Strategy Lab

From brilliant research to a business that holds

Two tools for STEM faculties, incubators and investors. The Business Readiness Test shows whether a team is ready to run a venture. Strategy Lab turns the team's plan into a business plan twin that is challenged, stress-tested and improved until it holds.

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A plan growing stronger round by round TeamMarketCustomersFinanceResilienceConsistency
Round 1Round 4 The same plan, before and after four rounds in Strategy Lab. Illustrative
Why we built it

Great technology, untested business logic

Universities produce some of the most promising technology in Europe, and most of it comes from people who have never run a business. The engineering is often excellent. The business logic is usually untested.

Two questions decide whether a young venture is worth backing, and both are hard to answer from a pitch deck. Is this the right team to take the idea to market? And will the plan survive contact with the market, its customers, its costs and its shocks? Faculty rarely have the time to coach every team through both questions, and the feedback students need most, the way an investor or a buyer would read their plan, usually arrives too late or not at all.

Strategy Lab gives every team that read early, quickly and at scale, and gives the people running the program a common, comparable view of every team and every idea.

01

Faculty and course leaders

See where each student and each team needs business teaching, and give fast, market-grade feedback to a whole course without a consultant in every room.

02

Incubators and accelerators

Rank a cohort on team readiness and plan viability before deciding where coaching hours, lab space and mentors go.

03

Investors and venture teams

Receive plans that have already been challenged, stress-tested and made consistent, with a comparable view across teams instead of a stack of decks.

Two tools, one path from idea to investable plan

Teams with an idea

Students, researchers and faculty with a technology and no business background.

Tool 1

Business Readiness Test

Is this the right team? 20 to 30 minutes per person, a combined team map.

Tool 2

Strategy Lab

Will this plan hold? A business plan twin, challenged and stress-tested.

A ranked pipeline

Pre-qualified ideas, comparable across teams, ready for coaching or funding.

Tool 1 - Business Readiness Test

Business Readiness Test

Is this the right team?

A 20 to 30 minute computer-adaptive test of business acumen for people who have never run a business, with a personal report for each person and a combined map for each team.

Film: Business Readiness Test: is this the right team? (3:09)

A test that adapts to the person

Every person behind an idea answers about 40 questions in 20 to 30 minutes. The test is computer-adaptive: each answer sets the difficulty of the next question, so it homes in on a person's real level quickly instead of serving everyone the same paper. A strong engineer who has never seen a profit and loss statement is not lost, and a student who has already run a small business is not bored.

Questions mix concepts, short business cases and numbers, from reading a simple P&L to pricing a product, choosing a sales channel or estimating how long the cash will last. None of it needs prior business study, and none of it is about memorising definitions.

Business Readiness Test · question path
Level found Difficulty 123456789101112

Correct, next question harder Wrong, next question easier

Six domains, two dozen micro skills

The test reads business acumen across six domains, each built from micro skills, so the feedback is specific enough to act on: not "learn finance", but "learn to plan cash month by month".

  • Market and strategy

    Market sizing · Competitive positioning · Business model choice · Timing and trends

  • Customers and go-to-market

    Customer segmentation · Value proposition · Channel choice · Pricing logic

  • Finance and unit economics

    Unit economics · Reading a P&L · Cash runway · Break-even

  • Operations and delivery

    Supply and sourcing · Scaling production · Quality and service · Make or buy

  • Team and leadership

    Hiring the first team · Roles and decisions · Incentives · Working with partners

  • Risk, legal and funding

    IP basics · Contracts and liability · Funding options · Investor readiness

A personal report, the same day

Each person gets a readiness profile: an overall score with a band from Exploring to Ready to launch, a chart of the six domains, the strongest and weakest micro skills and three concrete next steps.

It is feedback, not a verdict. The register is encouraging on purpose: the point is to show a gifted engineer exactly which piece of business knowledge to pick up next, not to grade them out of a program.

