How To Put Idea To Implementation

WPI Venture Forum is a really extraordinary activity for our School of Business students. The topic of this Venture Form is “An idea, what’s next?” The main speech is provided by Prof. Sturtevant from MIT, who is a co-founder at project 11. He had many practical experiences turning ideas into realities. I am very impressed by his elaboration of the steps an entrepreneur should take after generating an idea:

i.                     Have hope

ii.                   Turn hope into evidence

iii.                  Build a business model canvas

iv.                 Generate a value flow model, and make a list of assumptions

v.                   Make hypotheses of your plan

vi.                 Test and measure the hypotheses

vii.                Keep track of the hard questions

The most impressive part of his keynote is the hypotheses part – he spent quarter of his time on this section. Prof. Sturtevant took four companies as examples; they are PACT, Zagster, and Fashion Project. He illustrated how those companies made hypotheses for their business plan and assumptions as well as the way they tested the hypotheses. Those real cases are really helpful for further understanding of how to turn a business idea into real.

Following the lecture, there was a case illustration presented by InfoBionic. It is a newly founded medical device company. Moreover, the medical device manufactured by this company also related to IT field – they also develop information technology, but focus on healthcare. InfoBionic invent three main products for patients to monitor their arrhythmia through using could technology. This characteristic makes the company complicated and hard to identify the value proposition at first place. However, the bright side is that the gap that InfoBionic filled is innovative and unprecedented.

Those keynote and case illustration remind me of one of the courses I took last year, which was called ETR500. We used the text book “Entrepreneurship for Scientists and Engineers”. This course elaborated how to successfully start up a business for entrepreneurs, especially in technology field. From what I have heard and read, applying for a patent is one of the most important steps during doing a new business. Also, someone asked how to do the initial research for a new business, and one of the guest speakers mentioned that networking is very important – since it can bring you to a larger audience once you know some people. In my point of view, the events such as WPI Venture Forum are great ways for us to networking and know more business people.