The Entrepreneurial Process: Competition and Market Share

While BVC's topic is Sustainable Development, the pillar of committee is success within the entrepreneurial system, a tall task with a seemingly endless amount of factors and considerations.

Although generating your own complete business model and plan for development may be daunting as delegates, there are several key elements that are commonplace within enterprise.

Beginning in the very first step of the entrepreneurial process, with ideation, it is important to know exactly what the VALUE PROPOSITION of your good or service is. That is, the exact reason why anyone would ever need or want what you're providing. After figuring out what it is you're providing, the next step is convincing others that it's worth having, and more so, how to get others to buy your product over anything else similar.

This is where the tools of SWOT and conducting competitive analyses are incredibly helpful and insightful. SWOT is a comparative framework that stands for Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths, being what your product does well. Weakness being what it falters on. Opportunities are chances to capitalize on a niche or need that is not currently being filled, and threats being other products that may seize those opportunities. A competitive analysis is an overview of the landscape of products that may be relevant in competition with, and thus antagonizing your profitability. Some important details to note in doing a competitive analysis may be market share and market cap, industry size, age and maturity of industry, and potential cultural, social and political factors that may affect your product's desirability.

I hope that this blog post has given you little more insight into the entrepreneurial process, and we look forward to seeing you all in March.

Regards,
Alexander