Like people always say “Time flies so fast”, now it already passed through the end of the Design Thinking & Entrepreneurship in Practice class. It was over 7 months for the whole class. For me, it seems too soon to end this journey. Even though the business practices already ended up, yet it is the starting point to apply and adapt overall holistic business issues for real life in the future. After finished studying all modules, I would say it is the most productive class from my entire Master degree experiences. The Entrepreneur practices prepared me to become promptly for the real business situations that learning theory from the class and self- studying from the textbook cannot provide its value as the experiences of “Learning by doing”. The practical business activities taught me not only the way to apply the knowledge into practices but also, the special skills, attributes that are required as a critical concerns to individual for being a successful entrepreneur such as creative thinking skills, leadership skills, and communication skills. However, from both overall experiences I achieved, they recognised me that to build a new creative business in which can survive among the competitive environment, there are several components to be considered and it can be divided into 5 main key points consists of the ideas of products or services, The teamwork and collaboration function, the trait and practice to overcome business success ,and the marketing ,branding and networking.
The first essential resources to start business are the ideas of products or services and the right people to work for those. Having the right colleagues that can support and implement each others in terms of individual expertise skills and have the chemical match tends to be the perfect start. Since the class asked us to group in supportive function that everyone had to identify their role by self-evaluated on their strongest skills then, forming with the others who have different roles. I think the total differentiate can create the great combination that everyone can actually assist each others in every process of work. Fortunately, my group comprises of people who have vary unique background so we can specify and manage the role of each one clearly. Based on Amabile (1998) states group work feature is fundamental for every business since it’s the inevitable thing to work with many people nowadays. The more diversity in group means the more creative thinking will be brought up among the work context, yet the chemical match on attitudes and personalities is required in some cases. Sometimes working with the one who think in the same direction can heighten the creative and accelerate the flow work on the other hand, the dissimilar ideas that are shared among group discussion can expand the ideas of work as well. I’m so glad to say about the attitudes and personalities of members in my group get along very well and we also open-minded enough to share our point of views for the good of our group work. After, making sure that you have the good team, the next challenge is finding the products you are going to sell. For my group we took over one and a half months to find our best product or a service which is regards as the hardest part of the project. The lessons we learnt from this step is it is the time to be creative, well-researching, and open-minded. Think inside and outside the box also, research on current situations on market are the highlight for adding values to products and services. According to the Management and Creativity by Bilton (2007) pinpoints that creative is the ideas that novelty and useful so it is critical means for most organisation to take creativity into account of its business strategy, Combined with the great deal of changes and fast shifting of the advance technology in this era, how to cope with changes is very important to survive. Our group kept these two concepts in mind, we tried to find the most creative products and services that fresh, functional and suitable with the world situations. Finally, we discovered the right products. We decided to develop a black ugly square QR code into the colorful, stylish, and customised QR code stickers. It seems too simple if people say it is just selling stickers, but for our business, the stickers function would be the prior value since we concerned that in present days, people are trapped in the world of overwhelming information. Business people encounter many problems when they have to exchange their business cards, and it is time consuming and not smart. Instead of to reprint the new card that provides QR code, the function of stickers can save the money on that reason because our customers can put the stickers everywhere they want. As the top purpose of QR code that is built to facilitate users in order to dealing with these difficulties along with the ideas that stickers offer the best feature in its flexibility. It ensure that our business delivery the best products to our customers.
When the final decision of products is approved, as a marketer I have to identify the target customers so that we can reach through the targets appropriately. It is true that “customers is the heart of business”, we have to understand the demand of them and design the products to meet their needs. Anonymous (2009) on Morebusiness.com points out that market research is some kinds of fundament practice for receiving the perception and feedback from customers. Effienciency market research’s results will hint business the right ways to overcome customer’s heart and can maximise the sales number too. In consequence, our group tried to do as much as we could by both primary research and secondary research which gave abundant of useful information to design and develop our business. All of member mutually agreed that we should use our QR products as marketing tools and we mainly spotted on online medium such as social networks because we think it reflect the identity of our products. But some questions popped up, How we are going to make our business become outstanding than other in this kind of medium? Fell (2012) suggests the beneficial tips to managing social media, the potential one I applied in my practice was posting our business inputs in the best time slots that the author reports. I did it on every social media vehicles from Facebook, Twitter to Tumblr which I think it gave the satisfied results in terms of feedback from customers and catching the eyes of online community we aimed to access. The article also recommends another resource, it is 1 minutes clip about “Strategy to create social network content” (Belicove, 2012). Despite it is really short but it cover all the best elements to accomplish on create a blast on social media; position the brand ,target audience, create persona and choose the most effective social network platform. I would say these four aspects are repeated in my mind again and again which I considered it is good for me that I always remembered the underlined points on marketing. The persona aspects lesson that our teacher taught in class and from this clip, we put it on the advertising video, try to give most concise concept to our customers which is business people who normally use Smartphone. The comments on advertising clip were really goods even something need to be improved yet it encouraged each team member to put more energy on the work.
