- 1: Course Overview
- 2: Silicon Valley & Key Frameworks
- 3: Creativity & Improvisation
- 4: Venture Lab I -- Sicily Trip
- 5: From Idea to Opportunity 1
- 6: From Idea to Opportunity 2
- 7: Global Marketing and Business Models
- 8: Venture Lab II - Galileo Museum
- 9: Introduction to Venture Resources
- 10: Venture Lab III - Strozzi Museum Field Trip and Social Entrepreneurship
- 11: Venture Lab IV - Leonardo Museum
- 12: Startup Teams
- 13: Financings
- 14: Venture Lab V - Tim Parks
- 15: The Renaissance and Silicon Valley
- 16: Stocks and Options
- 17: OAP Preparations
- 18: OAP Team Presentations
- 19: Course Summary
Opportunity Analysis Project
Assignment
Key Deliverables
Milestones
Suggested Resources
Teams and Photos
Team Formation Deadline. This team will serve as both your study group and your term project team.
Session 3
List of potential ideas for your term project.
Session 8
Initial Positioning Statement. The Entrepreneurial Marketing class session will help you and your team get started in writing your positioning statement. Fill in Geoff Moore's two-sentence positioning template for your OAP product or service concept. The template is:
Sentence #1
For (target customer)
who (statement of the need or opportunity),
the (product/service name) is a (product/service category)
that (statement of benefit).
Sentence #2
Unlike (primary competitive alternative),
our product (statement of primary differentiation).
Create two PowerPoint slides. One slide should simply list the name of your project team with all the team members and their majors. The second slide should have a succinct draft of your positioning statement above. Send via email to the teaching team with your team name clearly identified by 9 AM the day of the session. Also post the slides to your team's website. For extra credit, please share how your potential venture will make meaning and not just money.
Session 10
Revised Positioning Statement. Post an update of your original positioning statement to your website. This should result from feedback and research you have received from sharing it with others such as classmates, friends, customers, users, partners, and others.
Session 16
OAP Dress Rehearsal. Session 16 is dedicated to final preparation including any dress rehearsals of the OAP.
Sessions 17 & 18
OAP Presentations. All teams will present their OAP in Sessions 17 and 18. Presentations are limited to 15 minutes per team including Q&A. Slides should be in standard PowerPoint format, with a recommended maximum of 8 slides per team. The best presentations are often the shortest and most succinct. A summary at the end of the presentation is often very powerful.
Teams must post their slides to their website (in either PDF or .ppt format) and the homework list (in .ppt format) by Noon before Session 18. This will give the teaching team time to assemble all the files onto a single laptop to facilitate presentations. No updates to decks are allowed after Noon.
Session 19
Written OAP reports. Post your OAP written report (up to 1500 words) to your team website and email it the instructors via the email list by Noon. Your team is strongly encouraged to keep your written analysis to 1500 words, as this is a good opportunity to learn how to be succinct in business communications.
Also by 10AM, send a confidential email to the instructors via ospflor63-homework with your personal assessment of how to distribute founding shares amongst your team members (including yourself). Assume a total of 100 are available for distribution. Share distribution should be based on completed work and not distributed as if you were actually founding a company.
Suggested Resources
Video Links:
Online at STVP’s Entrepreneurship Corner there is a wealth of film clips of entrepreneurial thought leaders discussing relevant themes. Feel free to scroll through ecorner.stanford.edu for insights and inspiration. The following are just a sample:
Key Deliverables
Milestones
Suggested Resources
Teams and Photos
Assignment
Via the Opportunity Analysis Project (OAP), students will learn how to tell the difference between a good idea in a dorm or a lab and a great scalable business opportunity. You will identify and define a market opportunity and pitch the opportunity to your classmates and the teaching team. Each team will create and maintain a website on which you will present your opportunity analysis and execution project as they evolve. You should post your key deliverables to your website as they become due.Key Deliverables
You and your team should pick an opportunity and perform a first analysis to understand whether your opportunity can be turned into a scalable business. In your presentation and written analysis you should tell the "story" of your proposed venture by addressing as much of the following as possible and appropriate:- Concept and Vision. Where did your idea come from (e.g., a Stanford lab)? Explain what the market opportunity is and what your solution might be. What makes your solution particularly compelling? How does it make meaning and the world a better place? Do you have personal experiences with this market? Is there existing intellectual property that you must license or new intellectual property you must develop in order to pursue this opportunity? Has anyone tried something like this before? If so, why did they fail or succeed, and why is the opportunity still attractive?
- Market Analysis. What industry or sector of the economy are you addressing? Why is this market attractive? What segment of the overall market are you pursuing? What market research data can be gathered to describe this market need? What are the total industry or category sales over the past three years? What is the anticipated growth for this industry? If this is a new market, what is the best analogous market data that illustrates the opportunity? Project the potential market size and growth for your opportunity.
- Customers and Customer Development. This is extremely important. You need to have a clear idea of who your target customer is. The only way for you to be able to do this is to "get out of the building" and speak with your potential customers. You will need to answer questions such as: What does the customer need? Why does the customer need it? What is the customer using today? What is the customer willing to pay for your solution? Why? How will you reach this customer? You should include both primary (or first-hand) research and secondary research, emphasizing primary over secondary.