Your readiness profile · Aisha
61of 100
Illustrative

Ready to test

  1. Exploring
  2. Building
  3. Ready to test
  4. Ready to launch
  • Market and strategy 64
  • Customers and go-to-market 76
  • Finance and unit economics 45
  • Operations and delivery 51
  • Team and leadership 58
  • Risk, legal and funding 29
Strongest
  • Customer segmentation
  • Value proposition
  • Market sizing
Work on next
  • Investor readiness
  • Cash runway
  • Contracts and liability
Your next three steps
  1. Build a 12-month cash plan for the pilot, month by month
  2. Read up on how early-stage investors judge a first round
  3. Sketch the pilot contract with one farm cooperative

One idea, one team, one combined map

Ventures are rarely built by one person. When three or four people stand behind the same idea, everyone takes the test, and the team gets a combined map. It shows who covers finance, who covers technology and delivery, who covers customers, where the team overlaps and, most importantly, where the whole team has a blind spot.

That turns the question "is this the right team?" into something a team can act on: learn it, recruit it or bring in a partner for it. In the example, a strong engineering team with a good field researcher has nobody who is comfortable with contracts, IP and investors, long before that gap would show up in a funding round.

Team map · Team Delta
MarketCustomersFinanceOperationsTeamRisk
LenaSensor engineering 484136785230
MarcoData and software 554771624434
AishaField research 647645515829
TomasProduct design 596239667038
Team coveragebest in team 647671787038

Blind spot: Risk, legal and funding. Nobody in the team scores above 38. Illustrative

A whole cohort on one page

Program leads see every person and every team on a common scale. That shows where a cohort needs teaching, which teams need a co-founder with a business profile, and which are ready for the next step. Because the results flow straight into Strategy Lab, the same view later adds how consistent and how resilient each plan is.

Cohort view · autumn intake
  • Team ArcHeat recovery for small data rooms 71
  • Team OrbitBattery health analytics for e-bike fleets 66
  • Team DeltaWater quality sensor for small farms 58
  • Team HelixLow-cost lab diagnostics kit 49
  • Team LumenSmart lighting retrofit for schools 44

Team readiness, 0 to 100 Illustrative

Tool 2 - Strategy Lab

Strategy Lab

Will this plan hold?

An AI-supported, human-monitored simulator that turns a team's idea into a business plan twin, finds the conflicts inside it and puts it through the shocks a real business meets, before the market does.

Film: Strategy Lab: the business plan twin (3:38)

What a business plan twin is

Engineers know digital twins: a living model of a machine that can be run, stressed and improved without touching the real thing. A business plan twin does the same for a venture. It holds the team's mission, goals, customers, assumptions and numbers in one connected model, so a change in one place shows up everywhere it matters.

The twin is built in five steps that loop. Teams are meant to go round more than once: every pass makes the plan more consistent, more resilient and easier to explain.

  1. 1SubmitFree text or documents
  2. 2MirrorThe plan, played back
  3. 3ChallengeThe conflicts inside it
  4. 4Stress testShocks it must survive
  5. 5IterateRework until it holds

Business
plan twin

  1. 1

    Submit: say it in your own words

    A guided submission asks what a good investor would ask: what is the idea, what are the mission, vision and values, what do you want to achieve and by when, who is the customer, what are the key success factors and the main risks, and what do you assume about price and cost.

    Teams answer in free text or attach what they already have for any question: a business plan, a concept note, a product description, a pitch deck. Nobody needs to learn a template first.

    Strategy Lab · submission
    business_plan_v3.pdfpitch_deck.pptxSubmit
  2. 2

    Mirror: here is what we heard

    With the support of AI, Strategy Lab reads everything the team submitted and plays the plan back visually: here is your mission statement, your value proposition, your customer, your goals and your key success factors, written clearly and side by side.

    The team then agrees or adjusts each item with simple scales, sliders and choices. Seeing their own plan restated is often the first moment a team notices that its members had different plans in mind.

    Strategy Lab · mirror
    Your mission, as we read it

    Give every small farm affordable, real-time certainty about the water it uses.

