Business Purpose

Why will my business exist? What will it aim to achieve?

Instructions

Below you'll find some initial warm up activities to help get your creative ideas flowing. We'll complete these as a class activity.

You will then take time for personal reflection to better understand your values, interests, and frustrations. You'll create a mind-map that will help you to create a business that has meaning and purpose relevant to you.

Outcomes

Understanding of your own interests, values and motivations
Understanding of business mission and purpose statements

Tasks

Class Activity: Business Ideas warm up activities
Classwork: Personal Business Mind Map and Business Ideas
Classwork / Homework: Problem Statements

Warm Up Activities

More often than not, ideas come from our own personal experiences of frustration and annoyance.

Can you think of a time when you were frustrated while trying to do something... is there an idea there? Do other people have the same frustrations?

Initial Activities:

Two Words Business Ideas
Alternative Uses

Some useful tools:

Random Words: https://randomwordgenerator.com/

Business Purpose: Mind Map

Before deciding on our own businesses, it is important we take the time to better understand ourselves.

You will create a mind map along the lines of the one shown here.

This mind map will help you to better understand what is important to you, your values, your interests and your frustrations.

You can see the interactive version of this mind map here:

https://coggle.it/diagram/XNGPzKW0VIlVVZSg/t/me!/ede641a39400afb23082bf108f9684eba007ba16c745659d2f4b8ccee123c135

Orange Level: Questions

Using this model as a guide, you are to create a mind-map for potential areas of interest.

You are to start with the following questions:

What do you care about? What is important to you?
What are you values*? What do you believe in?
What do you like to do with your spare time? What types of activities interest you?
What do you find annoying?
What really "pisses you off"? The things you just can't stand for and are driven to action about?

Purple Level: Answers

Write your answers to these questions. They don't need to be super detailed, but give you enough information to go to the next level.

Values*

What are values?  Values are the ethical principles or behaviour standards, ways of holding yourself to account.  By understanding the principles that you believe in, you can develop a better sense of yourself and how you want to be in the world.

These websites list "core values" that could help you to think about your own:

jamesclear.com/core-values (50 values)

scottjeffrey.com/core-values-list/ (200 values)

threadsculture.com/core-values-examples (500 values)

Blue Level: Why

Once you have created our initial responses to these questions, you need to dig deeper - expand on your answers by exploring what your responses actually mean. What is it you enjoy about those things? Why is that thing annoying? How does that activity make you feel? What do you get out of it?

Green Level: Wordstorm

After you have your answers, you should go through a process of word association. For each point in your mind map, add three to five words that come to mind based on each answer. This is your wordstorm - and helps you to think more deeply about the points you've made. Even better, can you create an additional layer of word responses to each of these words?

What we are trying to do is identify elements that can be pulled together to find an area of interest for you to develop your business idea.

source: LaunchX Handbook

Your mind map may end up looking something like this image.

Creating Links, Creating Businesses

Creating Links: Possible Businesses

Now highlight a few words from your mind map and try to imagine different companies based on the words you chose.

It is important to remember that you are not inventing the product (yet). Instead, you are thinking about the type of company you would start, the mission and purpose for that company (what you want to achieve) and the values behind your company. You should also think about the customers that you might want to serve.

For Example...

Using the mind map example above, you might have come up with:

A business that helps people with autism find career satisfaction
Crowdfunding organic farms with a profits being used to alleviating hunger
Designing logos for non-profit organisations who work with developing nations

Your Company(ies)

Company:

Purpose:

Values:

Customers:

Company:

Purpose:

Values:

Customers:

Company:

Purpose:

Values:

Customers:

Problem Statements

Based on what you've create above, you now need to brainstorm potential ideas.

Firstly, choose an interest area - an industry, product type, experience, etc. What products and activities are already available in this area?

Now look for ways that current customers of the market aren't fully satisfied with the solutions available. What are their frustrations? What are your frustrations with current offerings? What are the unmet needs of these customers?

You should also look for customers who are not currently being served by existing offerings. These are potential customers who may have the same needs, but do not have access to current products. What are the barriers that stop them from using existing products? Is it financial? Technological? Awareness? Skills?

Problem Statements

Now that you have an understanding of the existing issues and products, you should create a series of problem statements to solve with your product or idea.

A problem statement should start with "how might we...":

● How might we make the high school classroom materials more engaging?

● How might we allow education to cater to different learning styles?

● How might we bring students together around interests instead of geography?

Task:

Complete the activities above.

In order for business models to thrive, it is important for a company to identify their crucial, fixed aspects - such as the core offering, or company values - while maintaining a flexible approach and an open, questioning outlook towards innovation, new technologies, and emerging demands.

source: H-Farm, Maize.Plus

This is a very detailed article that discusses career paths and how you choose the right path for you. It features an idea called the Yearning Octopus, pictured.

Here's the article: https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html

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