Business Plans and Such…

The predictable question that I often received from my students in the Technopreneurship class not just this semester, but from the moment the course was introduce was,” Is our idea okay?” or ” Can our product/services be accepted?”.

Well if you’re going to teach Technopreneurship class, you had better be a hard headed SOB, otherwise you aren’t going to get any good business ideas out of this. That is why I am so hard to please with when it comes to approving business plans.I need to be this way to get the best ideas out from my students.

Sometimes you need to put a pressure around an environment to get the best out of them because people tend to make it or break during these session.

Most of the feedback that I’ve received from my class is that because of the lack of knowledge in IT and computers, were the main reasons my students could not bring out the best of ideas from them.

Some of the things that my students didn’t realizes was the fact that they came form a diverse background of education which they did not took advantage off. It starches from pure sciences to arts. Along the way were some business and economic background. This is an opportunity worth looking into. With this diverse group of people, thinking like an entrepreneur, you should pick your team mates amongst this group of students because you will get the most outstanding ideas from all sorts of school of though in which will make the brainstorming session of picking up business ideas more interesting.

So my suggestion would be , to think more outside of the scope of the technology then start narrowing it down to how it can be solve through software or creative applications.

And question number 2, why do we need more technoprenuers instead of just plain ol’ workers , well since I’m in Penang , lets look at the industrial areas here. During these turbulent times these factories and its workers were hit most. The billion dollar question is why? Yes its because the demand for their products declining, but the bigger picture would be , they are not doing creative work. Factories produces end products and sends it to the market, the R&D were done somewhere across the globe. So when demands starts to decline, factories needs to cut down on operational cost which lead to termination of workers and engineers.

But what if they were in a creative industry or in the software making business? These are two high level IT industries which needs an input from creative and dynamic people. No matter what the economic situations are, these small group of people will always thrive, I’ve seen it once in 1999 during the peek of the Internet and I am seeing it again this year during this so called ‘controlled’ recession.

Today I’m going to hit off for a food stall hoping activity before going to the airport.

Ciaow!