Entrepreneurship and Innovation Education

3From Vision to Business Plan

I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew) Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling, The Elephant’s Child

There is a plethora of business plan templates available for download on the Internet. Most of them have in common the fact that they involve a description of market trends, organizational structure and financial objectives, usually in that order. The structure below is the one we use with our entrepreneurship students.

The first part of a business plan is the executive summary, which is meant to be read by stakeholders in just a few minutes to give them an overview of the plan and convince them to read it fully. It is followed by a contextualization of the idea and the vision, how they evolved and why the proponents of the business plan are the right people to exploit and explore them. Some schools require students to create a literature review after the context, to make sure they know how to research the key concepts surrounding this business domain and industry.

With or without a literature review, every business plan should contain a market analysis, which consists of identifying opportunities and threats in the external environment, then defining a segmentation, targeting and positioning strategy based on these external factors beyond the control of the entrepreneur.

Once the positioning and target are clearly defined (and only then), entrepreneurs can adapt their marketing plan accordingly ...