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Tutkimus-, kehitys- ja innovaatiotoiminnan sydämessä

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5 Ways to Find a Business Idea
http://Light%20lanters%20hanging%20in%20the%20dark
15.10.2024
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Many people consider becoming entrepreneurs at some point in their lifetime. This desire can come from many different needs: arriving in a new country without networks, difficult economic times, looking for new challenges, wanting to be your own boss, or in the face of burnout to name just a few. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, the interest in entrepreneurship has been increasing in many regions (1,2). Many people experienced sudden loss of work or saw those around them affected by layoffs. This means that more and more people want to look to entrepreneurship to make their next career move. Entrepreneurship can begin as a way to supplement your regular income, start a passion project, or find a feasible way to control more of your own time. But not everyone is a natural entrepreneur. When you are not a natural-born entrepreneur, finding an idea to pursue can be one of the biggest struggles you have to make entrepreneurship a reality. Below are 5 ways to begin the process of finding an idea to pursue. This will take some internal and external contemplation in order to come up with one or two ideas that you can begin to explore. 1. Letting Go of Originality It is rare to have a truly original idea. Someone somewhere will have thought of a similar, if not identical, idea somewhere in the world. That is not a problem. It is not as bad as it may first seem. With other people having similar ideas or having ‘competitors’ means that there is already a market for the idea you are considering. Many of the products and services that we use today were not the first in their categories - including Google (search engine), Spotify (music streaming), and Facebook (social platforms). Many times, not being the first is an advantage because you can determine where other products or services are failing to serve customers. 2. Using Your Skillset Each of us is made up of many skillsets. Some relate to your home life, some relate to your education, and some relate to any hobbies you may have. There are so many places to look and find your skills. By thoroughly analysing them, you can begin to identify how you might package them to sell in certain industries or to certain professions. You begin by asking yourself questions like: What do you know well that others do not? What can you do easily that others need help with? What are others asking you for help with? Reflecting on these questions will allow you to see where you excel and what you specific unique selling point (USP) might be. 3. Solve a Problem or Identify Underserved Needs What annoys you in everyday life? What problems do you deal with repeatedly that might be worthwhile finding a fix to? Each of us walks around being irritated by certain things that we feel do not work well or are not fit for purpose. You can ask yourself: can I fix these in a way that I could monetise? Use your frustration to create sellable solutions. The same concept can be applied to underserved needs. Each of us has seen things that we can’t believe isn’t being utilised in other places. When I moved to Finland, I was blown away but the Finnish astiankuivauskaappi (dish drying cabinet) which even has its own Wikipedia entry. Have you experienced certain products or services that are local to one place that you could sell in another? Different cultures solve problems differently and this new perspective could help to find gap in the market. 4. Build on Products or Services That Already Exist When was the last time you created an adhoc way to balance your phone so that you could either have a video conversation or watch something on YouTube? Now there are many solutions to this problem but there didn’t used to be. And most of these solutions are sold by independent companies that are not related to Apple, Samsung, etc. This means that someone saw that there was a need to extend or improve how they used a product and took independent action. Some people have created special straps for Amazon’s Kindle so that they can be more easily used with one hand, especially when laying down. When the first iPhone was released, independent retailers began to provide stylised covers for them. They could see that people wanted ways to personalise their phone (the same phone that millions of other people had) to reflect their personality. Where can you see a way to make an already existing product or service, more usable or useful? Have you created a hack for yourself that you think others would benefit from? This can take the form of something physical or even an e-book or a course. 5. Ask Family and Friends The people that are closest to us generally know us well. Sometimes they can predict our responses to things and see parts of us that we cannot see clearly. Sometimes we are too close! To harness their knowledge, you can ask your family and friends what they think you do well for a great place to start your self exploration. You can even think about what you are consistently being asked to help with. Is it home repairs, is it computer help, website construction, or to write something? It may be that you help them for free because they are your family and friends, but is it possible that there is a way to turn those skills into something you can sell. One Bonus Idea: Buy a Business Just like business ideas don’t need to be original, your step into entrepreneurship doesn’t need to be with a business you started. This may sound confusing but there are many businesses that are for sale. Business through acquisition happens for many reasons: retirement moving onto new ideas or new challenges re-location (if the company is location-specific) passing away businesses outgrow their owners owners outgrow their businesses market changes, etc. This is how new owners can bring real value to current companies. You may have skills that are perfect for taking a current business to the next level. In Finland, there are marketplaces where you can search for businesses that are for sale. Three of these are: Yrityspörssi Yrityskaupat Firmakauppa Knowledge at Your Fingertips The last piece of advice is to use the tools at your fingertips. The internet had given every person who connects with it access to an immense amount of knowledge and potential customers. This means that it is now possible to start a company in very easily. No longer are you waiting on paperwork to go through, you can begin building something after you have spent a little time thinking about it and researching it. It doesn’t need to be perfect when you start, as long as you are open to feedback and open to changing things that aren’t working. Customer Research to Move Forward Once you have explored and identified a certain industry, product or service, or even your own skillset, you can begin to put your idea to the test and begin with market and customer research. Customer research is the foundation of any business idea and is required to move from the idea stage to the testable concept stage. Your customer research will tell you if you have an idea worth pursing or not. Remember, even finding out that it is not worth pursuing is an outcome. It allows you to move on to another concept without investing too much time, money, or other resources. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. With a Bachelor’s from Canada, a Master’s degree from Sweden, an MBA in Service Innovation & Design from Laurea, and her AmO from Haaga-Helia, she is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. Don’t be surprised if she knocks on your door to talk about learning co-creation methods through intensive learning experiences. Sources Fikri, K. & Newman, D. How the Pandemic Rebooted Entrepreneurship in the U.S. (hbr.org) Harward Business Review. January 17, 2024. More Brits than ever want to start a business post-Covid (accaglobal.com) March, 2022.

