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 | 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. | |
| 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. | |
| 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. | |
| Customers | 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 | 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. | |
| Finances | 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. | |
| 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 48 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.
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
