It has been one of the best events that I have attended for a
long time. I missed the social networking time since I was at David Norton ’62 Receives
Innovator of the Year Award event. By the way, it’s very innovative to hear
David’s speech about Balance Scorecard. Unexpected thing happened. The fire
alarm went off right in the middle of the speech. Everyone had to get out of
the room and came back. Fortunately, the rest of the event went very well.
Anyways,
The topic of this Venture Forum is “I have an idea. What
next?” I immediately got interested in the topic since I am doing two business
plans for this semester. One of the two is going to be a real business in a
near future. I can’t stop relating what I
heard from the speech to the business plan I am doing. I thought about my
teams, our goals and our action plans. When I heard Reed talked about Business
Model Canvas, Professor and I shared a smile to each other. I felt that the
things I am doing got recognized by professionals and I am on the right track. Of
cause, it is not the only thing I took away from the speech.
The best thing I like about Reed’s speech is the idea of
extracting assumptions from the idea, turning them into hypotheses, and testing
them. Usually when we have an idea that we think is brilliant and can make a
lot of money, it’s hard for us to calm down and take a step back to consider
the possibilities and the whole picture. If we can allow the thought that our
idea is not that perfect and need improvement, we then have the space to pivot.
I remember panelist Jim Warner said that he started eight or night business before
and nearly none of them stayed the same with the original idea when it finally
went off. The key point here is to have “concrete” assumptions to test. For our
Diet Meal Everyday business plan, a concrete assumption may be that a female
who want to keep fit would like to try out a meal plan for at least two weeks.
I really like what I took away from this forum. I also
learned that how to do research as a student. As Professor Shari said in class,
maybe in her ETR500 class, talking to potential customers is very important. As
a student, we have the advantage of being trusted. A begin sentence like “Hi. I’m
a student from WPI and I am doing a research about…” Both of my business plan
teams are on the “idea stage”. If we really want to push the idea to the market,
there are a lot more to think about.
That is really awesome that you and the students who enrolled ETR500 this year. You are lucky to have the chance to read the book Business Model, because last year, we had another different textbook, which is not as good as this one. The sections that you combine your own business model with this Venture Forum event enlighten me,and reminds me of ETR593, which is a course forcus on commercialization. In additional, I like the last paragraph when you describe how to talk to potential customers. Good take aways, Mengting.
ReplyDeleteGreat take away, Mengting.
ReplyDeleteI share the same feeling with you that what I am learning and working on are tested and proved by the guest speaker. We usually learn huge amount of knowledge without practicing. When I listened to the elevator pitch, my feeling is "yes, that's what I learned“. Thus, it was really excited to see our works are on the right track.
Hope we all can be on the right track forever :-)
Good point on the pivot part. I think that is true, the idea we create at the very beginning is probably not the perfect one, in a another work, is too idealistic. We need to do some research, just as what we are doing right now for our business plan; we need to do some analysis, about the whole industry and about our product; also, we need to pivot based on the limit we faced with and what our customers really need based on market research. After we doing all of those, we might make our product suitable for market.
ReplyDelete