Term Project Assignments: Opportunity Analysis and Opportunity Execution

"I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one."  ~ Mark Twain

 

Assignment
Key Deliverables
OAP Milestones

Opportunity Execution Project
OEP Milestones
Mentors
Appendix A
Suggested Resources
Tips for Interviewing Primary Sources

The Assignment

 

Opportunity Analysis (OAP) - Due Jan. 29^th
You will learn how to tell the difference between a good idea in the dorm and a great scalable business opportunity.  You will identify and define a market opportunity and pitch the opportunity in 5 minutes to your classmates and the teaching team. (See Appendix A for more detail)
Opportunity Execution (OEP) - Due March 3^rd/5^th

            You will explore how to actually assemble a company – thinking through how your team would sell, create demand, attract a team, and fund the product.  Then pitch the opportunity in 15 minutes to your classmates and the                 teaching team. (See Appendix B for more detail)

Key Deliverables

• Project Website: Each team will create and maintain a Website on which you will present your opportunity analysis and execution projects as they evolve.  You should post your key deliverables to your Website as they become due (see the section on Milestones that follows). The key deliverables for the two project are:

               

                    Opportunity Assessment Project - 15% of your total course grade – Due Jan 29^th

                    (See Appendix A for more detail)

1. Positioning Statement
2. 5-minute PowerPoint Presentation
3. Written Analysis (include a summary of Customer Discovery your team did)

You and your team pick an opportunity and perform a first analysis to understand whether your opportunity can be turned into a scalable business. In your presentation and written analysis you should address the following:

• Concept. Where did your idea come from? Explain what the market opportunity is and what your solution might be. What makes your solution particularly compelling? 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?

• Market. What industry are you addressing? Why is this market attractive? What segment of the overall market are you pursuing? What market research data can be gathered 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.
•  Customers.  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 research and secondary research, emphasizing primary over secondary.
•  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?   (You will get to think about this more in the Opportunity Execution Project.)
• Competition. 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?

The list above has 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.

Opportunity Assessment Project Milestones

• January 8 (Session 2)

Mandatory Admission and Team Formation Meeting. This team will serve as both your study group and your term project team.

• January 10

Submit mentor preferences by 11:59PM. Mail to e145-homework@lists.stanford.edu.

• January 22 (Session 6)

Initial Positioning Hypothesis. The Entrepreneurial Marketing class session will help you and your team get started in writing your positioning statement. Fill in Geoff Moore's two-sentence positioning template for your OAP product or service concept and send via email with your team name clearly identified. The template is:

Sentence #1

For (target customer)
who (statement of the need or opportunity),
the (product/service name) is a (product/service category)
that (statement of benefit).

Sentence #2
Unlike (primary competitive alternative),
our product (statement of primary differentiation).

Create and post two PowerPoint slides. One slide should simply list the name of your project team with all the team members and their majors. The second slide should have a succinct draft of your positioning statement above.

• January 29 (Session 8)

Opportunity Assessment Presentation and Written Analysis. By 7:00 p.m., the night before, submit your presentation and written work to the homework list e145-homework@lists.stanford.edu.  Your team will have 5 minutes to present your opportunity and the time limit will be strictly enforced.

           
        Opportunity Execution Project - 25% of your total course grade

1. Distribution/Demand Creation/Business Model Summary
2. 15-minute PowerPoint Presentation
3. Written Analysis

The Opportunity Execution is a chance for your team to think about how to take your idea from a business plan on paper and turn it into a real company. For this part, your analysis should include the following:

• What is the fundamental problem you are solving for the end user of your product?  What is the fundamental problem you're solving for your customer (if it is different from the end user)?
  
• Business Model. You had some more time to think about your opportunity.  Do you have any additional thoughts/changes about the business model?
• Distribution strategy. How would you sell your product? What distribution channels would you use?
• Demand Creation Strategy: How would you create demand for your product?
• Risk.  Of financial, technical, people, and market risks; which one is of most concern?  Which would you choose to address first and why? How would you manage or minimize each of the risks going forward?
• Partners and Allies. Who will be your major partners? How will your product be made? Will your company produce all of the parts, or will it use external suppliers? How would you go about attracting these partners and allies to work with your company?
• Funding. How would you fund your venture? Would you bootstrap, take money from venture capitalists, taking funding from a corporate investor, etc?
• Team. Who would you need on your team in order to make this venture a success? What kind of experience and skills would your team need? How would you go about attracting them to your company? 

