Integrated Venture Engineering Program (IVEP)

Innovating new, profitable ventures that can help solve pressing environmental and social challenges comes with enormous complexity and uncertainty. Today, less than 1% of ventures are likely to achieve profitability and survive.

The Integrated Venture Engineering Program (IVEP), a partnership between Cornell’s Center for Global Sustainable Enterprise, the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) and IVE Systems, was created to advance a novel, engineering-based venture innovation methodology called Integrated Venture Engineering (IVE). The methodology is meant to significantly improve venture startups’ success rates.

IVE has been developed, tested, and refined over the past decade through work with more than a dozen corporate and entrepreneurial impact ventures in banking, education, nutrition, mobility, off-grid solar and legal services.

Integrated Venture Engineering’s V-Model Method

IVE adapts engineering’s proven V-model method for innovating new, complex systems facing high uncertainty to the innovation of new business ventures. This method of innovation results in solutions that are more robust, reliable, and efficient by focusing on two critical processes necessary for long-term venture success: the design and verification of a business concept from the top-down; and the testing and validation of the business model from the bottom-up.

In contrast with today’s accepted practice of launching a minimum viable product (MVP) and then trying to discover a profitable business model while running the business, IVE leverages a top-down approach that uses extensive research, modeling, and simulation to establish a venture’s maximum viable concept (MVC) that is profitable, with a margin of safety to work under pessimistic operational assumptions and absorb unanticipated costs. Solving first for the MVC also sets clear performance parameters for the component parts that make up the business model, like product features and sales pitches.

This allows the business model to be prototyped, tested, and optimized from the bottom-up, starting with the components and working up to a complete pilot of a business unit. Doing so catches potential problems when they’re the easiest and least costly to fix.

IVE Venture Teaching Studio

IVEP provides multiple ways to engage, including the IVE Venture Teaching Studio. The Lab brings together a range of key stakeholders – companies, investors, entrepreneurs, and academics – across different disciplines, from business to engineering, as a community to advance ventures that generate enduring solutions to social and environmental issues in today’s competitive marketplace.

If you or your organization are interested in receiving more information about our upcoming learning labs, please contact us.