New Venture Lab: Equipping Christian Entrepreneurs

Idea Generation

Question

What is the best way to generate business ideas?

Answer

I would recommend that you first establish your criteria for a successful business:

  1. Personal criteria (your spiritual gifts, your passion to serve others, your abilities, your personality, your experiences, your ideal context (such as lifestyle) and your resources);
  2. Spiritual criteria (God-honoring business concept, value-added product or service, product or service that does not cause anyone to stumble, product or service that promotes increase, work environment consistent with employees God-ordained role); and
  3. Business criteria (industry, operational, financial, product and customer criteria). 

(See our Venture Analysis as for a way to help you analyze a business idea.)

Then, once you've established your criteria, identify various unmet needs, products and services to serve those unmet needs and identify various product and service platforms that deliver the necessary products or services to serve those unmet needs. 

Now you can evaluate your ideas against your pre-determined evaluation criteria, which will be your guide as to which business opportunities to pursue and which ones to abandon.  See the PowerPoint presentation in this section for more information.

The most powerful ideas will leverage as many of your skills and as much of your character, experience and giftings as possible and will be in the context in which you are the most comfortable and familiar.


Joseph Manion September 13, 2007

One assignment that we were asked to do as interns was to create a personal profile using information from our lives to fill out a framework to put business ideas through. The purpose is to help us eliminate ideas that are not ideal according to our profile. Completing this exercise really helped me to determine and write out my personal criteria.

Paul Ramsek October 17, 2007

In determing an unmet need: There are problems in all industries and sometimes those problems can be opportunities to make a solution for that employer whereby someone can be an intrapreneur. But be careful, those solutions maybe rejected because it can go against the status quo or even worse "waste" can actually be a tax benefit for an oligolopy. Thus, it would be better if you would research on how a system can be made through researching what specialty sciences, technologies, tools and specialists maybe involved. Also look into company alliances and what that may entail. The above comment would actually be in creating a technology company that can commercialize even unto developing new business models and entering into the market as a new player.
Please comment on this. Thank you.

Wade Myers October 17, 2007

Paul:

Please see my Q&A post in this section titled "Discovering a Customer's Unmet Needs" for more on this topic. As for "intrapreneurial" opportunities, see the VentureProfile titled "Former Ministry Worker Starts an Educational Coaching Business That Has Grown Into a Workforce of 20+" for the story of an intrapreneur that started a company within a company.

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