 
        Opportunity Execution Project Milestones

• February 5 (Session 10)

Team Effectiveness Worksheet. Come prepared to work with your team to grapple with issues of team effectiveness and leadership.  This is a chance to directly confront issues that you may have run across in the process of the opportunity analysis or otherwise working with your group.

• February 19^th

Distribution Channel and Demand Creation Summary: Each team should submit a 1-page summary of 1) how you will get your products in the hands of customers, 2) how will customers find out about your products.  How much will 1 & 2 cost (dollars and people.)

• February 24 - 26 (Sessions 15 & 16)

Mandatory Mentor Presentations. Each team will rehearse their Opportunity Execution Presentations with their mentors. This must be completed before session Session 16.

• March 3 & 5 (Sessions 17 & 18)

Opportunity Execution Presentation. Half of the teams will present in Session 17 and half in Session 18. Presentations are limited to 15 minutes per team plus Q&A. Slides should be standard in PowerPoint format, with a recommended maximum of 8 slides per team. The best presentations are often the shortest and most succinct.

 

Deliverables: All teams must post their PowerPoint deck and written work to their Website and homework list by 7PM on March 2. This will give the teaching team time to assemble all the files onto a single laptop to facilitate presentations.

 

• March 12 (Session 20)      

Written Analysis: 1500 words. Please bring to class 3 hard copies of your paper.

Team Founding Shares: By 11:59 on March 12, send an individual email to your homework list with your personal assessment of how to distribute founding shares amongst your team members (including yourself). Assume a total of 100 are available for distribution. Share distribution should be based on completed work and not distributed as if you were founding a company.          

Mentors

The instructors have assembled a group of professional mentors from all over Silicon Valley -- venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and people all around and in-between -- to work with your teams in defining, developing, and honing your opportunity analysis. Each team will be assigned one mentor "relationship," and that relationship will consist of either one or possibly two people, depending on whether a mentor is working alone or has chosen to work with another individual. 

E145 TAs will be coordinating the mentor program for and details will be discussed in Sessions 1 and 2 (Jan. 6 and 8 ).  At that time, they will distribute the list of available mentors and ask that your team submit your list of 5 mentor preferences via email (e145-homeworkl@lists.stanford.edu) by Saturday, January 10 at 11:59 PM. Please send 1 email per team with your team name in the subject.

A list of available mentors can be found here.

Appendix A:  The Process of the Opportunity Analysis

We recommend five basic steps in the process of analyzing an opportunity:

1.      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. Additionally, you may want to look through Stanford's Office of Technology and Licensing (http://stanfordtech.stanford.edu/technology) for new technologies that have been developed at the University.

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

3.      Gather data from primary sources. It is crucial for you to obtain data from primary sources for the OAP. 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, we prefer that you spend time gathering data from primary, not just secondary, sources. Please see Tips for Interviewing Primary Sources for some helpful tips and advice. Also check out SurveyMonkey (below).

4.      Gather data from secondary sources. Countless secondary sources exist on the Internet and in Stanford's various library resources. The Jackson Library GSB Database Resources and the GSB librarians are especially helpful. Appendix C of the Dorf and Byers textbook offers a good summary of secondary research sources. Try not to get too bogged down in financial and accounting data.

5.      Analyze and interpret the results. The written paper and the oral presentation will require you to persuasively summarize your results.

Suggested Resources

Video Links:

• Online at STVP’s Educators’ Corner there is a wealth of film clips of entrepreneurial thought leaders discussing relevant themes. Feel free to scroll through edcorner.stanford.edu for insights and inspiration.  The following are just a sample:

• Jeff Hawkins on Designing Successful Products
• Jeff Hawkins on the role of market research
• Vinod Khosla - "No problem, no solution, no company"
• Vinod Khosla - "Think big, act small"
• Heidi Roizen - "Bridge the opportunity"

 

Course Textbooks and Readings:

• Technology Ventures , Dorf & Byers.  Chapter 2-5, 7, 11, 19
• Four Steps to the Epiphany, Blank.  Chapters 1-3
• The Monk and the Riddle, Randy Komisar.  Chapter 6, pp. 80-83, pp. 118-121.
• "How to Write a Great Business Plan," Sahlman, HBS Case #97409.

Hot technologies and trends:

• Top 10 Strategic Technologies 2008
• Entrepreneur.com Hot Ideas for 2007
• Computerworld Tech Trends 2007
• JWT Intelligence 10 Trends 2008

SurveyMonkey:

• Past teams have found SurveyMonkey to be helpful in gathering primary data. The basic service is free and provides most of the features you’ll need, though it is limited to 10 questions and 100 responses per a survey. Visit SurveyMonkey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/