Entrepreneurs are self-motivated people. They recognize opportunities around them.
There are opportunities literally everywhere, and Startup Wars helps to create the entrepreneurs of tomorrow helping students to learn how to think like an entrepreneur, and to locate these opportunities.
It is crucial to find ways of identifying market opportunities through entrepreneurial thinking.
Think Like an Entrepreneur
Why do entrepreneurs try to start business or develop new products?
They see an opportunity.
An entrepreneur is able to identify and grasp onto a market opportunity through a variety of steps. This helps them to know how to evaluate a business opportunity.
As an entrepreneur, you need to possess these analytical reasoning skills to be valuable.
You also need your employees to also possess these skills. By slicing and dicing data, they can contribute to solutions for your startup’s inevitable challenges and problems.
This analytical thinking will further the improvement of the productivity and the eventual success of your company.
But how can you learn this skill?
Opportunity Assessment Steps
- Listening to their current clients and their needs: The easiest way to evaluate a market is to take the time to listen to the needs, wants, and likes and dislikes of current clients. Opportunities can be found by tailoring a product or a service towards these specific needs. Entrepreneurs are always considering problems as opportunities for growth.
- Focusing on the customer: Successful entrepreneurs take the time to reach out and speak directly with customers in the market to find out what they are thinking. Valuable feedback can guide business opportunities, helping you to determine the viability of a business opportunity.
- Observation of competitors. As part of a market opportunity assessment, entrepreneurs analyze the market competition to see the true market viability. What makes a competitor attractive to a customer? Where is your competition failing or succeeding, and why? What’s working and what’s not?
- Following trends and market insights: Entrepreneurs know their market, inside and out. What evaluates industry attractiveness? Following the current market trends helps define the market attractiveness. This will help establish industry attractiveness, from which new ideas will grow.
- Making a move while the iron is hot: Entrepreneurs know when to make a move before the opportunity is lost. The practice of entrepreneurship involves some risk.
What motivates entrepreneurs to take risks? Analytical thinking and observation of potential opportunity and growth. This growth mindset in business will lead the entrepreneurs of tomorrow towards success.
Market Analysis Framework
A business opportunity analysis researches the available data to establish if there is a demand or need in the market.
The analysis of the competition and study of the market conditions gives an entrepreneur a clear vision toward creating a strategic plan.
This opportunity analysis must be carried out frequently. It is a vital step for the growth of your startup company.
Startup Wars teaches this process to their students through real-life business market simulations and market opportunity analysis examples.
Students must study their business market in great detail. They utilize established market analysis frameworks, to learn how to find and build untapped opportunities.
Using a Startup Wars opportunity assessment template, students learn to embrace an “enterprise mindset” – and to identify and answer several questions, like:
- What’s the problem I’m solving?
- Who am I solving this problem for?
- What is the opportunity size?
- What is my main competition?
- How can we best differentiate?
- What is the market window?
- What’s my strategy?
- How will I create revenue?
- What are the critical factors to my success?
- After analysis, should I take this opportunity or not?
Closing Thoughts
The future leaders and entrepreneurs of tomorrow must learn to assess and develop a business opportunity – and jump!
Having the ability to not only see an opportunity but to also follow it through is the key to success in business.
Time and money are saved when an opportunity is properly uncovered and analyzed. Validating this opportunity in even an established market leads to creativity and possible change.
They say that “intuition is everything”, and that’s very true for business.
Intuition is key in establishing opportunities, and startup wars can help students feel confident in following their intuition – and caring out their decision making.
Previous Chapter
How to Teach Opportunity Recognition to College Students
Opportunity Recognition is an important entrepreneurial skill. It involves identifying a pain point and then developing a business solution.
Next Steps
Schedule a call with our team to explore how Startup Wars can fit into your classroom.
