ENT142 Fundamentals in Innovation and Entrepreneurship 2

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

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 so lution 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?

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 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.

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.

Who else serves this customer need? Who might attempt to serve this market in the future? What advantages and weaknesses do t hese 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?

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?

What did you learn in ENT141 and how between the time you chose the idea and producing the final presentation and written report in ENT142? Is this idea a true opportunity or not? Power point