Course Project

Study Questions

- Identify potential opportunities. Combine your own personal experiences and creativity with external forecasts and trend analysis. How is the world changing with respect to new technologies? What is the impact of globalization on current solutions? What new requirements will those changes produce? Recent media articles on trends are often a good place to start.

- Define your purpose and objectives. Identify your most promising opportunity, being careful to discriminate between an interesting technological idea and a viable market opportunity. Prepare an outline which will help you to determine what types of data and information you need to demonstrate the attractiveness of your chosen opportunity.

- Gather data from primary sources. It is crucial for you to obtain data from primary sources. Potential investors will place more trust in well conducted primary research than in stacks of data from secondary sources. There is simply no substitute for talking to potential customers from the target market in order to validate the opportunity you have identified. Consequently, we prefer that you spend time gathering data from primary, not just secondary, sources.

- Gather data from secondary sources. Countless secondary sources exist on the web and in your college's various library resources. Try not to get too bogged down in financial and accounting data.

- Analyze and interpret the results. Persuasively summarize your results.

Assignment

In your written analyses and presentations, you will tell the "story" of your proposed venture by addressing as much of the following as possible:

A. Concept and Vision. Where did your idea come from (e.g. a university lab)? Explain what the market opportunity is and how your solution addresses this. What makes your solution particularly compelling? How does it make the world a better place? Do you have personal experiences with this market? Is there existing intellectual property that you must license or new intellectual property you must develop in order to pursue this opportunity? Has anyone tried something like this before? If so, why did they fail or succeed, and why is the opportunity still attractive?

B. Market Analysis. What industry or sector of the economy are you addressing? Why is this market attractive? What segment of the overall market are you pursuing? What market research can be done to describe this market need? What are the total industry or category sales over the past three years? What is the anticipated growth for this industry? If this is a new market, what is the best analogous market data that illustrates the opportunity? Project the potential market size and growth for your opportunity.

C. Customers and Customer Development. This is extremely important. You need to have a clear idea of who your target customer is. The only way for you to be able to do this is to "get out of the building" and speak with your potential customers. You will need to answer questions such as: What does the customer need? Why does the customer need it? What is the customer using today? What is the customer willing to pay for your solution? Why? How will you reach this customer? You should include both primary (or first-hand) research and secondary research, emphasizing primary over secondary.

D. Competition and Positioning.Who else serves this customer need? Who might attempt to serve this market in the future? What advantages and weaknesses do these competitors and would-be competitors have? What share of the market do specific competitors serve? Are the major competitors' sales growing, declining, or steady? What are the barriers to entry for you? What are the barriers to entry for additional competitors? How could partners and allies best help you overcome competition from established enterprises or other startups?

E. Business Model.Now that you have discovered an opportunity and talked to potential customers, how will you turn it into a business? How will you make money and when do you expect your venture to be profitable? What is the major risk to address right away (e.g., market or technical)? In other words, which hypothesis regarding product or market strategies need to be tested right away?

F. Learning and Adaptation. What did you learn and how between the time you chose the idea in Week 9 and producing the final presentation and written report in Week 12? Is this idea a true opportunity or not?

The items above have no implied order. Some entrepreneurs start with a well-defined concept and then try to identify a market for their idea; others start by studying a market and then stumble upon an idea. Also, please keep in mind that the specific data and information you provide will vary according to the type of opportunity you choose to analyze. A key success factor for a successful project is the depth of your analysis and what you learned from it.

If after careful research you have determined that your business idea is not as promising as you originally thought, it is completely acceptable to present an OAP that describes why your idea will not make sense now rather than why it is the next big thing. An honest and rigorous analysis of an idea that did not survive further scrutiny is preferable to either (a) a half-baked presentation of an idea your team is unsure of, or (b) an enthusiastic job of over selling for your current idea, even though you know it is problematic.