Lucy is an innovation advisor to organizations large and small. She has been helping them seek breakthrough growth opportunities by launching new startup ideas to future proof their business. She has worked with multinationals to build out and implement their innovation engine as well as advising startups across Europe and Asia.
Three critical skills to get you from big ideas to a real business
There are many skills required in entrepreneurship and innovation. In this blog, we outline three learnable ones that are crucial to move from a big idea to a real business opportunity.
It is critical for innovators to know how to design a business model, understand its strengths and weaknesses in order to continuously improve it, and also know how to test and validate the critical hypotheses underpinning your business model. It is just as important for leaders to learn these skills so they know how to analyze and evaluate business models with a critical eye.
It is increasingly a rat race to compete on new products, services, price, and technology alone. This is why we believe the 3 most critical skills are the ones that can help you design, test, and manage superior business models.
Business design
The ability to shape and constantly adapt value propositions and business models to develop the most promising ones.
- Design value propositions that attract customers.
- Design value propositions that customers are willing to pay for.
- Design business models that are profitable and scalable
- Design business models that are protectable.
Ask the right questions
The ability to guide your team by knowing how to ask the right questions in order to assess and evaluate your business model
- Learn to ask the right questions even before you start testing, while you’re still designing your business model.
- Use the Questions for Leaders assessment sheet to help your teams explore new opportunities and compete on superior business models.
- Visualize the strengths and weaknesses of your business model with the resulting score
- Use trigger questions to continuously spark ideas for improving your business model
1 – Structure and consistency
Use Canvas Modules for structured consistency and to help provide a good overview of all the important elements in the site. Students recommended that modules are structured by week or topic (and include the topic, e.g. ‘Week 3 Contract Law’), instead of resource type (e.g. ‘lectures’, ‘practicals’) because this helps them more easily find relevant information.
Within each module, it’s important to keep the structure and design consistent to reduce extraneous cognitive load – for example, each module could have an introduction page, followed by a page of resources for the week, then a page for class content and activities, and then a page with review questions and reminders for the following module. This is particularly important if team teaching; ensure that other teachers use the same structure for their modules. Students also appreciated the modules page on Canvas, as it allowed them to see everything at once and quickly search for main topics.
This approach links to the UDL principle Representation by guiding information processing and visualization (3.3) .
2 – Explain why
We all like to know why we need to do things. In your Canvas sites, including brief explanations of why certain resources and activities are used can help students better understand their importance and why they should care. For example:
- This video explains how we can use the theory of change to explain social activism . This will be important when we look at the impacts of social media in the tutorial classes in Week 8. The examples discussed in the video are particularly helpful to demonstrate how this is done.
- As you read this report on The Impact of Trade on Climate Change , focus on how the author uses evidence to construct their argument on reducing global trade . This structure will help you in your position paper for assessment 3 .
- This chapter will be helpful when you explain how you perform a clinical assessment of small animals for assessment 2 because it covers key signs and symptoms to consider during each examination .
- When watching this video, consider these two questions: 1) Was there anything that the protesters said that surprised you? What was it and why was it surprising? and 2) Have you ever considered the limits of freedom of speech? These will help you connect what we covered in last week’s lecture (week 6) with the tutorial activity in week 7 on theimpact of freedom of speech on lawmaking .
- This is a required reading for this week. It will build your understanding of self-determination theory , a core concept for this module, and is related to Learning Outcome 2 .
- This is an optional video for this topic. It shows an inspiring example of how a real business applies the chain rule to their accountancy practice to improve customer outcomes .
This approach links to the UDL principle Action and Expression by guiding appropriate goal-setting (6.1) .
3 – Curate some ‘non-academic’ resources
It’s important for students to become familiar with academic readings as part of their development through higher education. However, to help recruit student interest, students suggested providing “human interest” resources or stories from reliable external sources such as The Conversation. When curated appropriately, these other resources can help to boost student motivation and connect with scholarly work.
This approach links to the UDL principle of Engagement by optimizing relevance, value, and authenticity 7.2 .
