Research Hub
THE SHORT VERSION: Hiilite’s positioning is research-defensible, not just clever. It comes from doctoral research called Growth Mapping — a mixed-method study of growth hacking by William Walczak (CEO, Hiilite; PhD candidate, UBC-Okanagan) under Dr. Eric Li. The platform you can buy is the commercial form of that research. This page is the source: the author, the academic work, the eight philosophies it stands on, and a directory of the papers and framework that put it all in writing.
Most agencies sell tactics and hope the numbers move. We work the other way around. The recommendations our platform makes are grounded in a body of research, an explicit framework, and an intellectual lineage you can read and check. This page is where that lives.
Who is behind the research
William Walczak, MBA is the pracademic behind Hiilite. Pracademic means two jobs at once: he runs the company and he runs the study. He has been CEO of Hiilite Creative Group since 2014 and has spent more than two decades in industry. He holds an MBA from UBC and an engineering background from Simon Fraser University. He is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at UBC-Okanagan, supervised by Dr. Eric Li, targeting completion in 2026.
The work has been recognized. CEO Monthly named him Marketing Strategy CEO of the Year 2023 for British Columbia, and he was a Daily Courier “Top 40” honoree. His research is peer-reviewed: Walczak, W., Li, E. P. H., & Nelson, S. (2024), “Logarithm: A Cinematic Exploration of Time,” Journal of Customer Behaviour.
His research interests are consumer behavior, machine learning, predictive analytics, consumer experience, and marketing. His operating belief: “maximum potential is only achieved when the most inquisitive minds play in concert with the right technology, in a fun environment.”
This matters for one reason. When Hiilite tells a small business owner what to do next, the answer is not a hunch dressed up as expertise. It is the output of a system built on studied, cited, defensible ground.
The doctoral research: Growth Mapping
The PhD is titled “Growth Mapping: A Mixed-Method Study of Growth Hacking.” It asks a question every small business owner feels and almost no tool answers: how does a resource-constrained company actually grow on purpose, and how do you know which move to make next.
The stakes are not abstract. Small businesses make up 98.2% of all employer businesses in Canada (ISED, Key Small Business Statistics 2025), and 92% of startups fail within three years (Pride & O’Reilly, Unicorn Tears). The growth tactics that get written about are unicorn tactics, built for big, well-capitalized firms. They do not transfer to a 15-person company. Growth Mapping is the study of what does.
The research distills into a small set of constructs that also run the platform:
- Sense → Seize → Transform — read the live data, recommend and sequence the right moves, then measure what actually moved and learn from it. This is Teece’s dynamic-capabilities loop in operating language.
- The 3Rs — Recruitment, Retention, Revenue: the operational domains a growth move can target.
- The 3Ps — Profit, Potential, People: the rubric for ranking which move to run next.
- The Growth Map — the KPIs plus the directional growth vectors that show where a business is and where to push.
The dissertation promised a “Growth Mapping Digital Tool” as its knowledge-mobilization deliverable. That tool is already built. It is the Hiilite Agentic Advisor at metrics.hiilite.com. The research is the academic grounding of the product; the product is the commercial embodiment of the research. Read the full framework on the Growth Mapping framework page and the long-form treatment in the Growth Mapping paper.
The eight motivating philosophies
Growth Mapping does not invent its theory from nothing. It stands on eight established bodies of work. Each one shows up somewhere in the platform. Here is the lineage, one line each, with the canonical source to read.
