how to generate and evaluate business ideas?

Vision & Values

Mika Marjalaakso

Founder Institute

Helsinki

21.11.2012

IDEA GENERATION & OPPORTUNITY EVALUATION

What kinds of opportunities you should focus on?

Passion

Best in the world

Big untapped

opportunity

Bad ideas are not always bad …

Recreation of Peter Thiel’s venn diagram of good startup investments.

Where do opportunities arise from?

Enabling Technology

• Location

• AI

• Cloud

• Grid Computing / P2P

• Mobile

• Pervasive cheap always-on connectivity

• Payment systems …

Consumer Behaviour

• BYOD

• Social media sharing habits

Business Model

• SaaS

• Crowdsourcing

• Subscription commerce

• Freemium …

Industry

• Finance

• Energy / Smart Grid

• Retail

• Government

• Medical

Regulation

• AMR business case as an example

• A number of medical and financial innovations …

It’s all about increasing awareness

How to brainstorm ideas?

• Simply start listing down various ideas on paper

• Involve trusted people with diverse backgrounds and

view points early on (industry / domain experience,

techie, designer)

• Sit down, exchange ideas, copy, twist, add, take out

– be creative

• The ugly truth: the best ideas come always as a

surprise when you don’t try to figure out them; be

aware and let your subconsious do the work for you

Build your best ideas into concepts (very few idea level things can be evaluated …)

How to evaluate ideas? The OAK Quick and Dirty Opportunity Evaluation Framework

Opportunity

Assets

Kill Often, Kill Fast

Compelling Idea

Entry Point

Market Size & Growth

Competitive Situation

Timing

Pivotability

Team

Attitude

Prototype

IPR

Customers / Partnerships

Money

A: 10k€

B: 100k€

C: 1M€

Time

A: 6 months

B: 1 year

C: > 1 year

Big idea Small idea

Great stuff Piece of shit

Basic research,

truck load of money

Quick GTM,

double down

understand your customer’s needs

minimum viable product?

solve your customer’s problem

SOMETHING ABOUT THE CULTURE

Key Takeaways

1.Start with the

problem/customer not with

piece of (shit) tech. 2. Team. Team. Team.

3. At the intersection of … – Passion

– Best in the world

– Big untapped opportunity

4. Culture matters.