The Smart Entrepreneur: Part III: Proof of Concept
By Bart Clarysse and Sabrina Kiefer
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About this ebook
The Smart Entrepreneur features real-life case studies as well as in-depth analysis by authors with direct experience of developing start-ups and venture coaching. Also available as a full ebook and print edition, here The Smart Entrepreneur has been divided into four mini-manuals: Idea creation and evaluation; From idea to business proposition; Proof of concept; and Marshalling resources. Each section offers practical advice and guidance to cover all aspects of your venture, from building a smart business proposition to assembling a dynamic team, carrying out affordable yet effective market research, and seeking investment.
Part III covers ways to demonstrate and test your business proposition, both technically and commercially, through prototyping and some rough-and-ready market testing.
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The Smart Entrepreneur - Bart Clarysse
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to many entrepreneurs, scholars and students, near and far, whose experiences and insights have found their way in some form into our thinking and this book, but who are too many to name here.
Kristien De Wolf was instrumental in co-developing, over the years with Bart Clarysse, a practical and structured method for coaching entrepreneurs which provided the inspiration for this book, and in helping us to deliver the method in its present form at Imperial College Business School. Johan Bruneel, another valued colleague, read early versions of many of the chapters and made useful suggestions.
Jean-Marc de Fety, Wouter Van Roost, Professor Colin Caro and Igor Faletski generously shared their time and enthusiasm in interviews for case studies. We also thank Luc Krolls and Rika Ponnet for consenting to our use of their written materials and video-recorded presentations for the case study in Chapter 4 (Part 2), and thank Bruce Girvan, Chris Thompson, Tom Allason, Frank Gielen, Johan Cardoen, Emma Stanton, Mirjam Knockaert, Mathew Holloway and Matthew Judkins for their contributions to the content and accuracy of case studies elsewhere in the book.
Matthew Dixon, of patent and trade mark attorneys Harrison Goddard Foote, cast an attentive and critical eye over Chapter 6 (Part 2), helping to make certain that our treatment of the ins and outs of intellectual property was precise and reliable. Chris Haley of Imperial Innovations helped us to identify a fitting science commercialisation story for our theme in Chapter 1 (Part 1).
In addition, three teams of students on the Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Design (IE&D) programme at Imperial College Business School created Figures 9 and 10 (Part 2) (Richard Lough, Rosie Illingworth, Howell Wong, Philippa Mothersill, Yann Helle and Lino Vital), Figure 6 (Part 4) (Stacey Sunderland, Christina Stampfli, Damon Millar, Joel Tomlinson, Prashant Jain and Sebastian Lee), and Figure 7 (Part 4) (Solomon Oniru, Clementine James, Olga Borets, Saravanogiri Manoharan, and Luke Trybula).
We also thank Professors David Begg, Principal of Imperial College Business School, and David Gann, Chair in Technology and Innovation Management, for their support to the activities of the Entrepreneurship Hub at Imperial College, which made the IE&D programme possible.
Finally, we’d like to thank the people at Elliott & Thompson for their support, advice, patience and, finally, gentle nudge to get on with it and complete the book, particularly chairman Lorne Forsyth, former and present publishers Mark Searle and Olivia Bays, project manager Jennie Condell and copy editor Kate O’Leary. We are also grateful to author and friend David Charters for introducing us to this affable publishing firm.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
III Proof of concept
8 Using prototyping
9 Testing the market
Epilogue: the entrepreneurial business case
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
When I was in college, guys usually pretended they were in a band…. Now they pretend they are in a start-up.
The entrepreneurial dream
Over the last 15 or so years, ‘entrepreneurship’ has become synonymous with ‘cool’. Paraphrasing the above quotation, you could say that garage rock has been replaced by garage start-ups.
Enterprise has also become a more accessible option for a larger group of people than previously, thanks to the advent of new technological opportunities. In the 1990s, as the reach of the internet and world wide web spread beyond the academic and governmental space into the civilian and commercial arenas, new business models could be conceived to transfer normally face-to-face commercial interactions into the virtual world. Services could be automated and productised, customers could be reached and products downloaded globally, niche markets could be created and served in an economical and unprecedentedly profitable manner. A venture could be started at little cost by a few people tapping code on some computers. A relatively inexpensive website interface could replace a capital-intensive chain of bricks and mortar shops or branches, and a customer base could be built up quickly and ‘virally’.
Hence was born a new generation of technology entrepreneurs, whose celebrity status was achieved in record time and stretched beyond the ‘in’ community of Silicon Valley to the readership of the broadsheet dailies, not to mention television and films. From a business perspective, things became