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Developing business ideas for drone technologies
Developing business ideas for drone technologies

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1.1 Communicating effectively with different stakeholders

As you learned in Week 1 of this course, you will have many different stakeholders for your business idea. Some will be your primary stakeholders and some will be secondary stakeholders, and they may be internal to your organisation or external (see Figure 3, adapted from Hill et al., 2020).

Internal and external stakeholders that are able to influence an organisation
Figure 3 Stakeholders and the organisation

As part of managing your different stakeholders, you will have different ways of communicating with them. Of course, depending on how well developed your drone business idea may be, you may or may not have the same kinds of stakeholders depicted in Figure 3. However, it’s safe to say that a critical part of developing any business idea is learning how to communicate it to others.

As you develop your idea, decide on your business model, and begin to add detail to the elements of your business model canvas, you will begin to identify the key parts of a business plan. A business plan is a formal document, which presents your business idea in written form. The renowned and emeritus entrepreneurship professor, Poornima Charantimath, explained that a business plan is a ‘dynamic document’ (i.e. it is meant to be updated regularly), and that:

[a] good business plan can be the most important factor in the success of the business. It should be brief, clear, and properly organized. Before writing your business plan, it is necessary to know for whom it is written. Business plans usually take from one week to three months to write. A business plan is not only a tool for raising money; it also helps the entrepreneur to identify and define business goals and to determine the best methods for achieving those goals. A business plan should highlight the points that can attract investors. The assumptions made in preparing the business plan should be realistic.

(Charantimath, 2018, p. 154)

Within Charantimath’s quote, there are some important points related to communicating with your stakeholders:

  • Who is it written for?
  • How can it help you identify and define your business goals?
  • What points do you want to highlight to attract investors?

There are many books available to help you design a business plan. As Charantimath explains, it can take up to three months to write a cohesive plan that covers all of the different areas of the business model canvas, such as (in very simple terms):

  • a clear and concise description of your business idea
  • your assessment of the business environment and your value proposition
  • who will be working on the business idea with you
  • how you will develop the business idea
  • how you will build the business and take it to market
  • how you intend to finance it.

Yet before you begin to detail a business plan, your first step should be to create a robust ‘elevator pitch’ that you can pitch to potential investors, as well as to potential grant funders, partners, customers, suppliers and other important stakeholders. The elevator pitch is the verbal equivalent of a concise one-page executive summary; summarising your business idea in the 60 seconds it might take to ‘pitch’ to a potential investor while going from the ground floor to the top of a skyscraper in an elevator or lift.