In class, when we teach discovery driven planning, we also show how you can use software tools to make the whole process easier. For those of you who would like to experiment with the tools, they are available for downloading at the Triad Associates web-site. Among the tools are calculators for a mini-NPV analysis, software…
Discovery Driven Planning
Discovery Driven Planning makes the intuitions of entrepreneurs explicit
Browsing through this month’s edition of Inc. magazine, I came across a column by Norm Brodsky on the advice he gave to a young entrepreneur. The guy’s business concept was interesting. He imports dirt from the Holy Land in the hopes of selling it in the US. Apparently it is traditional at funerals to sprinkle…
Discovery Driven Planning: Identifying Key Metrics
The skeleton of a discovery driven plan has to do with the key metrics that you use to make assumptions, and which drive the relationships among the elements featured in your plan. It is often difficult, though, for aspiring entrepreneurs to come up with relevant key metrics. In a really new business (think the early…
Discovery Driven Planning: Getting started and a dog-walking example
To develop a discovery driven plan, you’ll proceed through five interlinked steps. These are: Start with a compelling outcome – meaning, know what would make the investment worthwhile Benchmark your ideas against market demand and competitive offers Define the operational specifications for how the business will work, operationally, including defining your unit of business Describe…
Discovery Driven Planning: Different from conventional planning
Discovery Driven Planning was developed because years of research showed that companies using conventional planning methods to invest in new opportunities were systematically failing. When we researched the reasons, we found that conventional planning leads to systematically poor decision-making in a new venture, or other uncertain situation. With a conventional plan, projections are made based…
The Despair of Entrepreneurship Professors are perennially popular but doomed business ideas
One of the most dreaded aspects of being an entrepreneurship professor are the hundreds of times that students will come up with the same – bad – business concept when tasked with building businesses of their own. A perennial favorite is dog-walking services. Comes up every semester! Now, I don’t have a problem with dogs…
Discovery Driven Planning alive and well and living on Wikipedia
Well, it’s been said that you can find out a lot about just about anything on Wikipedia (although you should always double-check what you’ve found!). It was gratifying therefore to see that Discovery Driven Planning has made it into a Wikipedia article (together with some direct quotes from our original Harvard Business Review article). The…
Is your company unintentionally creating executive blind spots?
One of the nice things about being a very senior executive with a multinational company is that the job comes with perks. Sometimes, however, these perks can have the unintended effect of isolating key decision-makers from the very information they need most. Example: For decades, the top executives at America’s leading automobile manufacturers always drove…