Value creation, a must-have process for how to make a positive impact, is being integrated within the project-based approach that WPI pioneered—and continues to innovate.
Ideas and innovations must have value to create impact—that’s the lesson (and the practice) in Value Creation Workshops, available for faculty, staff, and students at WPI.
Curt Carlson ’63, whose leadership across his career has transformed world-changing ideas into tens of billions of dollars of marketplace value, inspires during a workshop at WPI.
WPI’s Global Projects Program immerses student teams into communities near and far, where they apply value creation principles to local problem solving. (Ghana Project Center)
Value Creation: How world-changing innovation comes to life
WPI students work on projects in the classroom, in the lab, and in the world. It’s preparation across their WPI experience to apply what they learn to create innovation that leads to things of great consequence to society.
Value creation, an exercise in active learning, is a natural fit with WPI’s project-based learning approach. Students’ talents and perspectives coming together expands the potential impact, and the teamwork results in feedback given and received—a powerful and essential factor in true value creation.
WPI also provides value creation workshops for faculty, increasing their success in securing grants and other funding—and in transforming their ideas and patents into marketplace value.
Read Innovation for Impact by Curt Carlson ’67, in Harvard Business Review, November 2020
Active Learning
Active Learning
WPI’s Value Creation Initiative (VCI) is based on a proven method of combining value creation principles with the repeated practice of those lessons and then applying them to a real-world problem.
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Five Disciplines
Value creation principles are based on these five disciplines:
- Important customer and market needs
- Value creation process
- Innovation champions
- Innovation teams
- Organizational alignment
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Communication
Students learn that they need to be able to communicate easily so value creation means teams have shared language, concepts, and tools such as the following common value creation terms:
- Innovation: creation and delivery of new customer value in the marketplace with a sustainable business or other model
- Customer value = benefits/costs
- 3-Cs: a Venn diagram showing the market space with an unmet customer need, you have the capabilities to address it, and where the competition is weak or missing at first
- Value Factor Analysis: a spreadsheet to help evaluate your value proposition against the competition and alternatives
- Bring-It-to-Life: an unforgettable image or story capturing your value proposition
- Mini-Max: a methodology for minimizing risk to maximize value
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Need, Approach, Benefits, Competition (NABC) Framework
A value proposition framework is often referred to as a NABC which begins with a hook—a purpose and audience-specific grabber is defined as follows:
1. Need
- Important unmet customer and market need with “pain point”
- Ecosystem: trends, disruptions, business models, players, …
- 3-Cs white space and beachhead customers: size and growth rates
- Key insights: the few reasons why the need has not been previously addressed and why it is now possible
2. Approach
- Working hypotheses — offering and business model
- Bring-it-to-Life, risk mitigation plan, proof points, and MVPs
- Initial development plan with milestones and resources required
- Innovation champion and team
- After a compelling value proposition is created, then a complete proposal or business plan is developed — timing, financing, production, supply chain, distribution, partners, sales,
3. Benefits per costs (value)
- Customers
- Investors, employees, and partners
4. Competition and alternatives
- Now and in the future by name
- Value Factor Analysis
- Golden Nugget competitive advantage
- Contingency plan for competitive response
After completing an NABC, teams take the next action of completing a brief summary and outlining next steps.
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Value Creation Forums
Value creation forums are recurring, multidisciplinary, and facilitated meetings of three to five teams.
- Each team gives a 2 to 10-minute NABC value proposition with team feedback that covers each of the following points:
- What was good
- How can it be improved
- Eyes of the customer or stakeholder
- Eyes of the funder or investor
Evaluate the quality of the feedback
Each forum follows specific guidelines:
- Stand and listen: no talking back
- Quantify: no bigger better, faster, cheaper
- Illustrate, graph, simulate, model, and prototype
- Unrelenting iteration — intense learning and improvement
between forums with teammates, customers, and partners
- Each team gives a 2 to 10-minute NABC value proposition with team feedback that covers each of the following points:
Solving Great Problems
Solving the World’s Great Problems
The WPI community—students, faculty, and staff—is wired to find ways to solve big and important challenges. WPI’s Value Creation Initiative is a critical reinforcement for that tendency. Participants learn and apply a structured process for designing solutions that create value rather than simply being interesting. Ultimately, Value Creation is part of a strategic toolkit that helps bring order to the unstructured, notably, the world’s great problems—from global health to clean water, energy and the environment to the future of work.
High-impact Innovation
High-impact Innovation
WPI alumni have founded and run companies too numerous to mention. They have fashioned the infrastructure that supports our way of life. They have made discoveries and explored new territory—physical and metaphorical. With their ideas, imagination, and knowledge, their creativity, and their indomitable spirit, they have helped build the world we know. Our students today benefit from their legacy and, too, have a role in paving a path to a brighter future for all of us. You, too, can be a value creator.
Meet The Founders
Meet the Founders
WPI students obtain the education they need to be life-long value creators in the global innovation economy. They get hands-on experience in team-based problem solving, a global perspective, and an understanding of customer focused value creation.
Curt Carlson ’67
WPI Trustee, Hall of Luminaries Inductee, Executive-in-Residence
If you are doing a project, you want to make sure it’s a project people care about. Solving a problem that people have—that’s what leads to innovation.
Len Polizzotto ’70
WPI Executive-in-Residence