INCOSE Webinar 181: How Systems Engineering Can Save Entrepreneurship

DATE: Wednesday, 7 May 2025

TIME: 11:00am-12:00pm EST (15:00-16:00 UTC)

How Systems Engineering Can Save Entrepreneurship

Innovating new ventures that profitably commercialize new technologies and solve persisting problems is the holy grail of business. These “new market ventures” open up big sources of growth for companies and create a lot of positive societal impact.

But today’s dominant “lean startup” innovation paradigm adhered to by entrepreneurs, investors, and corporations–—one centered around building minimum viable products based on customer needs, testing and iterating the offering live in market to prove out customer interest, and then testing and pivoting the business model until profitability is discovered—systematically violates the core principles of systems engineering. In doing so, it bakes in costly architectural flaws that foreclose any viable path to profitability and compounds the problem by trying to “build the plane while flying it.” The results prove it out: today, less than 1% of new market ventures reach profitability, and they fail at a great expense of time and money.

This presentation will introduce attendees to integrative venture engineering (IVE)--a promising innovation discipline that applies the rigor of systems engineering to reliably innovate new and profitable ventures. The session will trace how IVE emerged from efforts to build market-creating businesses in frontier markets presenting extreme cost constraints and how it has since been applied to over two dozen corporate ventures and startups across sectors. It will discuss how IVE has adapted the V-model and model-based systems engineering techniques to innovating and validating new core business architectures and form factors with a robust path to profitability at launch and do so in less time and with less money.

The session will conclude with an introduction and invitation to the Market Creators Lab–a partnership between Cornell University, INCOSE, and venture engineering firm Half-Solved whose mission is to convene entrepreneurs, investors and researchers in advancing the science and practice of IVE.