Business Idea Generation and Evaluation: The Start of an Entrepreneurial Journey

I attended two mega entrepreneurship events last week, the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC 2012) and BiZ2012. At both the events Sir Richard Branson was the keynote speaker. He and other speakers emphasised upon the importance of idea generation and opportunity recognition. “Innovate, innovate, and innovate! Generate ideas and act on the best one after evaluating it carefully”, Sir Richard Branson suggested to the existing and potential entrepreneurs.

Sitting in the audience, I realised the importance of generating as well as evaluating the business idea and decided to share the following initial steps of starting the entrepreneurial journey with you:

Preparation: This step contains all the background information, experience, and knowledge that an entrepreneur brings to opportunity recognition process. In this phase, an entrepreneur observes the political, economic, social, technological and legal trends.

Incubation: A stage where an entrepreneur thinks about the idea (based on observing the trends) or thinks about a problem, consciously or sub-consciously.

Insight: The flash of recognition-when the solution to a problem is seen or an idea is born. Also termed as “Eureka” Experience

Evaluation: An idea is subjected to scrutiny and analysed for its viability.

Elaboration: The creative idea is put into a final form, the details are worked out, and the idea is transformed into something of value such as product, service, or business concept.

In the enclosed videos, I discuss this process with Professor Paul Burns in an informal setting view and exploration. We welcome your feedback for further knowledge generation and dissemination.