Case Study: Swinburne University of Technology improves new-venture success with Palisade's @RISK

Using @RISK to Improve Success of New Ventures at Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology

Swinburne University of Technology researchers Dr. Clint Steele and Kourosh Dini faced the typical challenge of new ventures: little or no historical data on market size, adoption speed, pricing, development costs and other key variables. To address these deep uncertainties in projects such as the Omny by 121Cast app, they adopted Palisade’s @RISK to apply probabilistic design and move from unquantified “uncertainty” to analyzable risk.

Using Palisade’s @RISK the team built models that captured the flow of variances, specified input distributions by percentiles, and ran Monte Carlo and sensitivity analyses; this produced quantifiable forecasts and identified the key risk drivers. The outcome was deeper, measurable understanding of business-model sensitivity, stronger investor confidence, better-designed plans through coevolution, and clearer communication via @RISK’s succinct graphs and reports—allowing entrepreneurs to focus uncertainty management on a much smaller, defined set of unknowns.

Swinburne University of Technology

Clint Steele

Researcher