    AgreeAdjust
    Your customer

    Family farms of 5 to 50 hectares in the pilot region, buying through cooperatives.

    AgreeAdjust
    Price positionBudgetPremium
    Ambition in year threeSteadyVery fast
    Speed to first customerMonthsWeeks
  3. 3

    Challenge: the conflicts inside the plan

    The consistency check surfaces the 6 to 10 most important conflicts between what a team says it wants and what its own plan implies. A revenue goal that would mean owning half of the market. A mission to serve everyone next to a price only the largest buyers can pay. A green mission next to a supply chain that flies parts around the world.

    For each finding the team makes a choice: go back and rewrite the submission, or write a short answer on why it does not apply or how it will be solved. Either way, the team has to think it through, much as it would in front of an investor.

    Strategy Lab · challenge · 8 findings
    Ambition vs market

    Your goal is 10 million euros of revenue in year three. Your own market estimate is 20 million euros a year, so the plan assumes half of the market within three years.

    What would make that share realistic, or which goal fits the market you describe?

    Revise the planAnswer the finding
    Mission vs price

    The mission is a sensor every small farm can afford. The price point in the plan is 2,400 euros per unit, which only large farms in the survey said they would pay.

    Which matters more for year one: the mission price or the margin?

    Revise the planAnswer the finding
    Values vs supply chain

    Sustainability is one of your three values, yet every unit is assembled overseas and shipped by air to customers in Europe.

    Is there a supply option that fits your values, and what does it cost?

    Revise the planAnswer the finding
  4. 4

    Stress test: the shocks it must survive

    Then the twin meets the real world. Strategy Lab selects 6 to 8 stress scenarios that fit the venture: a key input cost rises, energy prices double, the currency swings, demand turns out far lower than planned, half of the team leaves, rules tighten, a funding round slips.

    Clicking a stress shows what it does to the key success factors, the KPIs and the financials, from margin to cash runway and break-even. Two stresses can be combined, because bad news rarely comes alone. Try it on the example: pick one or two stresses and watch the plan.

    Strategy Lab · stress test

    Pick up to two stresses Interactive example, illustrative numbers

    Gross margin42%
    Cash runway18 months
    Break-evenmonth 20

    The plan holds. Pick a stress to see what the lab would ask next.

  5. 5

    Iterate: rework until it holds

    Teams are encouraged to go back and change whatever is variable: the business plan, the statements, the price, the supply chain, the timeline. Each round is scored again, so the team sees its plan become more consistent and more resilient, round by round.

    That is the heart of the method. The learning happens in the rework, not in the first submission.

    Strategy Lab · rounds
    406080 Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Round 4

    Consistency Resilience Illustrative

What teams walk away with

A business plan twin that is ready to show

After several rounds, the team holds a pre-qualified, consistent and stress-tested picture of its venture: the concept, the company and the plan, with every interdependency checked.

  • Consistent: the mission, the goals, the customer and the numbers tell one story.
  • Stress-tested: the team knows which shocks hurt, by how much, and what it would do.
  • Easy to communicate: a one-page summary a professor, a jury or an investor reads in minutes.
  • Comparable: scored on the same scales as every other team in the program.
Business plan twin · one-page summary
Team Delta

Real-time water quality for small farms

Round 4
Holds 6 of 7 stresses
Mission

Affordable, real-time certainty about farm water.

Customer

Family farms of 5 to 50 hectares, via cooperatives.

Goal

2.5 million euros revenue in year three, 900 farms.

Price

Sensor at 690 euros plus 9 euros a month for data.

Key success factors

Field accuracy · cooperative partner · unit cost under 300 euros

Watch

Funding delay beyond six months still breaks the runway.

Team readiness 58Consistency 82Resilience 75Completeness 88

Illustrative

For programs, incubators and investors

Rank the pipeline, not the pitch

A good pitch can hide a weak plan, and a shy team can hide a strong one. Because every team goes through the same test and the same lab, program leads get a comparable view of every idea: how ready the team is, how consistent its plan is, how well it survives stress and how complete it is.

