1. Successful Entrepreneurs
Passion for the business
Vision and endless ideas
Product/customer focus:
Must satisfy customer needs
Persevere through setbacks and failures
Executional excellence: Translate creativity into action & generate measurable returns

2. The Power of Entrepreneurial Thinking
What makes a successful entrepreneur?
Seeing opportunity where others don’t
Innovation: better, faster, cheaper, easier
“Fire in the Belly”
Willingness to take risks
Extreme work ethic

3. Three Key Processes Increasing Relevance to Founding Venture Idea
Generation
Opportunity
Recognition
Creativity
Increasing Relevance to Founding Venture

4. Kinds of Intelligence
Analytic intelligence - The ability to analyze and evaluate ideas, solve problems and make decisions
Creative intelligence - Going beyond what is given to generate novel and interesting ideas.
Practical intelligence - The ability that individuals use to find the best fit between themselves and the demands of the environment
Social intelligence - The ability to understand and manage all types of people and to act wisely in human relations
Successful intelligence - The acquisition and use of what you need to know to be successful in a particular environment.

5. Successful Intelligence
Practical
Intelligence
Analytic
Intelligence
Successful
Intelligence
Success
Creative
Intelligence

6. Confluence Approach Creativity emerges from a confluence of
Intellectual abilities
Broad, rich knowledge base
Appropriate style of thinking
Personality attributes
Intrinsic, task-focused motivation
Environment supportive of creative ideas

7. Entrepreneurial alertness
Additional Aspects
Active search
Entrepreneurial alertness
Prior knowledge
Social networks
Opportunity
recognition

8. Pattern Recognition
Seeing links between seemingly unconnected trends, changes, events
Connections form an identifiable pattern

9. Entrepreneurial Opportunity
Situation in which a person can develop a new business idea that has potential to generate profit

10. Opportunities from Change
Truly valuable entrepreneurial opportunities come from an external change that
Makes it possible to do things that had not been done before
Makes it possible to do something in a more valuable way.

11. Change Leads to Potential
New technology
Political and regulatory changes
Social and demographic change
Potential

12. Forms of Opportunity Entrepreneurs develop business ideas by:
Developing new products and services
Tapping new markets
Formulating new methods of production
Identifying new raw materials
Developing new ways of organizing processes

13. Generating Business Ideas
Idea is thought, impression, notion
Opportunity: favorable set of circumstances that create need for product or service e.g. DTH, GPS
Opportunity has four essential qualities
Attractive
Durable
Timely
Creates/adds value for buyer/user

14. Recognizing Opportunities & Generating Ideas
Observing/ Study Trends
Economic factors
Social factors
Technological Advances
Political Action and regulatory statutes

15. Recognizing Opportunities & Generating Ideas
Economic Forces
Consumers level of disposable income
Interest rate changes
More women in workforce
Currently: global recession
Social Forces
Both parents working: fast food
Life stress: spas, wellness clinics , yoga, spiritualism

16. Recognizing Opportunities & Generating Ideas
Family & work patterns
Age of the population
Increasing diversity in the workplace
Globalization of industries
Increased focus in health care & fitness
Proliferation of computers & Internet
Increase in numbers of cell phone users
New forms of music & entertainment

17. Recognizing Opportunities & Generating Ideas
Technological Advances
Cell phones: allows people to be mobile
E-commerce: accommodates busy schedules and working from home/remote locations
Political Action
New laws:
Terrorism: Products & services to protect

18. Recognizing Opportunities & Generating Ideas
Solving a Problem
Observe people’s challenges
Look for problems
Listen to people’s complaints
Think of your own challenges

19. Recognizing Opportunities & Generating Ideas
Personal characteristics for opportunity recognition
Entrepreneurial alertness/6th sense
Social networks
Creativity: preparation, insight, evaluation
Prior experience in an industry

20. Techniques in Generating Ideas
Brainstorming: generate ideas quickly, no analysis or decision making
Enthusiasm, originality, lots of ideas
Freewheeling, lively
No criticism allowed
Session moves quickly
Leapfrogging encouraged

21. Techniques in Generating Ideas
Focus groups
People selected are familiar with issues
What’s on customers mind
Conducted by trained moderator
Success depends on moderator’s ability to ask questions and keep on track

22. Techniques in Generating Ideas
Surveys: gathering info from sample of individuals
By phone, mail, online, in person
Random portions of population
Customer Advisory Boards