Getting the creative juices going amongst staff can be a challenge at times. All too often they are heads down beavering away doing the day to day stuff to think about innovating and turning those ideas into commercial realities. How do you solicit those ideas from them?
My approach is to take staff out of their usual environment and have an offsite somewhere and spend a few hours running through a template or framework to get those ideas boiling to the top. Below is an extract from the powerpoint presentation I use for this purpose.
Definition of Entrepreneurship: Perceiving an opportunity and creating an organization to pursue it
- Can we discover or conceptualize an innovation that is marketable?
- Do we have the expertise and desire to bring this innovation, whatever it is, to market?
- Do we have access to the resources to produce this innovation?
- Can we create/operate in an environment conducive to perpetuating this venture’s success?
- There are no guarantees! People in this room have full responsibility for the success or failure of this venture.
The Idea
- Idea must be unique.
- It is neither likely nor required for a business idea to be new; odds are that someone, somewhere, has had the idea before.
- What is relevant is the implementation of that idea.
Product Concept and Market Need
- What is the product/service in terms of features and benefits?
- What does the product/service do and how does it do it?
- What are the target markets?
- What is the target population in terms of number, demographics and potential sales?
Expertise, Resources and Environment
- What expertise is required to translate the idea into reality?
- What physical resources do we need?
- What capital do we need?
- Are we in an environment that supports our business efforts?
Strategy
- Without a comprehensive executable strategy we will be forced to rely on crisis management to react to unforeseen events
- Strategy is like a game
- Consider it a game of chess
- Players weigh possibilities about the outcome of moves
- Armed with foresight and knowledge, determine the best move(s) to make
- However, business strategy is far more complex than any board game
- Business playing field holds many challenges
- Need to consider the market, innovation, core competencies, value creation, growth, restructuring, reengineering and global strategies
- Need to anticipate a wide variety of factors including:
- Global playing fields, new players, new products, new market sizes, new customers and competitors strategies to name a few.
Funding Vs Bootstrapping
- Where are we on this continuum?
Ideal Business?
- One built on a system rather than a product or service
- Is setup to run itself
- Is either:
- After a niche market; or,
- Is high volume not low volume high profit margin
- Not geographically constrained
Success
- Some businesses succeed more than others because:
- They positioned themselves within their industry context and reacted either quicker or better to specific industry conditions to gain some advantage over their rivals
- They acquired or developed resources or assets that are scarce, valued by customers, non-substitutable and are non-imitable
- They gradually accumulated complementary knowledge to build routines and core competence that are hard for rivals to imitate
Opportunities
- There are many opportunities that we can pursue.
- We have a diverse range of skills and experiences amongst us.
- We’ll tap into each others ideas, resources, understanding, knowledge and creativity to construct new shapes, blocks, buildings and formats, ways of doing things.
- The needs of customers are basic to product development.
Ideas
- Top ideas should stir public interest.
- Go for innovation, surprise, practicality, aesthetic value, different usage, time efficiency, quality, worth.
- Look for gaps (environment scanning), emphasising leading edge technologies
- Opportunities can arise from a change in industry
- Revise and adapt what we have to specific market needs?
- Monitor customer insights for inspiration
- Look for new business concepts
Opportunities
- We must gather customer insights and use them to build differentiated value propositions
- Information Technology is the engine room of business
- Software is a good profitable business to be in
- Continue to …
- Rejuvenate our product with a different model (perhaps SaaS model?)
- Or start with
Imagine
- Pretend we are a startup
- Don’t have any preconceived notions
- Worry about execution later
Opportunities
- Can we create the “next big thing” technology?
- Where do we fit in the software ecosystem?
- Should we carve out a substantial horizontal niche? Be disruptive to incumbents in the enterprise software space? Lets throw hand grenades in!
- Should we consider giving our software away and making it up with service?
- Setup a few diversified online business streams? Like a portfolio of online businesses.
- Put our IP online?
- Repackage what we have and put it online?
- Can we put a killer app online? ASP. CRM online, integration, data scubbing all on-line? Proximity matching online, $10 per batch…
- Maybe we develop software way outside of our comfort zone and go into podcasting, VOIP (i.e. Skype) or something like Google maps?
Info online, Courses online
Build a system that cannot be easily replicated (Dell, Fedex, Amazon, E-bay)
First Mover Advantage – Jump competitors by getting product/service out there fast
Going Foward
- Need to understand markets
- Sell the product while it is being built
- Everyone is in sales
- Leverage outsourcing, offshoring and open sourcing
Download opportunities template [.doc 61K]