As we're nearing the final assessment for the first part of the ADE, and have to submit a "knowledge application portfolio", I thought I would formulate my business idea here in this blog as well.
I actually have quite a few projects I am working on simultaneously:
- Consulting business – this is the ultimate source of income for me. I do product management & marketing consultancy for telecoms. As much as I like telecom business I'm rather tired of it, and I'm especially tired of having to work on several projects at the same time, so I'm really trying to make the consulting part obsolete by making more money on other ventures.
- Mobile TV – this is effectively the most developed startup I currently have. The original idea was to produce "made for mobile" TV content. Then, as we realized there was actually no real mobile TV market, we decided to start a mobile TV service, but instead of focusing on the technology side of the business (i.e. shrinking traditional TV content to fit small screens) we decided to focus on the product & marketing side and create a product that would be useful for customers (all the existing mobile TV attempts are not), and be customer-centric as opposed to technology-centric. We've been looking for a good technology partner, and found even more than that – we were lucky to find a company that has a very similar business approach (though they are very technical anyway), so now instead of creating the service from scratch we will be sourcing content for them. This would let us minimize the original investment (everything is financed from the "consulting" income) as we don't have to do branding, marketing, advertising, money collection, etc. ourselves and see the state of the market. We're really focusing on the bottom line here, so cash-cash-cash is all we're thinking about. The project is not really interesting or innovative anymore, because instead of creating a product we're just effectively re-selling the content. Applying fresh ADE knowledge – this is pure effectuation (search for Sarasvathy, Saras D. CAUSATION AND EFFECTUATION: TOWARD A THEORETICAL SHIFT FROM ECONOMIC INEVITABILITY TO ENTREPRENEURIAL CONTINGENCY. Academy of Management Review; Apr2001, Vol. 26 Issue 2, p243-263) – we're heavily relying on contingencies here (actually relying on contingencies might sound strange, but it has worked for us so far), and trying to use the opportunities and the resources we have to build something we can't yet imagine. Finding a technology partner has been a very lucky chance, and the change in business model really developed after that.
- Mobile Book Reader – an application for mobile devices (first of all, Symbian phones) to search for, download and read e-books and other e-texts. We're finishing the first version of the app in a week. This is not really a project, but rather a playground. eBooks are a blazing-hot topic these days, and I noticed that the Symbian end of the market was missing a decent ebook app and service. Besides, I'm a Symbian phone user myself. So I'm looking for contingencies here as well, but in order to be prepared and to stimulate my lucky chance I decided to start working on the topic, and have an application ready. So I'll keep fiddling around with it (maybe 5%-10% of my total work time) to see if anything comes out of it.
- iWeekend – the thing I'm starting to focus on. Originally iWeekend was a 3-day event where a bunch of geeks got together to create a project over the weekend – a complete project from scratch – from the idea to prototype + business model + presentation + business plan and everything else you would want from a startup. We've had one event in Moscow in October, and realized there was clearly the demand for it. So I'll be expanding this idea from now on. I already have a draft concept that I'll be developing and implementing. A more detailed post is to follow.
I will use iWeekend as a foundation for the assignment, because it is "double-useful" – iWeekend is an entrepreneurial venture itself, but I will also be using some of the concepts learnt at the ADE inside iWeekend itself – the incentive aims at developing entrepreneurship and innovative culture in Russia, so the synergies are quite obvious.
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