A Smart Idea Workshop
Creating a Business Model
Smart Idea works best in a workshop format with five to eight participants. Any less and you probably won’t have enough diversity; any more and you risk never-ending discussion.
The objective of a Smart Idea workshop is to direct your thinking towards creating a compelling business model by finding an area of a target end-user’s life that is strongly unsatisfied… and hypothesising ways of satisfying it. The way we visualise a business model is shown in the diagram on the right. That diagram tells the following story:
You, the entrepreneur, produce or deliver a story that makes a user happier. This increased happiness is valuable to some customer who will pay you a premium to continue delivering that story.
A Smart Idea workshop takes you through 4 steps that help you articulate what each of those circles should be:
- First we get to know a target end-user
- Second, we discover that user’s unsatisfactions and hypothesise ways of making him or her happier
- Third, we design ways (stories) of making that user happier
- Fourth, we find the biggest ‘pool of money’ (customer) in his or her environment to whom this happiness is most valuable (it may also be the user but we like to start by assuming its not).
Together, the four steps will provide you with a working business model that you will typically be able to test very quickly in some sort of mockup or prototyping scenario. To read more about the principles behind Smart Idea, and why it works, visit the Smart Idea Principles page.
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