Foundations of Business Development - NIT Northern Institute of Technology / TUHH, Hamburg · part of my Technology Management MBA · study notes for revision.
This module is about how a new business actually comes to be - whether that’s a start-up or a new venture inside an established company. It runs the full arc: from spotting an opportunity, through generating and evaluating ideas and nailing the customer value, to the hard strategic choices every young venture has to make about who to serve, how to compete, and whom to work with.
The heart of it is a simple but powerful idea: entrepreneurship is opportunity recognition + opportunity exploitation. The first half of the course is mostly about recognising and shaping the opportunity; the second half - the Entrepreneurial Strategy framework - is about choosing how to go to market when you can’t do everything at once.
These are study notes for revision: each framework explained plainly, with the cases (Andrea Kaneb, Lytro, Rent the Runway…) used to make the ideas concrete.
1 · What New Business Development Is
Entrepreneurship as opportunity recognition and exploitation; Drucker and Schumpeter’s “creative destruction”; the entrepreneur vs the intrapreneur; and the disciplined processes (Aulet, the Startup Navigator) that turn an idea into a venture.
2 · Innovativeness & Opposition
The dimensions and consequences of how innovative an idea is - and why people and organisations push back. The reasons for resistance to innovation, the measures to overcome it, and stakeholder analysis.
3 · Recognising Opportunities
Where opportunities actually come from, how to leverage your technologies and capabilities, and a structured way to map and choose among market opportunities.
4 · Generating & Evaluating Ideas
Getting to good ideas - creativity methods, open innovation and crowdsourcing - and then filtering them: predicting the “innovation killers”, and judging opportunities the way founders and investors do.
5 · Creating Customer Value
What “value” really means to a customer: the types of value, the Jobs-to-be-Done lens, and the Value Proposition Canvas for engineering a tight fit between what customers need and what you offer.
6 · Market Analysis & Customer Research
Sizing the prize and knowing who you serve: market potential, defining a target customer, and the research methods (qualitative and quantitative) that replace assumptions with evidence.
7 · Entrepreneurial Strategy: The Four Choices
Do entrepreneurs even need a strategy? Yes - and it comes down to four linked choices: Customers, Technology, Competition and Identity. Why you can’t optimise all of them at once, and how the choices hang together.
8 · The Four Entrepreneurial Strategies
The Entrepreneurial Strategy Compass: four go-to-market strategies - Intellectual Property, Value Chain, Disruption and Architectural - set by whether you collaborate or compete and whether you win on control or execution, and when each fits.
9 · Strategic Learning & Experimentation
Strategy under deep uncertainty: testing your riskiest assumptions cheaply, running disciplined experiments, deciding when to commit and when to pivot - keeping options open without drifting.