What is VIQ? What is Coresmart?

Venture Intelligence Quotient (VIQ™) is a research-based, focused framework for business opportunity assessment, venture planning and investment decision-making. It focuses on the proven critical attributes of venture success that have a disproportionate effect on a venture’s ability to attract investment and its ultimate performance. VIQ defines ‘critical attributes’ as those steps in the new venture process that, if executed correctly, will have a disproportionately positive effect on future performance. Strength shown by the new venture on these critical attributes will mitigate weaknesses on many other, less critical factors. Accordingly, any pronounced weakness of the venture with respect to any critical attribute may prove fatal to a new venture. Coresmart is aquestionnaire and analysis algorithm that utilizes VIQ™ to help entrepreneurs learn, plan and assess business potential of any entrepreneurial idea. CoresmartKey Features: – Collaborative platform, allowing multiple stakeholders to evaluate and plan new ventures, examine the weaknesses and improve business ideas, or kill the unsuccessful ones early – Easy view of impact of pivoting and changes to a business model: a log of history of evaluations shows how venture progressed over time, and how changes in the business model affect the potential of such venture for success – Positioning against venture prototypes, comprehensive reporting, recommendations to improve venture’s potential – Dashboard for investment decision making – A dialogue tool for investors, advisors, mentors and entrepreneurs – Learning platform with downloadable educational content

Who is Coresmart for?

VIQ is a philosophy and framework for: – entrepreneurs developing a business plan – investors evaluating new ventures – advisors and mentors helping entrepreneurs – educators teaching many aspects of entrepreneurial theory and practice – communities stimulating economic development through entrepreneurship

Research Methods

Basis of the VIQ Approach:sophisticated model underpins very simple questionnaire. The key methodological approach of the VIQTM system adapts a long-proven practice of insurance industry called actuarial modeling. Stripped of complication, actuarial modelling is simply what people called ‘actuaries’ do: they work out, using statistics rather than guesswork, what is the risk of issuing a life insurance policy to a particular person. Operationally, VIQTM uses the same statistical attention to the detail of critical factors to assess the success potential of a new business. To make an intelligent decision about life insurance, a ‘weighted algorithm’ is used. This is a mathematical calculation that takes a lot of detailed evidence and assessment about factors critical to determining how long anyone will live, and blends them to give a balanced consideration of the riskiness of insuring a particular person’s life. The assessment will consider age, gender, blood pressure, occupation and many other variables proven to be relevant as inputs to determine, statistically, the life expectancy of an individual. Similarly, in the VIQTM system, a weighted algorithm is based on researched venture attributes known to cause business success and failure. To assess potential of your business idea, you first rate your new venture on these attributes. Then VIQ’s weighted algorithm blends the ratings you provided. This produces an estimate of the future viability of the business. When writing a business plan as an entrepreneur or evaluating someone else’s business plan as an investor, this is exactly what you want: a dispassionate reliable estimate of the potential of a venture. The really great thing is that you can use the result as a first estimate: not a final edict. VIQTM is a tool of improvement; not just a means for saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’. If you work on improving the factors that VIQTM analysis shows to be weak, you can strengthen the venture.