Canon Map — Stunspot’s Guide to Business Venture Formulation
The Venture Formulation Canon maps the path from raw venture idea to institutionally steerable enterprise system.
The report sequence is not a generic business syllabus. It is an architectural progression: define what the venture is, discipline how claims about it are known, map the market and customer realities, design the offer and economic engine, assemble the operating and capital system, govern legitimacy, diagnose failure, and install execution control.
The canonical source reports live in knowledge-packs/by-report/. The docs directory is only the public navigation layer.
Volume 1 — A-E: Foundational Reality Layers
Use this layer when the core question is whether the venture is conceptually, epistemically, and market-real before serious buildout.
| Report | Canon Function | Link |
|---|---|---|
| A. Venture Ontology and Enterprise Reality | Defines the venture as a layered enterprise object: value-creation system, value-capture system, coordination system, resource-conversion mechanism, legitimacy-seeking actor, and adaptive strategic actor. | Open report |
| B. Operational Epistemology and Decision Logic | Establishes how venture claims should be known, tested, weighted, and acted on under Knightian uncertainty, separating warranted commitment from intuition theater. | Open report |
| C. Market Structure, Power, and Strategic Environment | Maps the external arena: market power, competitive structure, strategic constraint, timing, incumbency, substitution, and industry-level force. | Open report |
| D. Customer Reality, Demand Formation, and Opportunity Intelligence | Grounds the venture in customer behavior, demand formation, opportunity discovery, revealed preference, and the difference between stated interest and actual pull. | Open report |
| E. Venture States, Stage Transitions, and Scaling Logic | Describes how ventures move through states of maturity, what must be proven at each stage, and how scaling logic changes the operating problem. | Open report |
Compiled pack: Vol. 1 A-E Foundational Reality Layers
Volume 2 — F-K: Core Operating Domains
Use this layer when the core question is how the venture becomes a coherent offer, business model, commercial motion, operating system, capital structure, and organization.
| Report | Canon Function | Link |
|---|---|---|
| F. Offer Architecture, Positioning, and Category Design | Explains how offers become legible and preferable inside comparative market frames, including positioning, differentiation, category strategy, and customer perception. | Open report |
| G. Business Model Architecture and Economic Capture | Defines the economic engine: how the venture captures enough value to survive, scale, and avoid giving away the entire surplus it creates. | Open report |
| H. Go-to-Market Architecture and Commercial Motion | Treats GTM as an integrated conversion system spanning attention, acquisition, trust, sales motion, retention, expansion, and channel-model fit. | Open report |
| I. Operating Model, Delivery Systems, and Capability Design | Translates the venture promise into repeatable delivery mechanisms, operating capabilities, workflows, constraints, and service/product reliability. | Open report |
| J. Capital Strategy, Resource Assembly, and Strategic Resourcing | Maps how ventures assemble capital and resources without letting funding logic distort venture logic, sequencing commitments by risk and proof. | Open report |
| K. Organizational Design, Stakeholder Alignment, and Decision Rights | Defines the coordination architecture: roles, authority, incentives, stakeholder alignment, decision rights, and organizational operating logic. | Open report |
Compiled pack: Vol. 2 F-K Core Operating Domains
Volume 3 — L-N: Constraint, Legitimacy, and Control Layers
Use this layer when the core question is whether the venture can remain admissible, diagnose itself, and steer execution as it becomes institutionally real.
| Report | Canon Function | Link |
|---|---|---|
| L. Governance, Legitimacy, and Institutional Constraint | Treats the venture as a legitimacy-seeking institutional actor operating under laws, norms, trust expectations, compliance regimes, and stakeholder permission. | Open report |
| M. Venture Diagnostics, Failure Modes, and Corrective Intervention | Provides the failure map: how to identify structural venture pathologies, locate root causes, and choose corrective interventions before collapse. | Open report |
| N. Execution Control, Measurement Systems, and Institutional Artifacts | Converts venture logic into measurable control surfaces, review rhythms, scorecards, thresholds, artifacts, and steering routines. | Open report |
Compiled pack: Vol. 3 L-N Constraint, Legitimacy, and Control Layers
Omnibus
Use the omnibus when you want the complete canon in one file for archival use, local search, whole-corpus synthesis, or long-context systems that handle large Markdown files well.