Week 2: Business models and drones in agriculture
Introduction
Welcome to Week 2 of Developing business ideas for drone technologies. This week focuses on business models and revenue models, or how firms create and capture value. You will look at different types of business models and evaluate which one best suits your business idea. You will also learn about different revenue models, or ways to generate income from your business.
To be successful as a business you need to make money, and to do that you need to create something unique that others would want to buy. A business model can be thought of as a recipe that brings all the ingredients (or ‘resources’, e.g. people, land, machinery, crops, livestock) of your business together to create that something unique.
Revenue models are the various ways you can make money to sustain your business. If you don’t earn enough to cover the costs of resources (the ingredients for your recipe) and make profit to cover things such as your living costs as a business owner, you can be very quickly ‘out of business’. As you will discover later in this week, there are many creative ways to earn the most you can from your business. Business and revenue models go hand-in-hand; you cannot have one without the other, so keep this in mind as you work your way through this week.
Figure 1 shows the learning cycle for Week 2.
By the end of Week 2, you should be able to:
- recognise different business models for the use of drones, with a specific focus on agriculture and rural areas
- recognise how to distinguish between, and make use of, different types of business models
- appreciate the broader environmental and sustainability issues of business models using drones in agriculture and rural areas
- communicate your business ideas in a professional way that appeals to various stakeholders.