SHAHEED SUKHDEV COLLEGE OF BUSINESS STUDIES

ENTREPRENEURSHIP ASSIGNMENT ON IDEA GENERATION

BBS 3 FB HIMANI JAIN (8148) TARUNA NAGI (8179)

INTRODUCTION

First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.

Napoleon Hill American Author Napoleon Hill was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal-success literature. He is widely considered to be one of the great writers on success. His most famous work, Think and Grow Rich (1937), is one of the best-selling books of all time. Every new business, new product or service, and new marketing approach starts with an IDEA. So whether you are looking to create a market-busting product like the iPod, or come up with a campaign idea like the Million Dollar Homepage, there are creativity techniques that can allow you to conceive something new and turn it into reality. In this assignment, we have tried to understand the importance of idea generation in Entrepreneurship. For this five business ventures have been studies in regard of what made their founders take such risks, their inspiration, etc. The five businesses are:

Starbucks Coffee Company, Washington; Bookscan, Japan; eBay Inc., California; Terracycle, New Jersey;

YouTube, California.

IDEA GENERATORS: Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel, Gordon Bowker.

Starbucks Corporation is an international coffee and coffeehouse chain based in Seattle, Washington. Starbucks is the largest coffeehouse company in the world, with 17,009 stores in 50 countries, including over 11,000 in the United States, over 1,000 in Canada, over 700 in the United Kingdom, and over 100 in the Philippines. Starbucks began in 1971 when three academicsEnglish teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Zev Siegel, and writer Gordon Bowkeropened a store called Starbucks Coffee, Tea, and Spice in the touristy Pikes Place Market in Seattle. The three partners shared a love of fine coffees and exotic teas and believed they could build a clientele in Seattle. Each invested $1,350 and borrowed another $5,000 from a bank to open the Pikes Place store. Baldwin, Siegel, and Bowker chose the name Starbucks in honor of Starbuck, the coffee-loving first mate in Herman Melville's Moby Dick(so company legend has it), and because they thought the name evoked the romance of the high seas and the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders. The new company's logo, designed by an artist friend, was a two-tailed mermaid encircled by the store's name. The inspiration for the Starbucks enterprise was a Dutch immigrant, Alfred Peet, who had begun importing fine Arabica coffees into the United States during the 1950s. Peet viewed coffee as fine winemaker views grapes, appraising it in terms of country of origin, estates, and harvests. Peet had opened a small store, Peet's Coffee and Tea, in Berkeley, California, in 1966 and had cultivated a loyal clientele. Peet's store specialized in importing fine coffees and teas, dark-roasting its own beans the European way to bring out

their full flavor, and teaching customers how to grind the beans and make freshly brewed coffee at home. Baldwin, Siegel, and Bowker were well acquainted with Peet's expertise, having visited his store on numerous occasions and spent many hours listening to Peet expound on quality coffees and the importance of proper bean-roasting techniques. All three were devoted fans of Peet and his dark-roasted coffees, going so far as to order their personal coffee supplies by mail from Peet's. The Pikes Place store featured modest, hand-built nautical fixtures. One wall was devoted to whole-bean coffees; another had shelves of coffee products. The store did not offer fresh-brewed coffee by the cup, but samples were sometimes available for tasting. Initially, Siegel was the only paid employee. He wore a grocer's apron, scooped out beans for customers, extolled the virtues of fine, dark-roasted coffees, and functioned as the partnership's retail expert. The other two partners kept their day jobs but came by at lunch or after work to help out. During the start-up period, Baldwin kept the books and developed a growing knowledge of coffee; Bowker served as the "magic, mystery, and romance man."1 The store was an immediate success, with sales exceeding expectations, partly because of a favorable article in the Seattle Times. In the early months, each of the founders traveled to Berkeley to learn more about coffee roasting from their mentor, Alfred Peet, who urged them to keep deepening their knowledge of coffees and teas. For most of the first year, Starbucks ordered its coffee beans from Peet's, but then the partners purchased a used roaster from Holland and set up roasting operations in a nearby ramshackle building. Baldwin and Bowker experimented with Alfred Peet's roasting procedures and came up with their own blends and flavors. A second Starbucks store was opened in 1972. In 1981, Howard Schultz (Starbucks chairman, president and chief executive officer) had first walked into a Starbucks store. From his first cup of Sumatra, Howard was drawn into Starbucks and joined a year later. A year later, in 1983, Howard traveled to Italy and became captivated with Italian coffee bars and the romance of the coffee experience. He had a vision to bring the Italian coffeehouse tradition back to the United States. A place for conversation and a sense of community. A third place between work and home. He left Starbucks for a short period of time to start his own Il Giornale coffeehouses and returned in August 1987 to purchase Starbucks with the help of local investors.

