Desiring to know more about entrepreneurship? Wanting to start a new business? Well, this is a good opportunity for you since I am obliged to write something about entrepreneurship. ^_^
First of all, I will say something about myself. I am Noemi Antonio, a third year accounting student of Asia Pacific College or APC (owned by IBM and SM Foundation). My school offers a good quality education and a number of scholarships. In fact, I am a scholar of APC.
In my course, we are asked to plan a business. But how can we begin if we do not have any idea what to offer. This is our big problem. We have realized that starting a business is not a simple task. Fortunately, one of my classmates reported about sources of business ideas. In her report, she taught us that planning on what products or services to be offered alone take a long preparation in order for these ideas to be approved and executed.
Since I learned something in school about how to have business ideas, I am going to share them to you. Hope I can add knowledge to everyone who read this blog.
Business ideas may come from different sources such as the potential consumers, existing products or services, distribution channels, government, and research and development. These are the possible sources of an entrepreneur wanting to start a business. Generating ideas from these sources is not that easy, some methods like brainstorming, focus groups, and problem inventory analysis can be used to produce and test new ideas. Also, innovative ideas can be unlocked through creative problem solving techniques like brainwriting and reverse brainstorming.
In order to establish a new venture, development of a new product is needed. Product planning and development process starts from (1) idea stage, (2) concept stage, (3) product development stage, (4) test marketing stage, and (5) commercialization stage.
These learnings helped me and my groupmates namely: Katrina, Camille, Gerlie, and Daryl to decide and plan on what kind of idealistic business we will initiate. We used several techniques in gathering ideas. As we meet as a group we applied brainstorming, reverse brainstorming, problem inventory analysis, checklist method, free association, forced relationships, collective notebook method, attribute listing, and big dream approach. These methods facilitated us to have an idea on what service we will offer. Remember that creativity is a pivotal part of creating ideas.
Mr Ramon Duremdes, our teacher in Entrepreneurship, taught us to start small and dream big. Our group is guided with this philosophy and still plans to improve and examine every opportunities available.
In addition, I find out that the use of internet by entrepreneurial firms greatly increases. It is used to have new business ideas and to extend marketing and sales channels. Internet enables marketing costs to be minimized and at the same time reach broader markets. Our group is planning to promote our business through the use of internet. We will create our own business’ website. Hope our business will succeed. ^_^
