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2336 : STEP FOUR – PLANNING FOR IMPLEMENTATION

Wray and Andrew Black considered giving up, but demonstrating the
typical persistence of true entrepreneurs, continued to launch
successfully in 2000. Having merged with Flutter in 2002, Betfair won
the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in 2003.

In addition, internal politics, the law of unintended consequences,
changes in corporate strategy, all mean that the idea development
process can never be micro-managed so that it runs like clockwork.
This fluidity places two particular entrepreneurial attributes at a
premium – vigilance in detecting the unforeseen as early as possible
and flexibility in reacting to it.

The Minnesota Innovation Research Program team created an apt
metaphor when they described the innovation process as similar to
navigating an uncharted river – while unable to control exactly where
the river goes and how it behaves, the successful entrepreneur does
possess the skills to steer towards a favourable destination.

learning from experience The enterprise-award-winning company
Travel Counsellors illustrates effectively the power of reacting flexibly
to new information and experience. Among a number of business start-
ups, entrepreneur David Speakman had founded a conventional travel
agency which had achieved a steady turnover of £500,000. The failure
of another of his businesses, a restaurant, led him to define the key
criteria for his ideal business. These criteria included no fixed labour
costs, commission-only sales, large volume and low overheads. In the
light of his analysis of the business failure, and inspired by the
American trend-spotter Faith Popcorn, who predicted that more people
would shop and work from home in the future, Speakman completely
reconfigured his travel agency in 1994. He armed his travel agents with
laptops and mobile phones, enabling them to visit mostly baby-boomers
in their own homes and provide an extremely high level of tailored
service.

Turnover of Travel Counsellors plc in 2003 had soared close to £100
million.176

focused reapplication of the idea development process A final

guiding principle is that once the apparent blocks to implementation have
been identified, you should treat the process of resolving the blocks using
exactly the same process and techniques as you used in the first three
steps of the idea development process itself.