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Growth Medium
Release v0.5.02026-10-16
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Day 1
- 1IP Strategy: Protection, Execution, and the Open Alternative
Patents aren't the only moat. Learn when to protect, when to publish, and when to give it away-and why the choice might define your organisation's future.
- 2Execution Over Protection: Looking Beyond the Licensing-First Approach
IP protection feels like the responsible move when starting a new venture. But most businesses that succeed do so through execution, and protecting too early can actually slow you down. The truth is messier than either camp admits.
- 3Researcher Superpowers: What You Have That the World Needs
You spent years becoming one of the most rigorous thinkers on the planet. That training is worth far more outside academia than the job market suggests. The question isn't whether you have something to offer. It's whether you can see it.
- 4Strategic Moats: What Makes You Hard to Replace
IP is one kind of moat. Execution speed is another. But the most durable researcher-founded ventures are usually protected by something harder to name and much harder to copy.
- 5Business Model Types
There are more ways to build a viable business from scientific expertise than most researchers have been shown. This lesson is a menu. You don't have to order everything. But you should at least read it before deciding what you want.
Day 2
- 6Market Sizing and Opportunity Assessment: How Big Is Real?
In a small, dense research economy like Aotearoa's, market size is a number you build yourself from evidence you can reach, and defend line by line.
- 7Organisational Structures: Choosing the Shape of the Thing
A business model tells you how value gets created and paid for. It does not tell you what legal shape to build. Most researchers default to 'start a company' without ever seeing the other seven options on the table.
- 8Funding and Freedom to Operate: What You're Actually Agreeing To
Venture capital is only one funding option among many, and freedom to operate is a different question from who owns your IP. Both get conflated constantly, and both decisions are much harder to undo than they look at the time.
- 9Your 90-Day Plan: From Sketches to a First Move
You now have a moat map, a business model shortlist, a market number, a structure, and a funding stance. This lesson is where those five sketches become one plan and one first move.