Universities use it to decide where teaching and coaching go. Incubators use it to choose a cohort. Investors and corporate venture teams use it to see which plans have already done their homework.

Pipeline · ranked by market viability
#TeamReadyConsistentResilientCompleteOverall
1 Team DeltaWater quality sensor for small farms 58817488 75
2 Team OrbitBattery health analytics for e-bike fleets 66726179 70
3 Team HelixLow-cost lab diagnostics kit 49645570 60
4 Team ArcHeat recovery for small data rooms 71584962 60
5 Team LumenSmart lighting retrofit for schools 44524655 49

Illustrative

AI with people in the loop

AI does the reading. People do the judging.

We use AI where it is strong, and we say so: reading long documents, structuring a plan, spotting conflicts and running the scenario arithmetic for every team at once. That is what makes instant feedback possible for a whole course.

What we do not do is hand the judgement to a model. Techtone people monitor every run in the background, cross-check the findings and the iterations, and step in when a result does not make sense. Our team comes from strategy consulting and works every day with how markets, boards and investors think, and that experience is built into the questions, the findings and the stress scenarios.

  • The AI

    Reads and structures every submission · finds the conflicts · runs the stress arithmetic · keeps every round comparable

  • Our people

    Choose the stresses that fit the venture · review the findings · cross-check every iteration · brief faculty on the results

Two ways to work with us

Option 1

We run it for you

We provide and host both tools, set up the cohort, monitor every run and send the program leads the team maps, the business plan twins and the ranked pipeline, with a short debrief.

  • The test: 20 to 30 minutes per person, online
  • Strategy Lab: one interactive session of 2 to 4 hours, or rounds spread across a course
  • Human monitoring on every run
Option 2

We train your trainers

We believe the tools do the most good when as many teams as possible use them, and we cannot be in every classroom. So we train faculty, teaching assistants and program managers to run them themselves.

  • A train the trainer session of a few hours
  • The first one or two iterations run together within your coursework
  • Then your faculty run it independently, with our support on the technology and on reading the results

Questions faculty ask

What is a business plan twin?

A living, connected model of a team's business plan: its mission, goals, customers, assumptions and numbers in one place, so a change in one part shows up everywhere it matters. Teams challenge it, stress-test it against shocks and improve it round by round before the market does.

How does a computer-adaptive business test work?

Each answer sets the difficulty of the next question, so the test homes in on a person's real level in about 40 questions instead of serving everyone the same paper. The result is a readiness score with a band, a profile across six business domains and the micro skills to work on next.

How can a program rank startup ideas fairly?

By putting every team through the same test and the same simulator, then comparing them on common scales: team readiness, plan consistency, resilience under stress and completeness. That ranks the pipeline, not the pitch.

How much time does it take for students?

The Business Readiness Test takes 20 to 30 minutes per person. Strategy Lab runs as one interactive session of 2 to 4 hours, or as several shorter rounds spread across a course.

Do teams need a finished business plan to start?

No. Teams can answer the questions in free text, and attach a business plan, concept note, product description or pitch deck only if they already have one.

Does the AI decide which teams are ready?

No. The AI reads the material, structures the plan, finds conflicts and runs the scenario arithmetic. Techtone experts monitor every run and cross-check the findings and iterations; judgement stays with people.

Can our faculty run it without Techtone?

Yes. After a train the trainer session of a few hours and the first one or two iterations run together, faculty run the tools within their own courses, with Techtone support on the technology and on reading the results.

Is it only for STEM students?

It is built for founders without a business background, which is why STEM students, researchers and faculties are the core audience. It works for any team with an idea and no prior entrepreneurial experience.

What do program leads and investors see?

A team map for every team and a cohort view that ranks ideas by team readiness, plan consistency, resilience under stress and completeness, so coaching time and funding go where they matter most.

Bring Strategy Lab to your faculty

Tell us about your program, your students and your timeline. We will show you both tools on a live example and suggest how to run the first cohort.

Talk to us