Designing Solutions and Team Building

Solutions are not about the technology or the features. Solutions focus on customer value. Features, functions and technologies are simply vehicles for value creation. 

Competitors influence your relative value for customers.

Is your advantage superior and sustainable?

Degree of advantage: Better features or functions, lower price for the value delivered due to your operations or strategies, rareness - competitors cannot offer the same set of values to this customer.

Sustainability of advantage: How easily can a competitor copy or exceed your resources, know how, relationships - determines the likelihood of competitors replicating or surpassing your venture.

Build the team with attention to understanding:

What are their motivations?
How committed are they to this venture?
How realistic are they about the venture's risk and rewards?
What skills, abilities and knowledge do they have?
What is their reputation?
Where have they worked?
Where have they been educated?
What have they accomplished?
Who else needs to be on the team?

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).