- Competition and Positioning.
Who else serves this customer need? Who might attempt to serve this
market in the future? What advantages and weaknesses do these
competitors and would-be competitors have? What share of the market do
specific competitors serve? Are the major competitors' sales growing,
declining, or steady? What are the barriers to entry for you? What are
the barriers to entry for additional competitors? How could partners and allies best help you overcome competition from established enterprises or other startups?
- Business Model and Lean Startup Philosophy. Now that you have discovered an opportunity and talked to potential customers, how will you turn it into a business? How will you make money and when do you expect your venture to be profitable? What is the major risk to address right away (e.g., market or technical)? In other words, which hypothesis regarding product or market strategies need to be tested right away?
- Learning and Adaptation (extra credit). What did you learn and how between the time you choose the idea and wrote the first draft of the positioning statement and producing the final written report? Is this idea a true opportunity or not?
We recommend five basic steps in the process of analyzing an opportunity:
- Identify potential opportunities. Combine your own personal experiences and creativity with external forecasts and trend analysis. How is the world changing with respect to new technologies? What is the impact of globalization on current solutions? What new requirements will those changes produce? Recent media articles on trends are often a good place to start. Additionally, you may want to look through Stanford's Office of Technology and Licensing for new technologies that have been developed at the University.
- Define your purpose and objectives. Identify your most promising opportunity, being careful to discriminate between an interesting technological idea and a viable market opportunity. Prepare an outline which will help you to determine what types of data and information you need to demonstrate the attractiveness of your chosen opportunity.
- Gather data from primary sources. It is crucial for you to obtain data from primary sources. Potential investors will place more trust in well conducted primary research than in stacks of data from secondary sources. There is simply no substitute for talking to potential customers from the target market in order to validate the opportunity you have identified. Consequently, we prefer that you spend time gathering data from primary, not just secondary, sources. Check out SurveyMonkey as well.
- Gather data from secondary sources. Countless secondary sources exist on the web and in Stanford's various library resources. The Jackson Library GSB Database Resources and the GSB librarians are especially helpful. Appendix C of the Dorf and Byers textbook offers a good summary of secondary research sources. Try not to get too bogged down in financial and accounting data.
- Analyze and interpret the results. Persuasively summarize your results.
A key success factor for a successful project is the depth of your analysis and what you learned from it. If after careful research you have determined that your business idea is not as promising as you originally thought, it is totally acceptable to present an OAP that describes why your idea will not make sense now rather than why it is the next big thing. An honest, rigorous analysis of an idea that did not survive further scrutiny is preferable to either (a) a half-baked presentation of an idea your team is unsure of, or (b) an enthusiastic job of over selling for your current idea, even though you know it is problematic.
Opportunity Analysis Project Milestones
Session 2Team Formation Deadline. This team will serve as both your study group and your term project team.
Session 3
List of potential ideas for your term project.
Session 8
Initial Positioning Statement. The Entrepreneurial Marketing class session will help you and your team get started in writing your positioning statement. Fill in Geoff Moore's two-sentence positioning template for your OAP product or service concept. The template is:
Sentence #1
For (target customer)
who (statement of the need or opportunity),
the (product/service name) is a (product/service category)
that (statement of benefit).
Sentence #2
Unlike (primary competitive alternative),
our product (statement of primary differentiation).
Create two PowerPoint slides. One slide should simply list the name of your project team with all the team members and their majors. The second slide should have a succinct draft of your positioning statement above. Send via email to the teaching team with your team name clearly identified by 9 AM the day of the session. Also post the slides to your team's website. For extra credit, please share how your potential venture will make meaning and not just money.
Session 10
Revised Positioning Statement. Post an update of your original positioning statement to your website. This should result from feedback and research you have received from sharing it with others such as classmates, friends, customers, users, partners, and others.
Session 16
OAP Dress Rehearsal. Session 16 is dedicated to final preparation including any dress rehearsals of the OAP.
Sessions 17 & 18
OAP Presentations. All teams will present their OAP in Sessions 17 and 18. Presentations are limited to 15 minutes per team including Q&A. Slides should be in standard PowerPoint format, with a recommended maximum of 8 slides per team. The best presentations are often the shortest and most succinct. A summary at the end of the presentation is often very powerful.
Teams must post their slides to their website (in either PDF or .ppt format) and the homework list (in .ppt format) by Noon before Session 18. This will give the teaching team time to assemble all the files onto a single laptop to facilitate presentations. No updates to decks are allowed after Noon.
Session 19
Written OAP reports. Post your OAP written report (up to 1500 words) to your team website and email it the instructors via the email list by Noon. Your team is strongly encouraged to keep your written analysis to 1500 words, as this is a good opportunity to learn how to be succinct in business communications.
Also by 10AM, send a confidential email to the instructors via ospflor63-homework with your personal assessment of how to distribute founding shares amongst your team members (including yourself). Assume a total of 100 are available for distribution. Share distribution should be based on completed work and not distributed as if you were actually founding a company.
Suggested Resources
Video Links:
Online at STVP’s Entrepreneurship Corner there is a wealth of film clips of entrepreneurial thought leaders discussing relevant themes. Feel free to scroll through ecorner.stanford.edu for insights and inspiration. The following are just a sample: