INDIVIDUAL WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT : PROJECT PAPER
Each student will submit an Individual Project Paper that asks the student to explore how one can approach developing a New Business Venture as a logical and disciplined process.
The student is asked to take the position of a management consultant and act as an advisor to an entrepreneur who has come up with a creative new idea but has no experience in creating a new business venture. The new venture may be a new product idea, new services idea or even a new process idea.
A suggested approach is to present the paper as a set of guidelines which will help the entrepreneur answer the following questions: (Think these questions are come from 24 steps, but not all the steps are mentioned)
o Who is your customer? (Step 1 – Market Segmentation, Step 2 – Select a Beachhead Market, Step 3 – Build an End User Profile, Step 4 – Calculate the TAM size for the Beachhead Market, Step 5 – Profile the Persona for the Beachhead Market, Step 9 – Identify Your Next 10 Customers)
o What can you do for your customer? (Step 6 – Full Life Cycle Use Case, Step 7 – High-Level Product Specification, Step 8 – Quantify the Value Proposition, Step 10 – Define Your Core, Step 11 – Chart Your Competitive Position)
o How does your customer acquire your product? (Step 12 – Determine the Customer’s Decision-Making Unit (DMU), Step 13 – Map The Process to Acquire a Customer)
o How do you make money off your product? (Step 15 – Design a Business Model, Step 16 – Set Your Pricing Framework, Step 17 – Calculate the Lifetime Value (LTV) of an Acquired Customer, Step 19 – Calculate the Cost of Customer Acquisition (COCA)
The expectation is that the student will focus on the sequence of customer-centric steps and be able to write up a 7 – 9 page guideline to direct any innovation driven start-up on how they might approach evaluating the market opportunity and identifying first customers for their creative idea, and testing for business viability.
In preparing this individual assignment it is suggested that the student will draw on learnings from multiple sources including class lecture notes, course textbooks, and the student’s own independent exploration of the topic through internet and library research.
The final submission must be solely the student’s own work and all references need to be properly cited in an appendix section.
Sample Solution
