Strategy

Recognizing what your organization does today and what it must build to be competitive tomorrow, our team works with you to achieve sustained growth and enduring competitive advantage through strategic innovation.

Through partnership, our team will:

• Analyze your organization to identify core competencies
• Assess current and future market realities
• Build strategies to capture competitive advantage
• Implement and measure continuous progress

Projects we've tackled:

• Driving business model innovation
• Identifying organizational core competency
• Building new products, brands, and services

Solution Design

Moving strategy forward, we build the technology necessary to achieve your strategic objectives for mobile, web, and enterprise.

From pen to paper, prototype to product, our team believes in human centric design and immediate delivery of business value. To achieve this, we take our strategic findings and identify the individual elements necessary to deliver business value. We put the prototype into your hands, allowing customer insights to guide each evolution.

Solutions we’ve built:

• Delivering flexible location aware mobile software
• Instant on demand polling tool
• Living web design, built for non-techies

Luke Purcell

Practitioner first, my experience building products, brands, and organizations informs my approach to both consulting and business. From working to develop organizational capacity for social innovators in Jordan to assessing the business environment in Tanzania for microfinance, I am inspired by the opportunity to collaborate in creating solutions for today’s most pressing challenges.

As a lead for Poros Ventures, a Vermont-based white sheet strategy and innovation foundry, I am working with partner organizations to catalyze social innovation through the application of business best practices. The firm’s specialty lies in identifying growth opportunities for our partners, applying market-based strategies to develop and support organizational transformation.

Prior to founding Poros Ventures, I was an associate with Booz Allen Hamilton in the Strategy and Organization practice based in New York and Washington DC. While with the firm, I worked with corporate and government clients throughout the United States, Europe, the Middle East to move from insight to action in organizational development, business continuity, and growth strategy.

I graduated from the University of Richmond, with a Bachelor degree in Innovation and EntrepreneurshiI hold a Masters in Public Policy from George Mason University’s School of Public Policy with a concentration in regional economic development.

Bennington Purcell

Before starting Poros Ventures I was the lead developer for Ivy Insiders which was acquired in 2010 and then the director of Internal products for Revolution Prep. These challenges afforded me the opportunity to tackle hundreds of different technology challenges, from Computer Aided Testing Systems, Cloud Computing, almost every issue a small or medium sized business faces.

Technology has always been my passion. I enjoy and focus on how a small technology changes can make big differences. 7 years of small business development in a marketing firm, followed by a small business exit and integration with a larger company. I have worked alone and with teams and can always find the path from ideation through creation through implementation.

I graduated from Northeastern University with a BS in Business Administration, focusing on New Venture Growth and Management Information Systems.

Our projects

Growing by helping our clients to build sustainable competitive advantage

Projects

Outsized support. Overgrown ambitions. Unmatched performance. Poros makes partners of clients by taking your challenges as ours and ensuring your future growth is our measure of success.

With experience in markets throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, our global team can answer your questions and starting building the solution today.

Partners and projects:

• Four Winds Nature Institute business model innovation
• New England Environmental Education Alliance organizational core competency
• Arab World Social Innovators technical capacity development
• Pollster - Got a question? Ask a question.
• Location aware tagging

Location systems

Location awareness solutions for small and large organizations alike.

The Challenge

Poros was approached by a client looking for a technical solution capable of allowing location data to be easily collected, processed, and visualized. Recognizing that there was no available commercial tools, Poros turned to its development team to build a flexible web-based application to meet the specific client needs while allowing for future customization.

Approach

The approach was a fully agile one. We tackled each small issue and iterated it over and over again. First we released just a mobile version for our primary client. It was simple, only a mobile site built on iWebKit and Jquery Mobile. After that we realized we were working on something really cool. Through it all out and started again.

We built it on PHP and MySQL with Jquery, iWebkit for mobile, and a whole lot of TLC.

Outcome

After its first successful white label delivery, Point Recorder is now available in public beta. The tool allows a user to build a custom application using Point Recorder’s powerful location awareness tools that can then be shared and utilized by individual user communities. Infinitely customizable, the subscription service promises to bring the power of location awareness to companies and individuals. For more, visit Point Recorder.

Synergos

Arab World Social Innovators

The Challenge

Synergos’ Arab World Social Innovators program works with local leaders and organizations to strengthen their capacity to respond to social challenges. Working with an inaugural class of 22 individuals whose organizations spanned the spectrum of development maturity, Synergos needed flexible solutions capable of providing tailored strategic capacity development support reflective and sensitive to maturity.

