Preparing for the Individual Portfolio – Task 4. Note: The deadline for task 4 has been extended to 11:59pm on May 17. This is to ensure that everyone has two weeks to complete task 4 after completing task 3. Well done on finalising your prototypes for assessment task 3. Prototypes are a great way of making your work tangible. Your team should now have consensus on a problem for international students you are responding to, an idea for a product and/or service that could address that need (it’s fine if the specifics are still being finalised), and information on how well aspects of that idea tested with real world people. Now we have to consider the operationalization of our idea, and we are doing this in a business model context: Key issues to keep in mind: • Your team needs to start by considering what value proposition you are providing to a consumer through your product/ service. You have already started to think about these ideas in your week 7 tutorials. o In your week 7 tutorials you had activities related to the value proposition canvas – What are the jobs your consumer(s) are trying to complete? What are the obstacles standing in their way? What is it they are trying to achieve? o Based on your team’s answers to these questions, what will your product/ service have to offer your consumers? This is your CVP or customer value proposition. From your textbook, could it be newness (the ability to satisfy a consumer need that no one else does? Could it be higher levels of performance? Or could it be a more customised offering than any of your competitors? That’s great, but how should we word a CVP? The following material is taken from a great blog that can be found at: https://conversionxl.com/value-proposition-examples-how-to-create/ Your team’s CVP is the promise of value that will be delivered to the consumer. For this reason it needs to be in your consumer’s language. You need to draw on the insights from the interviews you and your teammates collated in the empathy and prototype tasks. Generally a CVP might be said to include: - Headline: What is the end benefit your team is offering in one short sentence? - Sub headings: A specific statement of what your business will do/ offer, for whom will you offer it, and why they might find it useful? - Bullet point features of your idea Remember it has to be easy to understand (particularly in a pitch setting in week 12), it communicates the results that the consumer will receive, and it differentiates yourself from your competitors. There are some great examples of CVPs in the above link. • Part 1 of Task 4: A successful CVP will be dependent on a working business model. For this reason each member of the group must choose one of the other components of the BMC to work on – customer segments, channels, relationships, activities, resources, partnerships, revenues and costs. For the component you have selected you need to tell us why knowledge of that component will be vital for your team’s ability to provide your stated CVP. Note: We strongly suggest that each member of the team chooses a different component of the BMC to work on. That way you can pool everybody’s work and form a complete picture of the operationalization of your business idea. Note: Individual team members cannot choose the CVP component of the Business Model Canvas to work on. Everyone in the group should have the same CVP. You are researching other components of the model. • Part 2: All of the work you and your teammates are doing this semester is focussed on answering a very simple question, is our idea feasible? In other words, is our idea worth pursuing? Your second question for part 4 of the portfolio asks you to discuss how your chosen component of the business model (i.e. resources, customer segments etc.) will be important for ensuring the feasibility of your business idea. Note: We are not asking you to actually do a feasibility analysis. Instead we are asking you to explain the role of your section of the model in determining feasibility. I have put on UTS Online a few pages from the book Effective Small Business Management: An Entrepreneurial Approach by Scarborough (2012). These pages deal with different types of business feasibility and should be read to provide background. I would strongly suggest that you do some extra reading around the idea of feasibility before commencing. • Marking Criteria – The following marking criteria will be used by your tutors when assessing your work: Some points to note: - This is not an essay. Just answer under the different sections. - References are not required but should be used if drawing on other people’s work. Good luck with the finalisation of your portfolio. Please ensure that you are meeting regularly with your team as you bring everything together for the week 12 final report/ and pitch. Regards Steve