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4 The importance of stakeholders
In addition to thinking about your business’s potential market and customer base, you should also consider how other stakeholder perspectives will impact on your business idea. Stakeholders are most often identified in reference to an organisation and are ‘any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives’ (Thompson, 1967, in Freeman et al., 2010, p. 46). For organisations, stakeholders include ‘shareholders’, who are specifically people who own shares in a business. However, the meaning of the term ‘stakeholders’ is much broader, and it can also refer to creditors, employees, customers, governments, competitors, media and communities, among others.
Even if you are still developing your business ideas, it’s a good idea to identify the range of stakeholders that could impact on your idea’s success or, conversely, how your idea might impact on them. This will help you to better understand any resources you can access or risks you should manage in the wider business environment. In the sections that follow, you will learn how to identify the stakeholders for your business idea and how to analyse their interests and impact.