Some brief reflections on the New Venture business-plan competition
After completing a previous business development project just a few days ago, I immediately “ventured” onto my next challenge, writing a business proposal for the first stage of the New Venture competition. To those that don’t know it, it is one of the largest of such competitions in Europe, builds on top of a methodology developed by McKinsey, and exposes your plan to a number of experts (financial or otherwise) that provide you with feedback and coach you through the next two stages: the feasibility study and the final business-plan.
The requirements for this first stage were to present a 2-page max document, which includes:
- The name
- Describing the idea
- Describing its innovativeness
- Describing the market
- Describing how you will make money
I actually started collecting data on the market and how to build the product about a month ago, as the market was similar to my previous project (though there is no conflict!). These last two days, I spent writing this thing full-time, minus some blogging here and twittering there, of course (in retrospect, I should’ve written something about it before the current deadline passed—it ends sometime today. Sorry about that!).
I went a little overboard, I think, splitting the idea into three components: the product, the underlying technology, and the organisation; translating “innovativeness” into competitive advantage; splitting market into target audience and competitive landscape; and proposing a number of parallel trajectories towards making money. I really maxed out those two pages and hope it wasn’t all too wordy.
What did I learn? Nothing on its effectiveness yet! But that it is a. very difficult to put an idea into simple words that everyone would understand it—my father doesn’t get it at all, for instance. And b. it really forces you to rationalise your thinking into concrete steps. “Does the idea make sense?” was a question that I constantly kept asking myself.
I don’t expect to win this competition, but as with all things, if you don’t try, you certainly don’t fail, and you most certainly don’t succeed. Wish me luck! More when I get the feedback!
Vincent
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I guess this is the same competition that is known in Nordics as Venture Cup? http://web.venturecup.fi/index.php?id=173
I went once to the seminars couple of years ago because there were interesting speakers. Haven’t yet assembled a team or come up with an idea, though.
Good luck with your business plan!
Yeah, it looks like it uses the same McKinsey-format.
You can also enter New Venture as an individual—maybe because Dutch people are so individualistic, I don’t know
. But one of your team-members has to be a Dutch citizen.
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