Opportunity Value Assessment

---
name: opportunity-value-assessment
description: "Places an identified opportunity in an attractiveness × feasibility matrix and assesses it from seven commercialization angles — the owner's own, productized assessment framework."
---

# Opportunity Value Assessment

## Purpose

Places an identified opportunity in a two-dimensional attractiveness ×
feasibility matrix and assesses it from seven commercialization angles. This
is the owner's own, productized framework, used in real client work — more
concrete and precise than the generic `opportunity-evaluation-and-judgment`
scaffold, which describes evaluation-and-judgment competence at a general
level.

## Based on

The owner's own service — the Opportunity Value Assessment product (own
product) and its supporting background research "S1 — Opportunity Package:
Proposal for a Simple Assessment Framework".

- Mullins' Seven Domains Model — three market-facing plus four
  organization-facing domains for assessing an opportunity's viability
  (Soren Kaplan, 2023 summary)
- Timmons model: team, opportunity, and resources in continuous interaction
- Product Opportunity Evaluation Matrix (POEM) — feasibility × attractiveness
  (ConnectedDale, 2023)
- TRL scale (DOE Tech-to-Market, 2021)

Requires the answers produced by
`../opportunity-intake-elicitation/SKILL.md` as input (or equivalent
information gathered another way).

## Method

1. **Assess attractiveness.** Four factors: market size and growth (see
   `../market-sizing-tam-sam-som/SKILL.md`), the significance of the
   customer's problem/need, the strength of the competitive advantage (what's
   unique — technology, patent, business model), and commercial potential
   (margins, scalability, an initial view of revenue relative to a licensing
   alternative).
2. **Assess feasibility/readiness.** Four factors: technology readiness level
   (TRL, in plain language: idea → PoC → prototype → tested prototype →
   pilot → market-ready), resources and capability (team, partners, funding —
   can the critical success factors actually be delivered in practice),
   strategic fit (for a large company: alignment with strategy; for a startup
   team: alignment with the team's vision), and risks and implementation
   barriers (technical uncertainties, regulation, long development
   timelines, capital requirements).
3. **Place the opportunity in a 2D matrix** (a 3×3 or 5×5 grid, low–medium–high
   on each axis) and write a narrative interpretation of the resulting
   cell: what does, say, "high attractiveness / medium readiness" actually
   mean for this specific opportunity?
4. **Identify three strengthening and three weakening factors.** Honestly but
   constructively — the goal is to surface challenges early, not to
   discourage.
5. **Formulate the Opportunity Hypothesis.** A few-sentence summary in
   business terms, elevator-pitch style: what product/service, for whom,
   what value is promised, what makes it excellent.
6. **Score the seven commercialization angles (evaluation lenses)** on a
   1–5 scale plus a short justification for each: market size & growth;
   problem strength & adoption; scalability & business model; competitive
   position; timing & disruption; funding and capital pathway; team &
   capabilities.
7. **Give a preliminary License vs. Startup direction** based on three
   criteria: market size/revenue potential, IP protectability, and the
   team's resources/risk tolerance. This is a direction, not a final
   decision — for deeper analysis see
   `../../../specialisation-packs/research-commercialisation/skills/spinout-vs-licensing-pathway/SKILL.md`.
8. **List 2–5 critical implementation factors** — what needs to be solved
   for the opportunity to reach its full value (e.g. validating scalability,
   distribution partnerships, regulatory approvals, hiring commercial
   capability).
9. **Keep the assessment a living hypothesis.** Update the matrix placement
   and scoring as new market or technology evidence comes in — don't lock in
   the assessment too early on the basis of assumptions that later turn out
   to be wrong.

## Gotchas

- Step 9 frames the whole assessment as a "living hypothesis" that should
  be updated as new evidence arrives — treating the matrix placement and
  7-lens scores as a one-time output rather than revisiting them when
  `opportunity-intake-elicitation` answers get corrected or enriched is the
  most common way this framework goes stale.
- Step 7's License vs. Startup output is explicitly a *preliminary
  direction*, based on only three criteria (market size/revenue potential,
  IP protectability, resources/risk tolerance) — reporting it downstream
  (e.g. in `opportunity-brief-writing`) as a final recommendation skips the
  deeper analysis the skill itself says is required
  (`spinout-vs-licensing-pathway`).
- This skill must not confirm market size, TRL, or other figures from
  memory or general knowledge — every input has to trace back to
  `opportunity-intake-elicitation`'s answers or be marked as an assumption;
  scoring the "market size & growth" lens from an analyst's own market
  intuition instead of the intake answers (or a flagged assumption) breaks
  the traceability the framework depends on.
- The 1–5 scores on the seven commercialization angles are simplifications
  standing in for real analysis that "still needs to be done carefully
  before the scoring is justified" — assigning a score without first doing
  (or at least sketching) the underlying market/competitor/cost work behind
  it produces a number that looks rigorous but isn't.
- The 2D matrix placement (Step 3) requires a narrative interpretation of
  the specific cell, not just plotting a dot — two opportunities that land
  in the same "high attractiveness / medium readiness" cell can mean very
  different things depending on which of the four factors drove each axis,
  and skipping the narrative loses that distinction.

## What this skill does NOT do

- Doesn't hand down a final investment or go/no-go decision — it produces a
  structured assessment, comparable across different opportunities, to
  support decision-making.
- Doesn't replace in-depth market, competitor, or cost analysis — the matrix
  and scoring are simplifications, and the underlying analysis behind them
  still needs to be done carefully before the scoring is justified.
- Doesn't make a final license-vs-startup decision — only gives a
  preliminary direction.
- Doesn't confirm market size, TRL, or other figures from memory — it uses
  the input values supplied by the `opportunity-intake-elicitation` stage,
  or clearly flags an assumption.

## Continue from here

- Next in this pack: `../opportunity-brief-writing/SKILL.md` — Writes the
  assessment results up as a concise Opportunity Brief report.
- Deeper-dive skills in the same pack: `../market-sizing-tam-sam-som/SKILL.md`,
  `../competitive-and-five-forces-mapping/SKILL.md`
- Related skill in another pack (deeper license-vs-startup analysis):
  `../../../specialisation-packs/research-commercialisation/skills/spinout-vs-licensing-pathway/SKILL.md`
- Related skill in another pack (research-based opportunity identification
  before this stage):
  `../../../specialisation-packs/research-commercialisation/skills/research-opportunity-recognition/SKILL.md`
- Complementary, not overlapping: `../../../business-design-frameworks/skills/taste-emulation-heuristic/SKILL.md`
  predicts a specific in-group's emotional/aesthetic reaction to a
  concept — a different question from this skill's commercial
  attractiveness × feasibility scoring; use both together for a fuller
  picture of an opportunity.
- This pack's shared guardrails: `../../CLAUDE.md`

## References

- `../../references/opportunity-frameworks-review.md` — summaries of Mullins, Timmons, POEM
- `../../references/opportunity-brief-template.md` — the report template for this assessment's results
- `../../CLAUDE.md` — this pack's shared guardrails