Approach

Members of the Poros team designed a four-module capacity development curriculum and worked to pair innovators with volunteer consultants providing business insights to accelerate organizational development. To overcome geographical boundaries, the team delivered telepresence training across the Middle East and utilized peer-learning circles to share best practices.

Outcome

The program resulted in the construction of formal strategic and action plans necessary to ignite and structure growth. Further, the partnership developed organizational capacity for 21 social innovators in the everyday applicability and discipline of strategy while providing a methodology toolkit and flexible templates capable of growing with each organization. Visit Synergos.org/socialinnovators to learn more.

Four Winds

Helping a non-profit gain new business.

The Challenge

The Four Winds Nature Institute provides programs that encourage folks to learn about and explore nearby nature, connecting people to the natural world where they live, work and play. Four Winds already provides a compelling experience to 17,000 students in Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire, building innovative partnerships between schools, communities, and volunteers. Looking to build sustainable growth and drive greater value creation, FWNI leadership approached Poros to identify organizational core competency and create clear, implementable paths to growth.

Approach

The collaborative effort began by asking: How can FWNI extend its model of community-classroom partnership? Poros identified three primary tasks necessary to achieve growth, focusing on program assessment, program design and delivery, and improved market outreach with new branding and improved web-based tools for volunteers.

Outcome

Poros is moving from project design to implementation:

• Evidence: To demonstrate the program’s effectiveness to potential participants and funders, we are building a comprehensive program evaluation to collect and validate FWNI’s approach. Our insight and analytics team has examined student performance on standardized tests, finding improved outcomes for classrooms participating in the program. To further refine our analysis, we will be gathering additional feedback from a spectrum of stakeholders: students, administrators, parents and staff.
• Program Design and Delivery: To maximize resources while improving FWNI’s reach, we are leveraging our analytics team to evaluate current delivery effectiveness. Our team is helping FWNI prioritize growth targets by incorporating GIS and market research data including trainer travel distance, school district science standardized test performance and resulting program need to optimize marketing efforts.
• Market Outreach: At the center of FWNI’s growth challenge is effective communication of program results to key decision makers. Based upon stakeholder analysis, Poros will continue to refine market segmentation and improve targeted marketing materials. In collaboration with FWNI’s existing partners, Poros is enhancing FWNI’s branding from print to the web.

NEEEA

Bring environmental education and change to new england

The Challenge

The New England Environmental Education Alliance, a non-profit committed to promoting quality environmental education, reached its 45th anniversary at a crossroads. Although NEEEA has enjoyed continued growth and popularity of its signature events, it is facing increasing competition and an evolving operating environment. NEEEA asked Poros to help identify future opportunities and to diagnosis potential hurdles preventing the organization from fully realizing its mission.  

Approach

With special emphasis on sustainable growth, Poros began early phase research to explore how NEEEA could improve environmental education by focusing on its core competencies. Armed with this research, Poros worked with NEEEA’s board to identify three key strategic initiatives necessary to build upon existing organizational strengths, evaluate adjacent opportunities and streamline its service portfolio, and modernize board structure to ensure the necessary resources and manpower were available to execute.  

Outcome

To ensure another 45 years of service, NEEEA is committed to delivering existing services to its members while driving innovation in the field. By concentrating on improving evaluative analytics, NEEEA is building a working portfolio that meets the needs of stakeholders while remaining aligned with its mission and strategic goals   Visit NEEEA to learn more.

Polling systems

Solving a small problem ended up with a big solution.

The Challenge

Financial sector client approached Poros with a simple request, “Let me create, distribute, and present results for polls in real time.” With continued interest in crowd sourced data, the company wanted to provide a flexible tool with minimal financial investment and maximum business value.

Approach

Inspired by the simplicity of the challenge, the team set about to build a tool that was equally intuitive and powerful. Existing solutions required either computer access or clunky handheld one-off devices. Working with the client, Poros took a human-centric design approach while evaluating and building a tailored use case. The core insight necessary to deliver a solution as simple as the request was to strip away the nonessential and build an interface available for the web, smartphones, or simply anyone able to send a text.

Outcome

Taking advantage of the ubiquity of mobile phones everywhere from meetings to classrooms, Pollster is a simple polling tool that allows for instant interaction between questioner and audience. To request access to our private beta, please visit Pollster.

Every Stop

Tracking every stop in every city. We are doing a review of every subway stop in every major city.

The difficulty of finding stuff

Stop Scout is getting crowdsourced data on each and every Subway stop in every city with a subway

Approach

We worked on getting the best writers and reviewers to start reviewing and judging every exciting thing near subway stops.

Check it out

Please visit Stopscout.