Business idea generation

Materials Needed

For Generating Interest in Topic

Create a realistic story describing a typical young person’s day in your country. His or her day should contain both positive and negative experiences, with more negative experiences than positive. The story might include experiences similar to those below. Select or describe experiences appropriate for the culture in which you are working. The story should take six or seven minutes to tell.

Share with the participants a number of original business ideas that were very unique when they were first developed and that have been very successful. (examples of innovative approaches, e.g. self-cleaning mop or Tesla car…).

Thinking out of the box or thinking creatively is important in generating new business ideas rather than copying what your neighbor is already doing. A good business idea is essential for starting a successful venture and for staying competitive afterwards. Good business ideas, however, do not usually just occur to an entrepreneur.

Rather, they are the result of hard work, effort, research, discussions, interviews and often creativity on the part of the entrepreneur.

Conduct brainstorming for around 10 min on different income generating ideas they can think of.  After 10 minutes, encourage participants to create a second list by thinking of other possible ideas of hobbies and fields of interest of the participants that could create opportunities for income generating ideas. First, ask participants to think about their hobbies and interests. They are given 5 minutes to think and list them in their phones/notebooks. Then they have to pick only one of the listed hobbies in which they think are the best at (maybe running or collecting badges, etc.) Ask them to think if they could earn some money from their picked hobby. Talk about the techniques and the needs of making their idea part of an enterprise (income generating). Make a list of hobbies and areas of interest that participants have; then brainstorm on the possible business ideas that could derive from those hobbies and areas of interest. As a last stage of the exercise, identify within the group a number of business ideas from the two lists that participants would be interested in considering as possible business ventures.

Ask participants to identify the business ideas that they think would make sense to them and why would they select them. Ask them to write down the business ideas and the corresponding motivations.