A quick entrepreneurial lesson on how to develop an idea into a viable startup

Less than 5% of the society are entrepreneurs and more than 92% of startups fail within the first five years of business. To start and sustain a business takes more than enthusiasm. The lack of formal business knowledge cannot be underestimated and critical decision-making right from the beginning cannot be entrusted to someone else or outsourced. It all starts with the entrepreneur. Without the entrepreneurial mindset, very few people can spot an opportunity to start with. Before drafting a business plan of trying to implement a business model, aspiring entrepreneurs need to look differently at problems and think differently as well.  

Professor James Green, Director of Entrepreneurship Education at MTech, has developed “The Opportunity Analysis Canvas” which helps in identifying entrepreneurial opportunities and building successful and sustainable innovative businesses. Through the canvas he answers why entrepreneurs are successful, how can we develop and grow our thinking as entrepreneurs, and what are the keys to identifying and growing successful entrepreneurial ideas into startups.

The canvas is structured as a nine-step experience that teaches how to think, see, and act entrepreneurially. Peter Drucker classified entrepreneurial opportunities into three categories that include innovating through inventing new technologies, exploiting market inefficiencies resulting from the asymmetry of information, and reacting to shifts in relative costs and benefits of alternative uses for resources (ex: changes in demographics, politics, regulations,…)

The idea of how to build a startup is not new, it evolved over time. It first began with the development of “the business plan” at Harvard Business School, followed by “Crossing the Chasm” (1991), “the innovator’s dilemma” by Clayton Christensen (1997), “The Lean Startup” (2008), “The Business Model Canvas” (2010), and recently “The Startup Analysis Canvas” (2017).

In the Optical business Optometrists seem to lack proactive entrepreneurship and rather than spotting opportunities of entrepreneurship they are being disrupted by other entrepreneurs who know how to seek, screen, and seize entrepreneurial opportunities (Contact lenses, online eye tests, …)