Top 10 business ideas & opportunities

Springwise.com has summed up the Top 10 business ideas & opportunities for 2010. Fx small scale food production using membership models or discreet rooftop solar panels and wind turbines. Check out the trends in business ideas.

For a broader view on trends for 2010 check out the media summary on Trendwatching.com.

Filed under: Uncategorized, ideas, opportunity, trends

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

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