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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS26

Positivity represents the consistent habit of seeing problems as
opportunities. It embraces the ability to recover rapidly from setbacks
and to tolerate criticism. It includes an unwillingness to allow the
unanticipated blockages referred to above impede progress.

Playfulness allows an entrepreneur to feel comfortable outside
mainstream thinking and action. Drawing on the resources of
childhood, it encourages risk-taking and the use of fun and humour in
thinking to stimulate flexibility of thought and deed.

Passion evokes the drive of an all-consuming purpose and an obsessive
will to achieve goals.

Persistence provides the difference between ‘if at first you don’t
succeed, try and try again’ and ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try
something different until you do succeed’.

self-awareness beats the imposition of others A final

point to make in support of undertaking the idea development process
yourself is that it is much easier to accept changes and refinements to
which you have been inexorably drawn by data which you have
generated yourself than to have to stomach changes which have been
imposed upon you by outsiders.

Sir Clive Sinclair and the C5 – the perils of a
flawed process of idea development23

the C5 story offers an object lesson in the risks of developing a

solution before the underlying problem has been fully explored.

Sir Clive Sinclair is an electronics expert whose world-beating products
include the executive pocket calculator (1972) and the microvision pocket
TV (1977).

His plans to develop an electronic vehicle go back as far as 1973. In
1983 a change in the law for the benefit of disabled drivers and milk float
manufacturers allowed for a new type of vehicle, the electrically assisted
pedal cycle. The Sinclair C5 was a battery-powered one-seater pedal-
assisted tricycle intended to herald a new era of ecological personal
transport. It was designed so that anybody over 14 years old could drive
it without insurance, driving licence, road tax or crash helmet. The C5’s