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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS12

entrepreneurs are ordinary people too The myths and

stereotypes of the entrepreneur are ready to be slayed. After all, over 80
per cent of America’s millionaires are reported by Jeffry Timmons to be
‘ordinary people who have accumulated their wealth in one generation
. . . and do not look like most people’s stereotypes of millionaires’.
Timmons stresses that these entrepreneurs are not necessarily the
gleaming power-players of corporate boardrooms. Rather, they are the
individuals who have created outstanding businesses in such sectors as
diesel engine rebuilding, meat processing, mobile home parks, pest
control and sandblasting.10

the four steps in the idea development
process The development of viable new business ideas is a

systematic business process, whether the ideas are intended to be used
within an existing organisation – intrapreneurially – or within a new
organisation – entrepreneurially. The business idea may concern a
product, process or service – in every case, the intended outcome is the
creation of new value for the organisation.

The process takes as its starting point that you have the germ of a
business idea, that is, something which you could provide to satisfy an
apparent market opportunity or need.

The four steps shown in Figure 1.1 opposite represent a dynamic and
iterative overall process of innovation, where each step informs both
the succeeding and preceding steps. The process highlights how new
and different ideas, and information of a higher degree of detail, are
generated at every successive step and will often be fed back into
earlier steps to allow development of alternative ideas. No information
or idea is ever wasted, even if an idea is abandoned, because in failure
lies the seed of further opportunity.

step one: seeking and shaping opportunities The first

step focuses on exploring your initial business idea by seeking and
shaping the opportunity which your business idea intends to address.
Quite often, our original business idea is framed as the single solution
to one unambiguous opportunity – it is frequently the case that in
reality we may not have defined the opportunity correctly in the first
place. As we shall see later, it is equally likely that our original idea
represents only one of many solutions to the opportunity as initially