From the beginning, Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. One that not only celebrated coffee and the rich tradition, but that also brought a feeling of connection. Today, with more than 15,000 stores in 50 countries, Starbucks is the premier roaster and retailer of specialty coffee in the world. And with every cup, we strive we bring both our heritage and an exceptional experience to life.

IDEA GENERATOR: Yusuke Ohki

I begin with a true, whimsical and lovely tale. Recently a Japanese man living in a tiny apartment, perhaps in Tokyo, with his 2,000 books felt utterly crowded. He scanned his library into his new iPad and sold the used books. But THEN: It dawned on him that this was a new business opportunity, and he is now offering "iPad library scanning" services as his new way of making a living. Given the invention and widespread sale of iPad, the new "iPad library screening" business was in what I keep calling the Adjacent Possible of the evolution of our economic and technological web. Steven Johnson in one of his essays for The Wall Street Journal called The Genius of Tinkerer wrote:

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of

the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself. Yusuke Ohki worked as an IT professional for a number of companies before creating BOOKSCAN with his friend Shinya Iwamatsu. Prior to this, Yusuke created Value Press, a company offering low-cost press release distribution.

When asked, Where did the idea for BOOKSCAN come from? he answered, I love books. It got to the stage where I had more than 2,000 books at home, taking up half my room. Also I was afraid of the bookshelf reaching up to the ceiling. There were lots of reports in Japan of bookshelves falling over and causing injuries during earthquakes. I wanted to avoid any risk of this happening to my kids. This was around the time of the iPad launch, and the idea occurred to me to scan each of my books so they could be read on the iPad. Then, I thought that many people must have the same problem. Thats the idea behind BOOKSCAN. Japan has been slow to publish e-books, confronted with irksome copyright issues and pricing systems. BOOKSCAN now aims to fill the gap left by major publishers. Customers simply send BOOKSCAN a book, and in return for JPY 100 users receive a PDF e-book version ready to be read on an iPad, iPhone or Kindle. Before sending a book to BOOKSCAN, users of the service are required to tick a box saying they have received the publishers permission to reproduce the text. There is no end to the range of content that can be digitized for added convenience, accessibility and interaction. BOOKSCAN has harnessed this in tandem with a real local need for e-book content to produce a valuable service. After the launch of BOOKSCAN, demand for the service grew rapidly, leading Yusuke to expand the companys operations and inspiring a host of competitors to enter the market. Ohki still works hands-on with BOOKSCANs systems, developing and expanding the services on offer.

IDEA GENERATOR: Tom Szaky

A freshman at Princeton University, 19 year-old Tom Szaky took several of his friends up to Montreal for Fall Break. There he stayed with friends who were feeding table scraps to red wiggler worms in a composting bin and using the resultant fertilizer to feed some of their indoor plants. The results were amazing! Tom was looking for a business idea to enter into the upcoming Princeton Business Plan Contest, early the following year. He had his answer: use worms to eat organic waste. He could make a quality fertilizer and address a major environmental issue at the same time! After Tom placed 4th in the Princeton Business Plan Contest, he decided to go ahead with his idea anyway and start producing worm casting based fertilizers. He emptied his savings accounts, borrowed money from friends and family and maxed out his credit cards to buy a massive worm poop conversion unit. Most of Toms time was spent shoveling rotting food out of the back of Princeton Cafeterias. Broke, exhausted and ready to throw in the towel Tom met Suman Sinha, a venture capitalist who cut the young entrepreneur a check and became TerraCycles first investor. With the money invested by Suman, Tom was able to rent his first office space at 20 Nassau St. in Princeton. After spending more time developing the company than going to class, Tom decided to take a leave of absence from Princeton to pursue TerraCycle fulltime. And in April of 2003, TerraCycle won the coveted grand prize at

the Carrot Capital Business Plan Challenge, complete with 1 million dollars of investment money. Unfortunately, the investors wanted to move TerraCycle away from its eco-friendly mission and focus entirely on the plant food. Despite having only 500 dollars in the company bank account, Tom turned down the money in order to keep using waste products as packaging! With more than 20 million people collecting waste in 14 countries TerraCycle has diverted billions of units of waste and used them to create over 1,500 different products available at major retailers ranging from Walmart to Whole Foods Market.

IDEA GENERATOR: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Hurley, Chen, Karim.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, while Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible". YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006. YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain

name [Link] was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months. The first YouTube video was entitled Me at the zoo, and shows founder Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site. YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs, and YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "not material" in a regulatory filing. In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales. According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43 percent and more than 14 billion videos viewed in May 2010. YouTube says that over 48 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the US. It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion videos a day, which it described as "nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined". In May 2011, YouTube reported in its company blog that the site was receiving more than three billion views per day. Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook.

