Innovation & New Business Proposal - TUHH Institute of Entrepreneurship & Institute of Innovation Marketing, Hamburg · part of my Technology Management MBA · study notes for revision.
This module is the second stop in the innovation track, and it changes the question. The first module was about finding an opportunity worth pursuing. This one takes an idea that already exists and asks whether it survives contact with reality: is there a market, do customers actually want this, can anyone else do it better, and can we build it and get paid for it? Every team carries its own venture project through the whole semester, so each framework below arrives as a tool to be used rather than as theory to be memorised.
The module opens on a deliberately uncomfortable statistic: most new businesses fail, and they fail mostly for market and customer reasons rather than because the technology proved impossible. Everything afterwards is an answer to that. We built and stress-tested business models, wrote personas and sized markets, ran customer interviews and journey maps, classified features with the Kano model, decomposed preferences with conjoint analysis, translated customer wishes into engineering targets with the House of Quality, mapped competitors, prototyped and pretotyped cheaply to kill bad assumptions early, and finally worked out revenue models, pricing and the engine of growth.
These are study notes for revision. Every chapter ends with a key-terms table, a short self-test with answers, and a one-minute recap. Most carry a worked example or a case from class so the ideas stay attached to something concrete.
1 · Why New Businesses Fail
The map of the module and the reason it exists: the chain of failure, why market and customer reasons dominate, what the module requires in both blocks, the activities behind those requirements, and the four evaluation criteria.
2 · Business Model Innovation
What a business model actually is and how to change one: the Business Model Canvas, the Business Model Navigator with its recurring patterns, the Ten Types of innovation, and why copying a pattern from another industry is a legitimate strategy.
3 · Entrepreneurial Strategy & Pivots
Choosing how to compete: the entrepreneurial strategy compass and its four routes to market, what each one demands, why the choice is hard to reverse, and how to tell a genuine pivot from simply giving up.
4 · Segmentation, Personas & Market Potential
Who exactly is this for, and how many of them are there? Segmentation criteria, building personas that are useful rather than decorative, and sizing a market from the top down and from the bottom up.
5 · Validating the Value Proposition
Turning a claim into evidence: jobs, pains and gains, the value proposition canvas, designing customer interviews that do not lead the witness, and reading what people do rather than what they say.
6 · Customer Journey & Service Blueprinting
Seeing the whole experience: mapping the journey stage by stage with touchpoints, emotions and pain points, then going behind the line of visibility with a service blueprint to see what has to happen backstage.
7 · The Kano Model
Not all features are equal: must-be, one-dimensional and attractive requirements, the questionnaire with its functional and dysfunctional pairs, the evaluation table, and why delighters decay into expectations over time.
8 · Conjoint Analysis
What each attribute is really worth: why asking directly fails, the decomposition logic behind holistic preference judgements, part-worth utilities, relative importance, and the trade-offs customers are actually willing to make.
9 · House of Quality
From the voice of the customer to the voice of the engineer: the rooms of the house, the interrelationship matrix, the roof of technical correlations, the competitive assessment, target values, and the honest limits of the method.
10 · Competitor Analysis & Perceptual Maps
Who else is out there: direct versus indirect competitors and the workaround you keep forgetting, a standard competitor comparison, and perceptual maps for finding the genuinely empty space.
11 · Prototyping Strategy
Learning under uncertainty: where external and internal uncertainty come from, the design perspective across problem and solution space, and why failure has to be built into the plan rather than avoided.
12 · Prototyping Tactics
What to build and how rough: divergence and convergence in problem and solution space, choosing fidelity to match the question, the kinds of prototype, and pretotyping to check you are building the right thing at all.
13 · Revenue Models & Pricing
How the idea makes money: revenue models sorted by who holds title, ancillary revenue, pricing mechanisms and discrimination, why price moves profit more than volume or cost, and how to measure willingness to pay.
14 · Managing Customer Growth
From first customers to a growth engine: problem-solution fit to product-market fit to traction, the paid, sticky and viral engines, the funnel and its metrics, owned, earned and paid channels, and the viral coefficient.