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Thick Customer Research Reduces Failures in Services and Businesses
http://People%20and%20Santa%20Claus%20under%20a%20bridge
10.10.2024
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The success or failure of a business or service depends on many factors. Some of them you will have no control over and some will be things that you can mitigate with your preparation and actions. Thorough customer research is one of those things that can help you to reduce your chances of being unsuccessful. For the purpose of this article, a customer is defined as a person who is the one who pays or not. Not all users will be the payer of the products or services that you sell but understanding them is vital. It doesn’t matter if you are involved with public services or a private company; doing customer research will help to avoid service and product failures. This will help you to avoid most of the early pitfalls in development and design phases because it allows you to understand what customers and users are expecting before you have even built anything. If you have already built something and it isn’t getting the traction that it should, there are many issues that could be at fault and without doing the research, you can only guess which one (or combination of them) it is. This takes time and money and will give you a much shorter runway to fix the problem. What is Customer Research? Customer research, when done thoroughly and intentionally, is a combination of asking, listening, and learning. Direct and indirect customer research can consist of: interviews surveys observations shadowing internet searches reading articles blogs academic journals, etc. There are a lot of ways to do this research and it is important to include different methods to get a good overview of the market and the customers themselves. One very good resource for understanding different methods for customer research is the website This Is Service Design Doing. There are both qualitative and quantitative methods of customer research listed on this website. Both are needed to create an in-depth context to gain actionable insights for your service or product. What is Thick Customer Research? When doing research of any kind, you have the choice of doing quantitative or qualitative data. Both of these have their pros and cons. Quantitative research allows you to reach far more people than you would be able to get with qualitative; this research can tell you whatis happening. While the depth of insights and understanding of human experiences that you can get from qualitative research will tell you why it is happening when compared to quantitative research. There is no context to the what. In combination, these two create what is called “thick data”. Tricia Wang gives a greatly informative TEDxTalk on the value of thick data. Looking at the photo of this article, using quantitative data, we can ascertain that there is 1 Santa Clause under the pier, there are two people talking to the Santa character, they are potentially half way along the pier and stood in between the pillars. What we cannot know is the why of any of this situation. Without doing some quantitative research, we cannot find out: Why Santa is there? What the people are talking about? How often Santa is present under the pier? If Santa will return tomorrow. What does Santa hope to achieve by being there? Is Santa achieving what he set out to do? Like mentioned above, even if we gather the answers to the quantitative research, we still have no context or actionable insights into what is really happening. Why Do Customer Research? There are a few main uses for customer research Knowing who you need to focus on Understanding how to communicate with your customer Follow different shifts and trends in your customer base Understanding what is important to your users You need to identify who your customers are or are going to be, you need to interview some of them and find out how they are currently fixing the issue(s) that your service or product will fix (or should fix). When you research why companies fail, as mentioned above, there will be a mix of reasons. An article promoted on a US Chamber of Commerce website lists three main causes of small business failure: Cash flow problems No demand for product of service Poor management From these three, the easiest one to help with customer research is the no demand for the product or service. If you are doing good research, you will find out early in the process whether your idea is useful or sellable. Long before you invest in full development, you should be out there asking questions and testing your idea before you have built it with a simple prototype. Doing this should also help with problem number one because it will let you put off bigger financial investments and reduce the amount of time it takes to get a sellable product. It can cost a lot of money and time to get your first fully functioning product or service. These steps should not be taken until you have a proven prototype that has shown that people are interested and willing to pay for it. Outside of validating a prototype, customer research is valuable to learn how to communicate and sell to your customer, figure out how they would use your product or service (it may not be how you think), and see if there are any specific elements or competitors that you are missing. It is also important to figure out how people are currently solving the problem right now without your product on the market. Understanding this will help you understand what may be a competitive edge in the future. Which Services and Businesses Need to Do Research? Understanding your customers/users is vital whether you deliver a specific service in a larger organisation or if you are a business that serves B2B or B2C customers. Customer research is so important for most people to learn because most people will need to use it in their work. It does not matter where you are in an organisation, most people have some kind of customer that they are creating services for. But many may not use that perspective in their work. For example, people working in HR functions or the finance office of an organisation can have both internal and external customers depending on their specific role. Many will likely have both. Human Resources will have responsibility for professional development opportunities but also recruitment. Professional development roles are creating services that will be used by internal customers [how staff or their managers can access or request certain training] and external customers [how training providers can submit proposals to collaborations, etc.]. In recruitment, hiring managers need use the processes that are in place to open a role to the public, but also the recruiter needs to field questions from outside the organisation and the external stakeholder needs to be able to easily navigate the application process. Not A ‘One and Done’ The purposeful design of services and products is what will make sure that you have the best chance of becoming essential to your customers and users. Purposeful design begins with research. Deep, methodical research that can be refined, replicated and impactful. Research is also not something that you can do once or become complacent about. It is important to make sure that you are always gathering some feedback in order to refine and respond to new trends and needs. This valuable edge will give you the understanding of what it will take to continually be solving your customer’s problems. And solving a real problem is the reason you will be successful. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. With a Bachelor’s from Canada, a Master’s degree from Sweden, an MBA in Service Innovation & Design from Laurea, and her AmO from Haaga-Helia, she is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. Don’t be surprised if she knocks on your door to talk about learning co-creation methods through intensive learning experiences.

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