9 puntos para referendar un proyecto emprendedor

En la Hardvard Business Review, Scott Anthony ha publicado un artículo que quizá os pueda interesar. Apunta 9 ítems para referendar un proyecto innovador:

1. Talk to a prospective customer to get their perspective. Remember, that is likely to be different from your perspective. And friends and family members could as prospective customers. My sister rightly pointed out that talking to a single customer felt a bit random, but "it is one more than I have now."
2. Go to where prospective customers might hang out and watch them for an hour. In my sister's case, that would entail watching mothers in a coffee shop or as they run through daily errands. Write down things that you didn't expect to see. Think about how that might influence your idea.
3. Research an analogy. Who did something similar? What can you find out about how well that worked from public sources? Remember, a failure doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, if you can understand why the failure happened.
4. Talk to someone who you think has good innovation instincts but isn't involved in the day-to-day grind of your operations. Ask what that person would do. My sister asked me and HBR blogger Whitney Johnson.
5. Begin to network toward an expert. If you could talk to three people in the world about your question, who would they be? Who in your network might be in their networks? People love to talk about their areas of expertise. My sister connected with a parenting expert who helped her formulate a range of specific questions to ask the publisher.
6. Visualize it. What would the thing look like? Create a sketch or mockup to bring the idea to life. For example, consider a six-panel storyboard (like a cartoon) that describes how people find out about, obtain, and then use your product or service. Visualization sometimes helps you understand your idea more concretely. Even more importantly, it gives you something you can share with people to get their feedback.
7. Do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Not a super-complicated one. Just one with three or four variables that help you understand what conceivably would have to be true for the idea to make sense. This exercise helped my sister understand the economic potential of the idea.
8. Conduct a broader assumption identification exercise. That sounds like a mouthful, but this is really nothing more than asking yourself "what would need to be true" for this idea to be viable. Which of those assumptions makes you worried? Can you address them using any of the techniques here? Usually this goes along with number seven. My sister felt that the most critical assumption was the percent of new sales that are truly new, versus "trade downs" of potential high-priced sales.
9. Spend an hour conducting a past pattern exercise. That is, look back at things you have done that have worked, and things that haven't worked. What separates them? For my sister, for example, factors could be things like "every time I am skeptical it doesn't work" or "things that person X says are crazy are in fact crazy." Once you have the list, how the current idea stacks up?

 El link al artículo original, lo podéis encontrar aquí.