The course ME2062 technology-based entrepreneurship has nearly come to an end. It was a fantastic journey to take this course and develop our project assignments. The course taught us theories about technological entrepreneurship and how to bring a digital product/service to the market.
Business Modelling for an Enterprise
Business modelling is an essential skill for entrepreneurs. Without proper business modelling for a product, an enterprise could fail to deliver the value of the product to the end customers. The theory of business model comes into four dimensions. It defines the value proposition, customer, structure and result for the product in a systematic way. With that, an entrepreneur knows what exactly the product needs to fulfil, who the customers are, how to reach them, how to realise or product the product/service, and most importantly, what the cost and revenue structure of the business are.
Marketing Strategy
Another important lesson I took away from this course is the set of marketing principles. For example, market segmentation, market validation, defining value proposition for marketing purpose, and the 4Ps marketing principles. You can’t create real business success if you can’t sell your product properly. This is why marketing is so important. And yet, it is interesting to learn all of them, because they relate to our everyday life so much that I can always find real life examples for the theories and principles.
Development of a new venture
The most interesting part of this course, I would say, is the group project which requires us to come up with an innovative idea and develop a business plan for it. It was so funny to see all the different ideas proposal by each classmates and how they pitched the idea. I really learnt a lot from them. Within our own group, we went through the process of selecting an idea amongst five different ideas and finally identify the most feasible and innovative one. After that, we set off to discuss and refine the details of the idea, followed by the creating of the pitching video. We put in a lot of efforts in the video since we think in a real life scenario, the success of a pitch will determine the success of your business development since you will get the required funding, support and most importantly, the feedback from your potential investors. Indeed, in the final presentation, the panel judges pointed out several points from a professional perspective that we neglected while pointing out that this was a business idea with great potential.
What I hope to take away from this course
It is quite interesting and fulfilling to see the actual product we developed coming out from this course, at least at a functional level rather than a marketable level. Currently, most of the project ideas are still in the prototyping period. It is good to have a comprehensive business plan for the idea, but implementing it would be a different story. It involves team dynamics, technology development and feasibility assessment. However, I understand that due to the time constraint of this course, this is not possible to do that, but it could be put into a higher level course in technology-based entrepreneurship.
