What Opportunity is Best For Your Business?

1. What Opportunity is Best For Your Business? Dr Peter Kelly School of Science, Aalto University

2. What Can We Learn From Wile E Coyote ?

3. Analytical Thinkers PLAN

4. Analytical Thinkers Fire Up Excel

5. What do we teach? I D E A P L A N € $ £ ¥ E XIT

6. Traditional Roadmap • Search for new high potential opportunity • Light bulb goes on • Write business plan • Raise money • Hire great team • Build product/offering • Orchestrate big launch • Achieve steady or hockey stick growth • Trade sale or IPO • Retire on beach

7. Does Traditional Roadmap Work? • 98% of all new US businesses do not raise funding from angels or venture capitalists • 70% of new businesses start with less than $20.000 in founding capital • 1 in 6 of INC 500 fastest growing companies started on less than $1.000 (including Dell Computer 1984)

8. Does Traditional Roadmap Work? • Only 6 of 1.000 business plans get venture funding • Of those 60% go bankrupt • Fewer than 2% of ventures reach an IPO • Yet what do we teach? And how?

9. Search and Select Strategy • Market already exists in some form • Undertake detailed analysis to identify opportunities • Assess market potential on basis of segmentation and past demand • Assemble resources to exploit the opportunity

10. How Could You Predict? • Budget airlines (Southwest 1971) • Microlending (Grameen Bank 1976) • Online book sales (Amazon 1995) • Internet search (Google 1998) • Social networking (Facebook 2004)

11. Intuitive Thinkers Ask Profound Questions Buy Food

12. What Does Your Gut Tell You?

13. And here?

14. Or Here?

15. IDEA = ANYTHING + YOU

16. What is your motivation or passion?

17. I want to start a business • I want to be CEO • This is a “hot” sector • Investors like this space • I want to be rich • I am unemployed • My boss says I should

18. I want to invest my time doing this because ...

19. OPPORTUNITY = IDEA + ACTION

20. Opportunities Can Be Made • Incomplete information • Market that defies definition • Consumers are not aware of their needs or wants • Confusing and conflicting signals abound

21. What Can We Do With Our Means?

22. What Are My Means? • Who I am? • Traits, abilities and attributes of entrepreneur/team • What I know? • Education, experience and expertise • Who I know? • Social networks

23. Risk Little, Fail Cheap

24. Affordable Loss • Risking little implies thinking creatively about how to bring cost of discovery down while … • Determining your walkaway cost in terms of time and money • Time seems to be more expendable than money • Depends on which type of money (earned income versus found money) • Returns are not solely monetary in nature

25. VIABLE VENTURE = OPPORTUNITY + COMMITMENT

26. Co-Create Solutions With Partners

27. Co-Created Solution

28. Co-Creation: Securing Partners • Stakeholders bring new means to table • Stakeholders invest what they can afford to lose • Open minded approach to the opportunity • Buy-in as opposed to selling • Look for partners with a “win-win” (reciprocation) • Who deliver on their promises • Who you like dealing with

29. The Element of Surprise

30. Who Could Have Guessed?

31. Could Be Transformed Into

32. Which Opens Up New Possibilities

33. Effectual EntrepreneurshipHolds Great Promise • Why do we spend our time (means) • What do we spend our time doing (affordable loss) • Who do we work with (co-creation) • Open to and seeking out new perspectives (surprise)

34. Some Insightful Reads

35. peter.kelly@aalto.fi+358 41 503 4508