Stage 3: Project Market Capabilities
| Introduction | Methodology Overview | Best Practices | Project Attributes | Market Capabilities | Market Readiness | |
Objective
The focus on Market Capabilities in Stage 3 aims at capturing a project's potential from the point of view of a business customer. The market capabilities are an assessment of the project’s situation from a business perspective.
Scope
The market capabilities are grouped in seven key categories: Product, Community, Support, Customers, Sales, Finances, Recognition. The table below details each of these categories. Note: this analysis may be biased in favor of commercially supported open source projects.
| Market Capability | Market Issue Addressed | Scope | |
| Product Establishment | What is the current status of the project from a market perspective? | From a POC with no user to improving product with UX and APIs up to full, complete, stable product or range of products. | |
| Developers and Community | Who develops the software? Is the organisation robust? | From research partners to active OSS team with occasional third party contributions up to broad active contributing community. | |
| Professional Support | What kind of support can be expected when deploying and using the software? | From no support at all to community best effort, commited bug fixing up to organized commercial support. | |
| User and Customer Base | Who uses this software? Are there customers? | From no customer or users at all to broad community of users up to broad and expanding customer base. | |
| Sales Activity | How is the user/customer base growing? | From no sales at all or random sales by founders up to sales from customer base and commercial partners. | |
| Financial Stability | How sound and sustainable are the project finances? | From time-limited R&D subsidies and founders, friend and families up to appropriate financing and positive cash flow. | |
| Market Recognition | What's the competitive position of the software? What efforts are made? | From no market recognition at all and basic identity and website up to leadership recognition. |
Data Collection
Market capabilities are collected via a structured expert interview with the project leader. For each category six situations are identified covering 42 business-related situations. For each category the project is associated to one of the six situations after discussion and in agreement with the project leader.
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |||
| MKT-1 | Product Establishment | No-user, R&D, POC | Beta, Packaged, Documentation | Full Q&A, Doc etc. | UI, APIs and Interoperability | Product Range | Platform Sub-Project Generation | |
| MKT-2 | Developers and Community | Research partners | Declared OSS | Active OSS project leader | Occasional third Party contrib. | Regular third party contributors | Broad active project community | |
| MKT-3 | Professional Support | No support | Help contact Identified | Community Best effort | Committed Bug fixing | Direct commercial Support | Direct and partner Support | |
| MKT-4 | User and Customer Base | No customers nor users | Early users, not customers | First customers | Early customer base | Growing customer base | Established customer base | |
| MKT-5 | Sales Activity | No sales | Random sales by founders | Fledgeling sales by sales organisation | Sales from new customers | Repeat business from customer base | Sales from customer base and partners | |
| MKT-6 | Financial Stability | R&D subsidies | Founders, Friends and Family | Sponsor or professional early stage | Early stage plus customer money | Appropriate financing | Positive cash flow | |
| MKT-7 | Market Recognition | No market Recognition | Basic identity, Website | Developing Marketing | Active Marketing | Market Recognition | Leadership Recognition |
Computation
Computation is trivial since the result is an immediately normalised value between 0 and 5 in each category.
Results
We do not publish the results of the Stage 3 interview since it is closely associated with the real objective of the whole exercise: the MRL score.
The final MRL score is obtained by combining the project's attributes (which themselves include reference to the best practices) with an asssessment of its market capabilities.
Stage 2: Project attributes < Previous | Next > Market Readiness Index