Building AKOS
We are sharing selected decisions and lessons as AKOS develops—honestly, without publishing confidential methods or pretending that unfinished work is finished.
I am developing a platform to help people explain and develop their ideas. Yet explaining the platform itself has been a struggle.
A personal reflection on explaining from the inside, the frustration of repeated rewrites, and learning to connect with Founders and Impact Funders.
Read the founder’s reflectionAKOS began because I needed a better way to manage AgriKinetics' own development work. But the longer I have worked with it, the clearer the larger problem has become. A person can have a genuinely worthwhile bioeconomy idea without already having a university team, corporate R&D function or network of specialists behind them. The idea still deserves the chance to be built into a coherent vision and tested properly.
That is the purpose I now want AKOS to serve. Anyone with an idea intended to create positive impact should be able to begin. AKOS should help them understand what they are really trying to build, what evidence is missing, which specialists are needed and whether the work deserves to progress. It should create leverage without pretending that software or AI can replace competence, experiments or human judgement.
The same starting discipline applies when the idea comes from an SME, university, public body or major corporation. Everything starts with an idea. The organisation around it may be larger, but the vision still needs to be made coherent before governed development begins.
Evidence should not merely be stored. It should change what happens next.
This journal will record selected parts of that process. It will include mistakes and unresolved questions as well as progress, because a polished retrospective would miss the point of what we are trying to build.
The next part of the build will examine the foundation before Phase 1: how an idea or concept becomes a coherent vision, how unresolved assumptions remain visible, and why readiness to begin governed development is not the same as proving viability.
An idea can be exciting without yet being ready for investment, prototyping or partnership. The first AKOS function now in development is intended to help us establish that position honestly. Its working description is Will It Fly?
This is not a simplistic yes-or-no test. It begins with the idea as it currently exists and makes the opportunity, assumptions and unanswered questions explicit. Commercial potential, technical feasibility, impact, regulation, manufacturing and delivery need to be considered together because weakness in one area can change the value of progress in another.
We are testing the approach internally on AgriKinetics projects before considering any public access. That gives us a practical way to challenge the assessment structure, the way evidence is classified and whether the resulting recommendations are genuinely useful.
A useful early assessment should improve the next decision, including the decision to pause.
The intended outcome is a reasoned position: proceed, proceed subject to conditions, investigate a defined uncertainty, reshape the opportunity, pause or stop. The work remains in development and is not currently being offered as a public service.
Apply a stable assessment structure across several internal projects, record where judgement differs and refine how AKOS communicates evidence, uncertainty, recommendations and limits.
I have spent enough time developing products to know that enthusiasm can carry an idea further than the evidence should. By the time the difficult questions are asked, considerable time, money and credibility may already have been committed.
That is why we are placing so much importance on the AKOS Will It Fly? report.
It is not intended to be a quick score or an automated verdict. It develops progressively through the first five AKOS phases, as the opportunity is clarified, the product and customer are defined, possible development routes are compared and the evidence behind the proposition is examined.
Its first job is to expose weaknesses before expenditure expands. That may mean an unsupported market assumption, an unresolved technical dependency, an unrealistic manufacturing route or an environmental claim that does not yet withstand scrutiny.
Its second job is to give founders, investors and programme sponsors a disciplined basis for deciding what should happen next. That decision might be to proceed, investigate a specific uncertainty, reshape the proposition, impose conditions, pause—or stop.
But finding weaknesses is not the same as trying to kill an idea. A promising proposition should emerge stronger because the report identifies what needs to be demonstrated, which evidence matters and where the next affordable work should be concentrated.
A report that simply confirms what everyone hoped to hear has not done its job.
Impact is integral to that assessment. A product does not become sustainable simply because it contains a crop, fibre or other biological material. We still need to understand where the feedstock comes from, how it is processed, what energy, water and chemistry are involved, whether the product performs, how people and communities are affected and what actually happens at the end of its life.
The Sustainable Development Goals can help structure that thinking, but only if they are connected to relevant targets, measurable outcomes and evidence. Adding an SDG badge to a proposition is not impact assessment.
The early Will It Fly? report will therefore include an Impact and SDG position: the intended benefit, the material trade-offs, the claims that may be supportable and the evidence still required. It will not pretend that an early assessment is a verified Life Cycle Assessment or the final Impact Due Diligence Report. Impact evidence must continue to develop and be challenged throughout the complete AKOS journey.
We are now testing how the prototype brings these questions together, classifies the supporting evidence and preserves human responsibility for the resulting decision. The work is real, but it remains in development. We will continue to show progress without claiming capability before it has been demonstrated.
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