About Acorn Adaptive

Acorn Adaptive's purpose is to cultivate good in our communities through enabling service that provides and thrives.

Our Root to Reach™ framework and interactive foundations workshops are the tools we use to pursue this purpose.

In each interaction with our community and our clients, we strive to enable growing teams to adopt this same purpose within their own organizations.

The Root to Reach™ Framework

A Framework for Portfolio Innovation

To succeed, organizations need to effectively adapt what they provide and how they thrive when faced with change. The speed of change, alignment amongst stakeholders, and the complexity in their environment can become problematic in how effectively they adapt.

The Root to Reach™ framework is based on more than a decade of experience growing, providing, and offering services across varied industries, and offers adoptable solutions to these problems. In the face of change, uncertainty, and complexity, this framework guides effective adaptation of what an organization offers and how it succeeds in its purpose.

We refer to this adaptation toward changing market needs as 'portfolio innovation', which we explore through four fundamental concepts.

Fundamental Concepts:

  • Shared Portfolio Terminology
    Proactively align on concepts that are difficult, lengthy, or even contentious to describe. Pack meaning, nuance, and implication into words that can be culturally re-used.
  • Adaptive Guiding Principles
    Define expected habits and importance to be applied in uncertain situations. Where rigid steps and process may break in uncertainty, guiding principles can allow teams and systems to adapt toward an outcome.
  • Go-to-Market Lifecycle
    Adopt the stages, steps, and stakeholders that allow teams to start with ideas for innovation and grow them into new or changed offerings.
  • Offering Modeling
    Define the types of decisions made to model the marketing strategy of an offering. Apply these decisions at the right place in the Go-to-Market Lifecycle and with the right stakeholders.

What Sets Root to Reach™ Apart?

  • Simple Visualizations Driving Adoptable Concepts:

    To facilitate adoptability, the Root to Reach™ framework applies the concept of the portfolio to visualizations of a tree growing under the sunlight. Through the exploration of its fundamental concepts, the framework enables teams to be 'arborists' of the tree that represents their portfolios.

  • Inclusive Across Organizational Stakeholders:

    Root to Reach™ balances the perspective of two key types of stakeholders within an organization: 1) those that anticipate or present what the organization can offer in the market and 2) those that prepare or supply what the organization brings to the market.

  • A Broader Approach To Innovation; Adaptable to Industry-Specific Disciplines:

    'Go-to-market' has become a popular discipline regarding adapting to change in the market. In application however it can tend to focus on the launch of a specific offering and overhelmingly on the stakeholders that anticipate and present in the market. Root-to-Reach™ offers a Go-to-Market Lifecycle and a place for further industry development, testing, or change-oriented disciplines to plug-in, but all with intentional connectivity back to the breadth of the overall portfolio strategy.

The Root to Reach™ Go-to-Market Lifecycle

The Root to Reach™ Go-to-Market Lifecycle

Photo of Elias Franz

Elias Franz

Founder

Elias is the founder of Acorn Adaptive and author of the Root to Reach™ framework. He has led and consulted teams for over a decade in the areas of service management, business development, and go-to-market strategy.

Forged by these experiences and realized through Acorn Adaptive, Elias carries an individual purpose to cultivate good in his community through establishing systems that provide and thrive.

Enable Your Team

Enable your team to adapt your offerings, align your stakeholders, and embrace complexity. Contact us to inquire about planning a Root to Reach Foundations Workshop today.

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