Industry Understanding - Industry Status - Industry Lifecycle

In the previous two posts, we learned that industry conditions frame the knowledge and demand factors. Industry status addresses industry lifecycle and structure:

• Emphasizes growth opportunities
• Explores industry evolution
• Provides insights into an industry’s timeliness for new entrepreneurial entrants

Industry Lifecycle

• Typically, industry goes through following four phases: birth, growth, sustain and die.
• Stage of development of the industry affects new ventures’ performance in the market.
• Dependent on customer adoption of new products and services: Beginning, middle, or end (causing a deceleration in market).
• New firms perform better in younger markets, as it is easier to attract customers when demand growth is high.

Reasons why young industries are most favorable to new ventures:

• Less competition versus established industries.
• Competing companies are operating on a more level playing field.
• Little to no dominant design or technical standard.

This blog post is based on my learnings from the course on ‘entrepreneurship’ offered by Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute, University of Maryland through Coursera (2014).