- Dynamic Capabilities (Teece) — Sense / Seize / Transform is Teece’s sense / seize / reconfigure; the loop is the higher-order capability. (Teece, 2007, SMJ; Teece, 2018, Long Range Planning)
- Growth Hacking (Ellis; Bohnsack & Liesner) — the Plays catalog is the growth-hacking taxonomy, run as experiments against real client data. (Bohnsack & Liesner, 2019, Business Horizons; Troisi et al., 2019, Industrial Marketing Management)
- Business Experiments (Thomke) — every Play is a testable intervention; Transform measures what moved. (Thomke, “Building a Culture of Experimentation,” HBR, 2020)
- Agentic AI (Anthropic; Weng; Ng) — agents are the Workers that run the Plays, under a recommend-and-approve autonomy model. (Anthropic, “Building Effective Agents,” 2024; Weng, “LLM-Powered Autonomous Agents,” 2023)
- Marketing Agility (Kalaignanam et al.) — short Sense → Seize → Transform cycles; the loop tightens every iteration. (Kalaignanam et al., 2021, Journal of Marketing)
- Deep Learning (LeCun, Bengio & Hinton) — the reasoning layer detects patterns across multi-source client data. (LeCun, Bengio & Hinton, 2015, Nature; Goodfellow, Bengio & Courville, Deep Learning, 2016)
- Predictive Analytics (Davenport; Chen, Chiang & Storey) — interpretable, small-sample recommendation rules bound to client financials. (Davenport & Harris, “Competing on Analytics,” HBR, 2006; Chen, Chiang & Storey, 2012, MIS Quarterly)
- Marketing Strategy (Porter; Christensen JTBD) — goal to the right Play to run next, with profitability as the strategic axis. (Porter, “What Is Strategy?,” HBR, 1996)
Why this is the moat
Reporting tools are read-only. They show what happened in a prettier wrapper. Skill libraries are open-loop. They do tasks but have no goal and no client data. Hiilite is the only one that closes the loop: goal to action to outcome, bound to the client’s real financials, and grounded in doctoral research.
That last clause is the point of this page. Anyone can claim a method. Few can show the research, the supervisor, the peer-reviewed publication, and the eight-discipline lineage underneath it. Hiilite can. The wedge line says it plainly: your report knows what each client is worth. See exactly how that connects to the product in The Agentic Agency.
The research directory
The full body of work, organized.
- Growth Mapping framework — the category-defining framework: Sense → Seize → Transform, the 3Rs, the 3Ps, and the Growth Map diagram. Start here.
- Growth Mapping (paper) — the long-form treatment of the doctoral research and why it matters for SMEs.
- The Agentic Agency (paper) — the commercial thesis: the agency that runs on goals, data, and AI agents instead of guesswork.
- The eight philosophies — the intellectual lineage, with canonical sources, listed above.
- Reports — original research, including “The State of SME Growth,” drawn from the study’s real data (aggregated and anonymized).
FAQ
What is Growth Mapping? Growth Mapping is doctoral research by William Walczak (UBC-Okanagan) into how resource-constrained businesses grow on purpose. It is also the framework that runs the Hiilite platform: a Sense → Seize → Transform loop across three domains (Recruitment, Retention, Revenue), with moves ranked by three criteria (Profit, Potential, People). Read it on the framework page.
Is Hiilite’s approach actually research-backed, or is that just marketing? It is research-backed. The method comes from a PhD in progress at UBC-Okanagan under Dr. Eric Li, builds on eight cited bodies of academic work, and the author is peer-reviewed (Walczak, Li & Nelson, 2024, Journal of Customer Behaviour). Every philosophy on this page links to its source so you can check the lineage yourself.
Who is William Walczak? He is the CEO of Hiilite Creative Group and a PhD candidate at UBC-Okanagan. He holds an MBA from UBC, was named CEO Monthly Marketing Strategy CEO of the Year 2023 for BC, and is a published researcher in consumer behavior and predictive analytics.
How is the research connected to the product? Directly. The dissertation’s promised “Growth Mapping Digital Tool” is already built as the Hiilite Agentic Advisor (metrics.hiilite.com). The platform delivers the research’s interventions on real client financial and marketing data; the study validates and improves the recommendation engine.
Why does this matter for a small business owner? Because 92% of startups fail within three years and most growth advice is built for big firms, not the small businesses that make up 98.2% of all employer businesses in Canada. Growth Mapping studies what actually transfers to a small company, so the next move you make is grounded in evidence, not a guess.
Read the framework, then talk to us. Start with the Growth Mapping framework, then book a discovery call to see what your own numbers say.
By William Walczak, CEO of Hiilite Creative Group and PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies at UBC-Okanagan (supervisor Dr. Eric Li). Profiles: hiilite.com/team/william-walczak · LinkedIn · Google Scholar.