Finding Fertile Ground: Identifying Extraordinary Opportunities for New Ventures

Description:

If you're starting a business, the statistics prove that your best odds of success are in high technology industries: not just computing and telecom, but also biotech, electronics, manufacturing and materials, medical devices, robotics, and other knowledge-intensive fields. This is the first book to provide a methodology for finding those extraordinary opportunities. Shane shows how to identify market opportunities and competitor weaknesses, evaluate customer needs, manage risk and uncertainty, predict product adoption and diffusion, structure your organization, and protect intellectual property. You'll learn how to take into account crucial issues such as network externalities, and the emergence of dominant designs and technical standards. Unlike other books on entrepreneurship, this one offers solutions specifically targeted at high tech startups. Based on an MBA course taught at MIT, the University of Maryland, and Case Western Reserve University, it brings together insights that were previously scattered across multiple publications -- or never published at all.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments.

Introduction. 

 1. Selecting the Right Industry. 

 2. Identifying Valuable Opportunities. 

 3.  Managing Technological Evolution. 

 4. Identifying and Satisfying Real Market Needs. 

 5. Understanding Customer Adoption. 

 6. Exploiting Established Company Weaknesses. 

 7. Managing Intellectual Property. 

 8. Appropriating the Returns to Innovation. 

 9. Choosing the Right Organizational Form.

10. Managing Risk and Uncertainty.

Conclusions.

Index.