For budding founders, few things can kill the excitement of entrepreneursip more than discovering that your startup idea not viable, either because it's been done before, it's unfeasible, or some other reason. Luckily, Naveen Lakkur, Director of the Bangalore Founder Institute, and Dr. Liz Alexander, co-founder of Leading Though, have written this post to help entrepreneurs guide them in crafting an idea for a lasting and meaningful startup.
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You’ve undoubtedly heard it said many times that ideas are a dime a dozen. Human ingenuity is so innate it’s not surprising there’s this almost endless wellspring of novel solutions generated. But as you may have discovered, having one or more ideas is only a small part of what it takes to become a successful entrepreneur.
Just as important is understanding that not every idea has the potential to become a business.
That’s why the Idea Matrix featured in our book, FOUND: Transforming Your Unlimited Ideas into One Sustainable Business will undoubtedly be helpful to you. Because it’s vitally important—whether you’re an aspiring or experienced entrepreneur—to understand the different categories that ideas fit into and how each of them matches up with specific market stages. Only with that appreciation can you confidently take appropriate action, in line with your expectations.
Here’s an example that will help to make this assertion clearer:
Imagine that your idea is to take people on vacation trips to Mars. What a cool proposition, right? Well, maybe so. But not if you intend to market this as a viable business.
Leaving aside the category of such an idea for the moment, let’s look first at the market stage into which the “Martian vacations” idea fits. Would you agree we might determine this to be an “Unknown” market? After all, there are countless “unknowable” challenges to consider: In what year (or even century) will such trips to Mars become viable? How many people would be interested in this kind of adventure? What will be the range of price points for each type of vacation, and how that might cost affect the size of your market?
So, if we agree that we’re talking about an Unknown market category in the case of trips to Mars, here’s why trying to create an entrepreneurial venture—meaning a sustainable business—out of this idea won’t work. Not only is it not possible to engage your target market at this point, but no one is going to be willing to fund it. The idea at this point in time is purely aspirational.
No Idea is a “Bad” Idea
That doesn’t make it a “bad” idea, however.
After all, you’re probably thinking to yourself that you’ve read about billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson and others, who’ve been exploring how space travel and vacationing could fit together at some point. But even then, they’re not thinking of these as entrepreneurial ventures. For them, such an idea fits into the categories of Patent or Pastime. The more research these pioneers engage in to try and create such vacation packages in the future, the greater the chances they may secure several patents based on the resulting knowledge. Similarly, with so much of their own discretionary money to spend, such a “high flying” idea could be a hobby or pastime for these high wealth individuals. They’re willing to fund such ideas to fulfill their personal fascination with inter-planetary travel, but they’re not expecting to turn it a business right away.
Of course, this was an extreme example to give you a sense of how the category of the idea and the market stage need to be in alignment. And how what might seem like a “bad” idea in one pairing can turn out to be a good fit in another.
So what kind of idea might best fit the category of “entrepreneurial,” you may be wondering? Here’s an example whose story was covered in our book, FOUND. It concerns an electronic (e-)waste startup called 4R Recycling, based out of Bangalore, India.
Since we’ve already given you the idea category, in which market stage does helping to handle the waste generated by India’s enormous consumption of computers, smart phones and other electronic gadgets (said to represent a market worth USD$400 billion currently) best fit?
What’s Your Market Category?
Would you agree that this is a sun-raising idea? Meaning that there’s a huge existing—and growing—market need for electronic waste solutions? In which case 4R Recycling fits into the “In Demand” vertical slot along the “Entrepreneurial” horizontal line, because the problem can be addressed in a scalable way with the confidence that people are currently willing to pay for it.
In fact, when the co-founders engaged in their preliminary research they quickly determined that the problem they planned to address was one that was growing exponentially. All trends point to increased consumption of electronic goods throughout India, while at the same time the lifespan of such devices is decreasing. You could say that having solved one set of problems, we’ve simply created a new set. Which is always good news for entrepeneurs!
Knowing that consumers were replacing their existing technology at a faster rate, 4R Recycling could be confident that by focusing on electronic waste, their company had a rosy, some would say “recession proof” future. After all, their service is a small price to pay for managing a problem that—without it—would result in a much higher price in terms of environmental damage. (In the chapter entitled Unearth in our book, you’ll also discover what 4R Recycling’s original waste management idea was and why—had they decided to pursue that—they would likely have run out of money before getting their company off the ground!)
But don’t think that your business idea needs to be confined to just one idea category. It could be that in the future companies like 4R Recycling create products or methodologies that could also be patented solutions. Alternatively, some of those fresh solutions could become part of a “plug-in” for an established manufacturing process.
When you have the right winning idea and understand the appropriate action you need to take, there’s no limit to the viable solutions that can emerge.
More than Passion & Perseverance
In a recent Jet Airways in-flight magazine feature, a family-run business owner was asked what his message was to aspiring entrepreneurs. His response was one you may well have heard frequently yourself: “Let your passion and perseverance guide you.” As with so much off-the-cuff advice, the reality is somewhat more complex. While passion and perseverance are essential qualities of successful entrepreneurs (and their corporate equivalents, intrapreneurs), they need to be tempered with a proven, systematic framework like the Idea Matrix. That way you can be confident that your passion and perseverance are channeled towards taking the right action, appropriate to the outcome you desire.
The Idea Matrix is just one of several Intellectual Properties now made available to the readers of FOUND*. Our book also includes a simple yet highly effective technique known as the ROSE Model, with which you can quickly validate each of your ideas before investing too much of your valuable time, money and effort. Plus, the main focus of the book is a five-part methodology using the acronym F.O.U.N.D., to ensure that—of all the “winning” ideas your remarkable mind comes up with—you can most easily identify the one that can become a sustainable business.
About the co-authors:
Naveen Lakkur is Director of Founder Institute, Bangalore, India and a corporate innovation coach who inspires innovative thinking. He has been involved as a catalyst for over 200 ideas that have become commercial realities. He is also co-founder, board member and/or investor of many interesting, innovative and successful companies, including Values Centered Innovation, Compassites Inc., iCharts Inc, and JiffleNow.
Dr. Liz Alexander is co-founder of Leading Thought, a boutique consultancy operating in the U.S., Europe, India, Australia, and South Africa. She works with corporate, academic and not-for-profit clients to help them discover and develop “white space” ideas and opportunities, with which to differentiate themselves from their competition. FOUND is her 17th book.
*FOUND: Transforming Your Unlimited Ideas into One Sustainable Business is the second book Naveen and Liz have worked on together. FOUND is available on Amazon and bookstores throughout India and through Amazon Kindle in other parts of the world, including the U.S.
(Rear view of the brunette woman in formal clothes image by Shutterstock)
