The Entrepreneurship bug

As it happens to a lot of wannabe MBAs, I have also been bitten(Slightly tho') by the entrepreneurship bug. Of late I have been thinking about a lot of business models. From 'niche food chain' biz model to some web based models, I have been doing some biz analysis.

We are living in the midst of a very powerful information revolution. Knowledge Management based and KPO kinda biz models have started being received well by the Venture Capitalists for at least a coupla years in India and about for half a decade in the better developed markets.

I thought I came up with a good biz model(happiness short lived!!). Let me explain my model very briefly. It's all about a lot of young naive consultants and market researchers, being hired by my portal at a relatively lower price, each of them with some special domain knowledge and being relatively naive at it. They might be students or employees working elsewhere who'd be willing to work 'part time' for my portal right in their house sitting in front of their desktop powered by high speed net connectivity. Companies would outsource low end 'Knowledge work', to my company, which can't be outsourced to niche consultants, who would in the first place not like to work in the basic lower end market research based problems and secondly, demand higher price. So companies would outsource such work to my company.

Advantages:

1 People can make quick money by working from their houses.

2 Online jobs are already available in India but still most of them are not too good in terms of the 'challenge of work' and the pay package to be taken up by the emerging 'knowledge class' of India( hmmm and yet another class, coined by me!) whose power or competency levels can't be ignored in times to come.

3 Information revolution has peaked in India with 2 Mbps connectivity no longer a dream

I don't want this blog post to be a writeup of a biz plan executive summary, so stopping here and not going into the nuances.

Again this is an optimisation of a biz plan I had drafted about an year earlier, where the sorta work was not Knowledge based, but kinda BPO work like documentation, lower end software work et all taken up by poor college students in a part time basis sitting in front of their desktop. To cut the long story short that plan targeted the (fortune at the)bottom of the pyramid, whereas my current modified plan targets a slightly different set of people.

I thought that my new plan was kinda unique in the sense that it targeted a separate class of people, who in the past have not worked online in spite of having credentials. When I was doing some web searching to further my plan, I stumbled across this company 'InnoCentive' which more or less performs the same kind of work that I had thought of. It posts challenging pharmaceutical problems with cash incentives for an innovative solution. I was a lil sad, but I learnt quite a bit. Management gurus call this kind of an approach as 'pull strategy' where the resources are pulled, as in our case where the resources are different people working from different parts of the world. I'd explain the crux of this pull strategy and how this strategy would evolve as a powerful strategy in my next blog post...Do read it if you feel that you haven't gained much insight in this post.