Where do ideas come from?

Ideas come from anywhere, but when it comes to new businesses 3/4 of new ideas come from the entrepreneurs direct experience or current job. The rest often come from fx “things you like to do” and some from more or less formal idea generation sessions.

This is the introduction of professor Mark Julianos podcast about finding business ideas.

Mark Juliano goes through the most common ways of finding business ideas and also cuts idea evaluation right to the bone and asks you the most important questions about your business ideas.

So when you are tired of reading about business ideas, just lay down and listen to a clever guy.

I recommend Mark Julianos podcasts from the Entrepreneurship & Business Course in general. They give a very pracitical introduction to the disciplines of entrepreneurship.

Filed under: Uncategorized, entrepreneurship, ideas, opportunity

What do you want your life to look like?

When you ask people what prevents them from being entrepreneurs and starting their own business, a frequent answer is “I haven’t found the right idea yet”.

It might sound like a fair excuse, but it is looking for the one-and-only to marry. If you only go into relations if it is with the one and only, you might never get married. There is always something wrong if you look for it.

Fortunately there is another approach if you want to start building a business: Start asking yourself what you want to do with your life. In The E-Myth Revisited Michael E. Gerber lists a few questions that you might start asking yourself before you define what kind of business you want to start:

• What do I want my life to look like?
• How do I want my life to feel on a day-to-day basis?
• What would I like to be able to say I truly know in my life, about my life?
• How would I like to be with other people in my life – my family, my friends,
• my business associates, my customers, my community?
• How would I like people to think about me?
• What would I like to be doing two years from now? Ten years from now? Twenty years from now?
• What specifically would I like to learn during my life – spiritually, physically,financially, technically, intellectually? About relationships?
• How much money will I need to do the things I want to do? By when will I need it?

Being entrepreneur is a choise of lifestyle, so you might as well start thinking about your own life.

Se also the website of E-Myth Worldwide.

Filed under: Uncategorized, ideas, mindset, opportunity

What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial?

In this weeks class we had a discussion about how real entrepreneurs act. Do they prepare and plan or do they rather hav a just-do-it approach?

I don’t think, that we got to a conclusion, but Saras Sarasvathy have written some insightful articles about it – discussiong the causation versus effectuation approach to entrepreneurship.

On the website Effectuation.org there are a couple of great articles “What makes entrepreneurs entreprneurial” eand “Effectuation versus Causation”.

From more than a thousand entrepreneurs that I have met, the vast majority – at least 80% – of entrepreneurs have the effectuation approach. They haven’t developed a unique product, and they haven’t made much of a market analysis. They just start a business based on:

- what they are good at

- what they want to do in their life

- where they have a customer base to start on.

They may never grow big – although some do – but they get started fast later the best of them grow big. They focus on where they can sell something today and not where the big markets will be tomorrow.

Filed under: Uncategorized, entrepreneurial process, mindset

Creative techniques for getting ideas

If you want to arrange a group meeting to generate new business ideas, it may be relevant to use a special creative technique to help the ideas on the way.

A great website with a lot of different methos is MyCoted. If you find the number to overwhelming you may just click on Idea Generation.

Filed under: Uncategorized, ideas

Textbook readings I

For those of you who bought New Venture Creation, I recommend chapters 4 and 5 if you want to learn about creating business opportunities (ch. 4 – p. 115-141) and screening opportunities (ch. 5 – p. 169-171).

Chapter 4 has a couple of good exercises – fx. p. 167-168 about Idea Generation.

Chapter 5 has a couple of good exercises for screening and shaping venture opportunities. But relax a bit in the beginning. Develop your idea before you make the tough screening.

Finally I recommend chapter 3 – p. 79-96 for an introduction to the entrepreneurial process.

Filed under: Uncategorized, entrepreneurial process

Idea or opportunity

Last monday we started brainstorming for new business opportunities and we identified hundreds of them – and started screening the opportunities to identify the best.

Some of them were already developed into business ideas – or solutions to a problem.

That is usually the way my brain does it too – I get an idea, and then I start thinking about whether it is acutally also an opportunity.

If you get an idea, the intellectual analytical approach will be to start analyzing, whether there is actually a business opportunity: Does it solve a problem, is there a big enough market, will the customers pay the price etc.

But that is not the fun part: I usually keep on developing my idea because it is fun and because I believe in it – not because I have analyzed the market and business opportunity. I just go with the flow.

You learn a lot in the process, and even if it may not be a strong business opportunity at the beginning, it may turn out to be in the end.

I don’t really know what my conclusion is to this post. Maybe it is “just keep working on business ideas that turn you on. If you can keep the fire burning, you will end up with something good in the end”.

Filed under: Uncategorized, ideas, opportunity

Get inspired by other peoples ideas

Don’t think that you should necessarily come up with new-to-the world ideas to start up an entrepreneurial business. Getting inspired by other peoples new ideas – and sometimes even stealing or copying them might be just as good. And often even faster and safer, because the concept has already been tested elsewhere.

I don’t mean stealing or copying illegally, but often an idea is only protected by the trademark, and if you start up a similar business on a new market with another trademark, there will be no problems.

A place to look for new business ideas might be Springwise.com that reports about new business ideas all over the world.

Filed under: Uncategorized, ideas, opportunity

Consumer trends as inspiration

In the search for inspiration for business opportunities, you may look a bit closer on upcoming consumer trends.

An interesting website for inspiration is Trendwatching.com that is based on 8.000 trendspotters around the world reporting local trends.

Filed under: Uncategorized, opportunity

The business plan

During the course you will develop your own business idea(s) and in december you will hand in a business plan describing the business and how to start up the business.

To get some guidance about writhing business plans i recommend:

Starting up – Achieving success with professional business planning. This handbook is written by McKinsey & Company and is used as guidance for participants in the Venture Cup business plan competition. This handbook is focusing on projects with potential for investors. Download “Handbook English” from the swedish Venture Cup website.

The Dynamic Business Plan is a shorter introduction and a  more general approach to writing business plans without necessarily having investors in mind. You can download the book or use the website as online guidance.

The Dynamic Business Plan website

Go to download page – with books and business plan template

Filed under: Uncategorized, business plan

Where do we get the money?

Why not start with the end? The traditional and maybe logical way of looking at the entrepreneurial process is developing a good business idea, forming a strong team and then at the end look for the money.

In my opinion there is a lot to learn if we start the other way around and start looking at where the money comes from. By understanding the way banks and investors look at new and small businesses, we clearly understand the challenge in front of us. And if we start thinking like investors ourselves from the start, we can ask ourselves the question about our business ideas: Would I invest in that?

To get an understanding of the financial market for entrepreneurs and especially the investors caled business angels (or angel investors), I recommend the following:

Envestors guide to raising finance (A simple guide to raising finance of up to £2m)

Informal sources of Venture Finance

- both downloadable from the Brithsh Business Angel Association website.

Both reports are also downlodable on Fronter.

Filed under: Uncategorized, funding, investors