In addition, I found the article “Strategies for success” (Richard Branson, 2012), it provides nine advices for all around concerns on business that seems very useful. One particular advice that our team members’ mindsets is about branding which Branson suggests brands (and logo) is the first obvious things customers will perceive therefore giving the meaning of brands and clarify them to customers are smart action. Unless if you don’t do, it means you give it away for your competitors to exploit your advantages.
As mentioned before that each of member in our business teams are taking a leading role of our own function. For me it means we have to lead other members when it comes to the task we take care of. I have a chance to study the concept of “Transformation leadership” (Bass, 1990 cited by Barr, 2011), It gave the practical key ideas to be effective leaders such as the required traits to foster other co-workers.
For all experiences by myself and group work, we had around 3 months to build our business and then the time to promote our brand in physical events comes. I and my group attended to every trade fairs that are compulsory. Each time we showed up, it gave different experiences and feelings to me. The first trade fair in Kingston University, I was extremely nervous and excited, however it gain better results than I expected. The second fair was in open market in Kingston town, this time totally challenged us due to there was no equipments and facilities that support our products so we had to change the sell strategy. This happen instructs our team to be more adaptive and flexible. Although we didn’t gain as high volume of sales as former fair, we experienced to deal with changes and constraints. The last performance on business team practices “The Dragon Den” was toughest task; our team put extreme efforts dedicated to this presentation. Since it is genuine collaborating that requires such a lot of well prepared, I made a lot of study by watching from existing examples “the real dragon den show” As posted on my blogs about Levi Root’s reggae sauce and his well presentation, it confirms me that business is also another form of art.
Besides, the blogging activities urged me to be more active in habit of searching new information and knowledge, it made me more eager to find the answers about things which I assume it is all benefit to myself. And it really support the lifelong learning concept as Candy (2010) states about the effective bloggers means they are a lifelong learner, the more they curious about new things and keep find out for information and knowledge the more your brain are active. She also adds that eagerness for learning does not set the blog become successful but it represent how happy and quality of the bloggers. The benefits of blog can be applied into marketing strategy like Baer (2012) suggest 6 lifelong practices on how to use blog as a marketing tools which I concerned that in this digital and internet ages, people spend most of their times online channel, it is a new rule to deeply understand the correct way to generate information as well as wisely perceive it at the same time. As the unavoidance stream of digitalisation, I accidentally run into the article by Bamforth (2012) who explains complicated ideas of the links between social media, convergence, and consumerisation to easy understand meaning. He illustrate the effective ways to deals which these too much emerging technology and make life easier with it. For me, writing blog as self diary helps person thinks more critical and more open-minded. Moreover, the sharing posts create the strong sustainable knowledge community as well.
To sum up, this entrepreneur class enhanced me to become more ready for my real life business goal. As I aims to have my own apparel brands, overall learning skills I got from the class and reality practices instructed me to be able to cope with all around business issues that I will encounter in the future life. The suggestions and comments, also the challenges and difficulties I faced, they made me feel more confident and fearless to start growing my own business path which I always worried before. Nevertheless, one more precious thing I got would be getting many good friends that even the class already finished, but not for long -lasting friendships.
(Word count: 1995)
References.
– Amabile, T. (1998) How to kill creativity. Available at http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/11444_02_Henry_Ch02.pdf (Accessed: 2 December 2011).
– Anonymous (2009) Why is Market Research Useful? The Importance of Market Research. Available at http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/management/Market-Research.brc (Accessed: 3 December 2012).
– Baer, J. (2012) The 6 Lifelong Laws of Content Marketing for Agencies. Available at http://www.convinceandconvert.com/blogging-and-content-creation/the-6-lifelong-laws-of-content-marketing-for-agencies/ (Accessed: 17 May 2012).
– Bamforth, R. (2012) Convergence, Social Media And Consumerisation Have Complicated Work. Available at: http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/convergence-social-media-and-consumerisation-have-complicated-work/ (Accessed: 22 April 2012).
– Barr, N. (2011) Does cuisine has a place in the Creative Economy and what role does Creative Leadership play in its production? Available at: http://macedefence.wordpress.com/ (Accessed: 30 March 2012).
– Belicove, M. (2012) How to Create a Social Media Content Strategy. Available at: http://www.entrepreneur.com/video/223199 (Accessed: 14 February 2012).
– Bilton, C. (2007) Management and creativity. Oxford: Blackwell. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Management-Creativity-From-Creative-Industries/dp/1405119969)
– Branson, R. (2012) Richard Branson on Strategies for Success. Available at http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/220789 (Accessed: 28 January 2012).
– Candy, A. (2010) The 8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers. Available at http://www.copyblogger.com/effective-blog-habits/ (Accessed: 18 May 2012).
– Fell, J. (2012) Finding the Best Time to Post to Social Networks. Available at http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/223569 (Accessed: 12 February 2012).
salythanaporn 