Business Plan
Assessment 5
The student should come up with a business idea, make a preliminary assessment of product/service feasibility and implement the assessment tools for an organizational feasibility study according to the full Methodological Guideline.
i. Volume: minimum 5, maximum 10 pages of main written text (800 words) – except for bibliography and appendices. Plus annotated PPT presentation
ii. Formatting of the main text: police Times New Roman 12 pt, interline – 1.5 pt, Justified alignment, page number in upper right corner
iii. Content:
1. Cover Page, including project name,
2. Concept Statement: business idea explanation, (analysis based on the CLASSICAL ARTICLE “What is Strategy” – Porter 1996 – Harvard Business Review). Results of your analysis should be presented either in a text format OR in a format of the building blocks of the Business Model Canvas making this business model distinctive from similar businesses (from 1 page to 4 pages)
2.1 Describe the business strategy
2.1.a) Strategic positioning base – You need to identify products/services your are going to provide – Describe business type and location – Describe target customers for whom you are going to create value through your offering (be specific, indicating only an age group or geographical 11 location is not enough; it is preferable to focus on customers with a specific lifestyle, based on psychographic segmentation)
2.2) Trade-offs (What do you refuse to do: ex. which services you do not provide, which type of customers would not be targeted, etc)
2.3) Strategic activities of this business: your main (primary) and support (secondary) activities. (What would you like to do to deliver customer value?)
2.4 Resource sufficiency: how are you doing to access key resources for delivering customer value?
3. Justification of business idea choice, based on applied literature review. The structure of this section (coverage of relevant topics), quality of arguments (credibility of the literature sources; logical development of arguments, use of applied research literature, building connections among different sources of knowledge in the literature and from business practice) and justification of strategic potential of business idea (based on literature sources) are evaluated separately according to the grading criteria. It should refer to a variety of documents, including at least 3 reliable sources for a passing grade. The bibliography should contain at least 5 general sources to be considered for an excellent grade on this criteria (from 1 page to 4 pages)
4. Feasibility evaluation: Concluding the assessment of product/service feasibility (1 page). Based on the well-grounded conclusion about the feasibility of a business idea, it contains one of three possible decisions. They can be summarized as follows: (1) a decision to go forward with a business plan development, (2) a decision to review the business idea before making a decision on a business plan, (3) a decision to abandon business planning based on this idea.
iv. Bibliography: references are formatted in Harvard style (to facilitate the referencing, groups may use Harvard References in reference management software)
v. Appendix: it contains information that is relevant for the study, but not easily included in the main written text.
