ENTP 1020 Entrepreneurship and the Scientific Method
Professor: Donna Root CEO of JiggaBot
Putting the Scientific Method to use by setting milestones
ENTP 1020 is based around putting the scientific method into practice. We were able to choose any type of company or product to start. This class is based around milestones that are completed throughout the process of validating and creating a business/ product. These milestones included, talking with others that may be interested in the idea/concept. This was apart of the validation process, would these people use the product or service, if not, why? Milestone two was to gather information and recourses that may be needed to start. These resources may include personnel, physical goods or intellectual knowledge. Milestones 3-7 included, forming a hypothesis, experimenting, analyzing data, interpreting data results and publishing these results. The end product is a business plan and executive summary that the group can choose to pursue further or drop the concept entirely. If the group continues to pursue the company they are exposed to all of the recourses that are available to students. Most students do not realize that there are endless free resources available to them as a student. During the research part of things there can be a change of heart on the group and this can result in what we called a pivot.
I was apart of a group that was able to become very good at pivoting from company to company and idea to idea. We originally started with a crowed funding managing service where we would help new startups create a campaign on any of the crowed funding platforms. By the end of the class we had pivoted about 7 times and landed on an idea of prototyping a longboard that is 7 feet long. Normal longboards are 3-5 feet long. This board is supposed to resemble surfing on land so that the surfing market doesn't just have to be near the ocean. The surfing market is projected to reach $13.2 billion; if we were able to tap into a portion of that market along the coasts of the world along with inland cities our market share could reach .01% of the market, resulting in $1.3 million in sales. But as I talked about earlier we were master pivoters, we constantly made changes. While we were testing our prototype we had another pivot that made our product more versatile. We were able to put four people on our board and turn it into a bobsled as we went down campus. This pivot would not have happened if we were not in the right environment, but thankfully this course was over fall break when the number of people on campus is very minimal. We had all of the sidewalks to our selves with the occasional maintenance worker staring at us trying to figure out what we were doing. The moral of this story is mastering pivoting, without pivoting many businesses would not be thriving today. Having the ability to change and adapt is essential to business in todays society, humans love change in some aspects if it creates more value for them.