IDEA GENERATOR: Pierre Omidyar

Pierre Omidyar is the founder of eBay. He was born in Paris in 1967, the only child in a French-Iranian family. At the age of six, the family emigrated to the United States and he grew up in and around Washington, D.C. Pierre was bitten by the computer bug at a very early age, sneaking out of the gym to teach himself on his science teachers cheap computer. He later graduated to an Apple II and got paid to computerize the schools library catalogue. As legend has it, in summer 1995 Pierre Omidyar was dining with his fiance, Pam Wesley, when she mentioned that she was having problems finding PEZ collectors with whom to trade. PEZ, originally breath-freshener mints (later fruit-flavored sweets) in dispensers with character heads, had become collectors items. This, so the story goes, gave Pierre the eBay idea. But

actually it is not true. The fact is that Pierre Omidyar was following all other computer freaks in trying to find a use for the Internet. Though Pierre Omidyar had never been to an auction in his life, he believed that an auction could be an interesting marketing tool. Place an advert giving a minimum price and if several people show an interest - why not let them bid? At the time, Pierre Omidyar was employed by a company called General Magic and so had to do his programming in his spare time. Over a long weekend, he created an auction web site. It didnt look very appealing, nor did he have a clue as to what the public might want to auction. He just created various categories: antiques, books, comics, computer items, electronics. and called the site AuctionWeb. At the beginning the site was free and slowly began to attract visitors. Traffic on AuctionWeb steadily increased through the autumn of 1995 and by the end of that year AuctionWeb had hosted thousands of auctions with over ten thousand bids. In 1996, Pierre Omidyar decided to start charging sellers a percentage of the final sale price. He had no idea whether it would be accepted or not, but soon the cash and cheques came rolling in. AuctionWeb was one of the few to make a profit right from the start. By June, revenues had doubled for the fourth consecutive month, reaching $10,000. Pierre Omidyars hobby had become a business. He left General Magic and hired his first part-time employee, Chris Agarpao. Its said that at this time, the staff sat around on folding chairs and DIY style desks were delivered in cardboard boxes to be screwed together by the employees. It is also said that there was only one single telephone and the staff were not allowed to answer it. Anyway, the number was kept secret because Pierre Omidyar wanted to keep costs to a minimum. The intention was that any customer with a query should send an e-mail. By August, AuctionWeb was so successful that it was joined by Jeff Skoll, a gogetting entrepreneur who had done some consulting work for AuctionWeb. Pierre Omidyar believed that Jeff Skoll was the man to develop and drive the business. Around this time, the laidback [Link] types were faced by men-insuits with economic degrees, who had the task of making money while the more relaxed Omidyar tended the AuctionWeb web site and community. In 1998 eBay as it was now called, was launched on the stock exchange.

The story goes that founder Pierre Omidyar wanted to call it Echo Bay, but the name had already been registered by a Canadian company mining for gold in Nevada. So Pierre Omidyar chose eBay. Now known as eBay, the San Jose-based company has become the largest person-to-person online trading community. eBay used the web to create a totally new market in the form of an auction. It now has over 1,000 categories and bids are placed at the rate of over 600 per minute. It is said that over 250,000 items are added daily and that it has sold over 45 million items since its conception in 1995. The site has about 50 million registered users and employs a staff of over 2,500.

CONCLUSION
Every business starts with one thing - an idea. This can be because someone has spotted a gap in the market, or because they have spotted a flaw in a product or service. Developing this idea into a viable product or service is a very important part of building your business. The stories mentioned in our assignment give us the inspiration that one doesnt have to sit with a pen and writing pad on a free Sunday deep in thought for money minting ideas to generate. The idea can come from anywhere to anyone. If one keeps its eyes, ears and most importantly mind open very simple and obvious task can lead to your new business venture. It can be simply your love for coffee or reading or at a dinner with your friends and family.

And one does not have to be born in a multi-millionaire business family to pursue these ideas; people like college students [Link] doubt, bring about a revolution. The trick is that one should be able to overcome their mental blocks. One should be able find different solutions to the problem by broadening their thought dimension. When one start to think beyond the limits and norms set by the world it is then that wonders happen. Some people may want to start their business and have no way of coming up with the ideas. So here are some questions that you can ask to get the ball rolling so here are just some suggestions: Can your hobby be turned into a business? What are your skills? Are they useful in running a business? Have you discovered a niche in the market?

Once in possession of your business idea, this is when you have to refine and consolidate it to see if it will work as a business.