Milestone 2 — Desk Research

Milestone 2 — ADA 9,000

The second milestone produces the first substantive analytical output: the Preliminary Market Prioritisation Matrix. This matrix is the foundation on which the primary research agenda is built. It determines which regional clusters receive deep-dive primary research investment and which are monitored or rejected on desk-evidence grounds. The CPC reviews and confirms the priority deep-dive list before Phase 3 fieldwork is committed.

This is the most cost-efficient checkpoint in the research: if the desk screening reveals that a candidate region the CPC expected to prioritise does not meet the RARF threshold, that finding is surfaced before primary research resources are deployed against it, not after. The milestone payment reflects the significant analytical effort required to apply the RARF rigorously across eight or more candidate clusters, but it protects the CPC from downstream evidence problems by requiring sign-off before fieldwork proceeds.