Will your project survive in a big company?

This is based almost completely on work by this guy:
http://www.thomasthurston.com/

He found 8 questions that will effectively predict whether your new business line will succeed in a large organization.  I've paraphrased them and reworked them a little according to my experiences.  It has been a while since I've seen the originals...

1. Are the margins big enough to be interesting?  (Interesting >= current margins)
2. Are the markets you're serving big enough to be interesting? (Revenue contribution >= current revenue * 1%)
3. Does the project help sell products the biz is already selling?
4. Is the product in a market category we already participate?
5. Does the program help combat a top competitor?
6. Is the target market available through current primary channels?
7. Is there no perceived threat to an existing top customer?
8. Is there no perceived threat to an existing, power internal group?

If you can answer "YES" to everything, congrats!  You may survive the business funding cycle!

If you score one "YES" you're looking at a 50/50 chance of surviving each funding cycle.

If you score two "YES" answers... well, forget about it.

You might have a great business concept, a wonderful go-to-market strategy, and competitive products that serve a real market need.  If the corporate anti-bodies are going to reject you... you'll be rejected.

I have seen this happen several times.  There are reasons for a lot of this behavior.

For example, if this margins are too small, it will drag down the company's margins and starts to look like a growth trap.  From a strict-finance perspective, you're lowering the effective return for shareholders.

Most of what you see there are questions that are associated with diversifying the business.  Expanding into new markets, serving new customers (or pissing off old ones), attacking new competitors, etc. -- these are all outside the core and scary and difficult to do.

This is why big companies often fail to thrive.