The Impact-Feasibility Matrix
News from the Funding Innovation Lab: October 2, 2024, Edition 15
It’s officially October and we’re counting down the days to our Sprint Showcase on October 30th. Please join us!
In previous posts, I’ve shared a little of the behind-the-scenes of how the sprint process works. Today, I want to share The Impact-Feasibility Matrix, which factored heavily in the discussions for both of this year’s sprints.
The Impact-Feasibility Matrix is a part of solution mapping within the design thinking innovation framework.
It’s essentially two questions:
Can we do it?
Should we do it?
On one axis, we consider the feasibility of the potential intervention. Because we are designing these experiments to be embedded in real-world activities and events, the interventions need to be something we can actually accomplish. Since we have also added the creative constraints of tiny, fast experiments to increase the velocity of learning, feasibility becomes a meaningful question in the design of the sprint.
On the other axis, we consider the impact of the potential intervention. Does it have the potential to meaningfully increase the inclusivity on the part of the funding process we are designing for?
Keeping these two factors in mind, there is one additional factor that weighs heavily in my personal analysis of potential interventions: viability and adoption of the intervention in the real world.
Ultimately, the marker of a good intervention to test is something that could also be easily adopted by practitioners with very little friction, nudges or default easy solutions being the ideal. It is possible that an intervention could be both feasible to test and yield promising results, but be incredibly challenging to adopt in day-to-day practice by investors, ecosystem partners, or founders.
Imagine for example a scenario where a company was looking for a consistent and repeatable way to increase team satisfaction and camaraderie. Suggesting they all go to an amusement park for an outing might hit the impact and feasibility goals, but might only be viable once a year.
As we design our sprints, we’re looking for the sweet spot where the intervention we test is doable, impactful, and easy to integrate if it proves successful.
Want to see the outcomes of the two sprints we’re running this fall and contribute your ideas to the sprints we could run next year? You’re invited to our Sprint Showcase on October 30th!
2024 Sprint Progress Update
The Funding Innovation Lab is live and actively working on experiments now! We will be keeping you updated on our progress with this weekly Progress Update section.
Phase 1: Design the Sprints for 2024 (July-August)
July 25: We announced the focus areas for this year’s two sprints at our Kickoff event
August 6: We finalized the sprint design teams and scheduled the meetings where these teams will determine what/how/when we will run these experiments
August 21: One experiment is fully designed and in motion. The second is partially designed, with some logistics around how it will get executed still to be determined.
Phase 2: Facilitate the Sprints (September)
Sprint 1 complete. Data has been gathered and the Sprint team has met to debrief, analyze the results, and propose next steps.
Sprint 2 is in motion. Details to be shared later!
Phase 3: Open source the Sprint Results (October)
Register for our Launch Party and Sprint Showcase! —> register here to join us
October 30th in Cambridge MA 12:30pm-5pm
The Funding Innovation Lab is a non-profit program, founded by LabCentral and led by Beth McKeon, with a mission to increase funding inclusion, access, and opportunity for women and BIPOC founders in the life sciences.
The Funding Innovation Lab convenes and supports innovators from across VC, universities, and entrepreneurial support organizations as they run rapid design sprints to solve the persistent systemic barriers and bias in the fundraising and capital deployment process. The Funding Innovation Lab has an open-source policy, sharing the wins and fails from these experiments here on Substack and with its community of practitioners with the goal to see widespread adoption and replication of emerging best practices in this field.