It has been a week since I posted which is lazy of me as it has been a really busy week in which I learnt a lot of new things.
For three days lst week I attended a corporate dragons' den in which three teams had to develop new business propositions and present them to a venture board on the last day.
Mine was a team that worked well together and through long, hard days developed an idea which was good enough to get some seed funding - we can take the idea to the next stage, which in our case is a period of testing out some of the assumptions that underpin the proposition.
This is what I learned:
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Big companies have hugely talented people in them - they may be overseas, they may be in your building but they are there. How to make the most of them is the challenge.
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You need to go through a rigorous and creative divergence in order to converge on the plan. And then you need to keep refining, refining and refining.
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The team must have focus so that it keeps to time, is creative and progresses.
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The emotional impact of such work needs to be at least mentioned - ie it is a rollercoaster and you need to be able to go with it. Time pressure does funny things to people.
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Make sure you have a numbers person and interrogate your financial assumptions. and make sure they know how to use formulae in Excel.
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Research so you have facts on the competitive landscape.
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Have an elevator pitch you can say simply and explain simply.
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Work on your presentation and make sure you have a graphics/Powerpoint genius. Three days' work into a 20 minute presentation is a challenge.
And once you get the money - and our case we are in alarge corporate - work out how to manage the project. Expertise across the business is a huge challenge - how do you bring people together who are already busy and who may work in a different country with big time differences.