What New Business Development Is

Foundations of Business Development - NIT Northern Institute of Technology / TUHH, Hamburg · part of my Technology Management MBA · study notes for revision.

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This first chapter sets the frame for the whole module: what “new business development” actually is, who does it, and the rough process that turns a spark of an idea into a working business. Everything later - opportunities, ideas, customer value, strategy - hangs on the simple definition we start with.

Tip

The definition to hold on to: entrepreneurship = opportunity recognition + opportunity exploitation. First you spot a valuable opportunity; then you do something about it. Part A of the course is mostly the first half; Part B is mostly the second. Miss either and there’s no business.

1 · What is entrepreneurship?

Two classic definitions capture the two faces of it:

• Peter Drucker: “The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.” - entrepreneurship is a response to change.
• Joseph Schumpeter: entrepreneurs are the source of “creative destruction” - the churn by which new offerings displace old ones and drive the economy forward.

Put together: the world keeps changing (technology, regulation, tastes, shocks like a pandemic), and every change quietly closes some businesses while opening others. The entrepreneur is the person who notices and acts.

Note

The boiling-frog problem. The changes that threaten today’s business and create tomorrow’s often arrive slowly and incrementally, so they’re easy to miss - like the frog that doesn’t notice the water heating up. Part of the entrepreneurial skill is reading weak signals early, before they’re obvious to everyone.

2 · It’s not only about founding a start-up

A common misconception is that “entrepreneurship” means quitting your job to found a start-up. In fact, new businesses get built in two settings - and the skills largely transfer:

Entrepreneur outside established firms

• Pursues a brand-new business idea
• Writes a business plan; raises venture capital or loans
• Matches the opportunity to their own know-how and skills
• Founds and runs a start-up

Intrapreneur inside established firms

• Pursues ideas that expand or reinvent the existing business
• Builds a business case; wins a project budget
• Matches the opportunity to the firm’s core competencies
• Leads an innovation or new-business project

Two homes for new business creation. Famous “intrapreneurial” examples: Post-it notes (3M), the PlayStation (Sony), and the Like button (Facebook) - all born inside big companies.

The through-line: whether you’re a founder or an intrapreneur, the job is the same - recognise a business opportunity, match it to the resources you can command, and exploit it.

3 · The process: from idea to venture

New business development isn’t a lightning bolt of genius; it’s a disciplined process. Two well-known models say much the same thing in a slightly different order:

Stage	Bill Aulet - Disciplined Entrepreneurship	Grichnik et al. - Startup Navigator
Understand	Market analysis: potential and target customer	Problem, customer analysis, solution concept
Design	Problem & value proposition, customer research, competitive analysis	Design and “pretotyping”; value proposition, competitive & market analysis
Plan	Sales plan, revenue model, financial analysis	Development plan, resources, partnering
Build & scale	Design/pretotype → scaling and growth	Marketing & sales, financial planning, scaling and growth

Tip

“Pretotyping”, not just prototyping. Before you build the thing (a prototype), test whether anyone wants it with the cheapest possible stand-in (a “pretotype”) - a landing page, a mock-up, a fake button. It’s the theme that returns in the final chapter on experimentation: buy evidence before you spend on building.

4 · What this module covers

The rest of the course follows the natural order of building a business:

Recognise the opportunityinnovation, sources, ideas

↓

Understand the value & marketcustomer value, market research

↓

Make the strategic choicescustomers, tech, competition, identity

↓

Go to market & learnthe four strategies, experimentation

The path through the module - each stage is a chapter (or two), building from a raw opportunity to a tested go-to-market strategy.

Revision summary

Tip

The one-minute recap

• Entrepreneurship = opportunity recognition + opportunity exploitation. Spot a valuable change, then act on it.
• Drucker: the entrepreneur searches for, responds to and exploits change. Schumpeter: entrepreneurs drive creative destruction. Watch for slow, boiling-frog changes.
• New business is built by entrepreneurs (outside established firms - start-ups, business plans, VC) and intrapreneurs (inside them - business cases, project budgets, core competencies). Same core job.
• It’s a disciplined process (Aulet, Startup Navigator): understand → design → plan → build & scale. Test cheaply (“pretotype”) before you build.

Next: Innovativeness & Opposition to Innovation → - how new an idea is, and why people resist it.