Opportunity Analysis Project (OAP)

033200 Fundamentals of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Spring 2019

Project #2 (Opportunity Analysis Project (OAP) – Deadline: April 29th, 2019!

Summary

The Opportunity Analysis Project (OAP) will allow students to leverage the many tools that they have learned so far in the course. By Sessions 12A/12B, teams will develop a 3-page “story” and narrative regarding the OAP. Student teams will pick an idea during Session 9B and use the time until Sessions 12A/12B to determine whether (or not) the idea is a true opportunity that can be turned into a scalable enterprise.

Study Questions

• Continue from Project 1 and identify potential opportunities. Combine your own personal experiences and creativity with external forecasts and trend analysis. How is the world changing with respect to new technologies? What is the impact of globalization on current solutions? What new requirements will those changes produce? Recent media articles on trends are often a good place to start.

• Define the purpose and objectives of your new business. Identify your most promising opportunity, being careful to discriminate between an interesting technological idea and a viable market opportunity. Prepare an outline which will help you to determine what types of data and information you need to demonstrate the attractiveness of your chosen opportunity.

• Gather data from primary sources. It is crucial for you to obtain data from primary sources. Potential investors will place more trust in well conducted primary research than in stacks of data from secondary sources. There is simply no substitute for talking to potential customers from the target market in order to validate the opportunity you have identified. Consequently, it is important to spend time gathering data from primary, not just secondary, sources.

• Gather data from secondary sources. Countless secondary sources exist on the web and in your college’s various library resources. Try not to get too bogged down in financial and accounting data.

• Analyze and interpret the results. Persuasively summarize your results.

Assignment

Test your OAP idea by talking to at least ten potential users, customers, and partners, document

these discussions, and share what you learned. Create presentation slides to share with your

033200 Fundamentals of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Spring 2019

classmates and write a corresponding written report of no more than 3 pages in length. In your

written analyses and presentations in Session 12A/12B, you will tell the "story" of your proposed

venture by addressing as much of the following as possible:

A. Concept and Vision. Where did your idea come from (e.g. a university lab)? Explain what

the market opportunity is and how your solution addresses this. What makes your

solution particularly compelling? How does it make the world a better place? Do you have

personal experiences with this market? Is there existing intellectual property that you

must license or new intellectual property you must develop in order to pursue this

opportunity? Has anyone tried something like this before? If so, why did they fail or

succeed, and why is the opportunity still attractive?

B. Market Analysis. What industry or sector of the economy are you addressing? Why is this

market attractive? What segment of the overall market are you pursuing? What market

research can be done to describe this market need? What are the total industry or

category sales over the past three years? What is the anticipated growth for this industry?

If this is a new market, what is the best analogous market data that illustrates the

opportunity? Project the potential market size and growth for your opportunity.

C. Customers and Customer Development. This is extremely important. You need to have a

clear idea of who your target customer is. The only way for you to be able to do this is to

"get out of the building" and speak with your potential customers. You will need to

answer questions such as: What does the customer need? Why does the customer need

it? What is the customer using today? What is the customer willing to pay for your

solution? Why? How will you reach this customer? You should include both primary (or

first-hand) research and secondary research, emphasizing primary over secondary.

D. Competition and Positioning. Who else serves this customer need? Who might attempt

to serve this market in the future? What advantages and weaknesses do these

competitors and would-be competitors have? What share of the market do specific

competitors serve? Are the major competitors' sales growing, declining, or steady? What

are the barriers to entry for you? What are the barriers to entry for additional

competitors? How could partners and allies best help you overcome competition from

established enterprises or other startups?

E. Business Model. Now that you have discovered an opportunity and talked to potential

customers, how will you turn it into a business? How will you make money and when do

you expect your venture to be profitable? What is the major risk to address right away

033200 Fundamentals of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Spring 2019

(e.g., market or technical)? In other words, which hypothesis regarding product or market

strategies need to be tested right away?

F. Learning and Adaptation. What did you learn and how between the time you chose the

idea in Week 9 and producing the final presentation and written report in Week 12? Is

this idea a true opportunity or not?

The items above have no implied order. Some entrepreneurs start with a well-defined concept

and then try to identify a market for their idea; others start by studying a market and then

stumble upon an idea. Also, please keep in mind that the specific data and information you

provide will vary according to the type of opportunity you choose to analyze. A key success factor

for a successful project is the depth of your analysis and what you learned from it.

If after careful research you have determined that your business idea is not as promising as you

originally thought, it is totally acceptable to present an OAP that describes why your idea will not

make sense now rather than why it is the next big thing. An honest and rigorous analysis of an

idea that did not survive further scrutiny is preferable to either (a) a half-baked presentation of

an idea your team is unsure of, or (b) an enthusiastic job of over selling for your current idea,

even though you know it is problematic.