The Enterprise Challenge: A Platform to Bring Market Knowledge to the Table

Last Saturday, we had our third Workshop for the Enterprise Challenge with Charlie Curtis. The theme for this workshop was “Pivot and Present”.

In the first part of the workshop we reviewed the competitors existing in the market for some of our enterprises, the Hollywood Pitch feedback from the previous session, and the feedback that we received from our potential customers. These three steps provided the perfect background to learning about; how to innovate the business model for each of our ventures, and how to pivot, challenge and enhance the venture.

Brainstorming 101.

Once we had established the different reasons that may drive us to pivot our venture, we analysed how to increase evidence that people will buy what we are selling. To do this, we needed a vision about empathy and about who our customers are, and how they live their lives. We also needed to analyse the needs and pain points in the area of the product or service that we were wanting to provide. This enables us to understand the value proposition of the offer, see how real customers respond to it, and establish what features they like about the venture.

Later in the session, we talked about the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), which is the early version of a product, which is developed with just the minimal features that are required to satisfy early customers. We created MVPs for each of our ventures. During this exercise, we also discussed ways to pivot our ventures based on scale and impact and drew up internal business models to get a better sense of the market sizes we were addressing.

The most interesting part of the workshop was the explanation of the different examples of business and operating models such as; franchise, subscription, cooperative ownership, microfinance crowdfunding, etc.

The Enterprise Challenge is an opportunity for us to learn about business and entrepreneurship. Weidenfeld-Hoffmann scholars come from different backgrounds and this is an opportunity for a person in any field of knowledge, to understand how businesses and markets operate. Learning about entrepreneurship gives us key skills and knowledge to make a real change in a world where some of the wealthiest entities are no longer countries, but companies.

Bringing together people from all walks of life and having them work collaboratively towards one objective is the essence of the Enterprise Challenge. Intelligent people with brilliant backgrounds and promising futures need the right tools and training to generate a sustainable impact in the world, and the Enterprise Challenge is just the programme for this.