Blue Chi's » Business

Big Business Idea Competition

blue_chi — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:01:00 +0000

I attended the Big Business Idea Competition finals last night. The Big Business Idea Competition is one of the nice initiatives made by PEIE and Ernst & Young to promote entrepreneurship among the Omani youth. The concept of this competition is simple, you submit your business plan, if you win, we will give you a grant of RO 5,000 ($15,000) and office space and facilities for an entire year free of charge to make your big business idea a reality (Check rules here). It is a really nice concept in essence, but for some reason, even after running for three years in a row now, we have not yet seen a single successful startup emerging out of this competition:

Winner of the year 2006: Oman Gateway Portal (Read post at BBIC blog): The project was to create a “dynamic and interactive online tourism company” – Which basically was a tourism website. You can search google for “Oman Gateway Portal” and you will only find it mentioned in press releases made by TKM. I have no idea if the website ever existed.
Winner of the year 2007: Oman Souq Online (Read post at BBIC blog): The project was for “online retail” – No additional info can be found about the project anywhere online. No active website can be found online, but Archive.org shows me this pathetic page.

I am not sure I understand what the reason for this failure is, it might be just a natural failure of a business like any other: all business have risks and it is normal and expected that not everyone will succeed, but then again, for the winners of a competition organised by the government supported incubator program AND Ernst & Young you would expect them to last for a year at least before they find out that this is not going to work. These businesses do not even seem to get off the ground. There really seems to be something wrong. I think that it could be attributed to one or more of the following:

The selection process cannot identify projects/ideas that will actually work.
The post-selection process does not provide sufficient support and guidance to transform a winner’s raw idea into a viable business venture.
The competition is not capable of attracting good enough business ideas which are new, innovative and can be transformed into a real business. It is impossible to pick an amazing idea from a stack that does not contain any. And it is also impossible to create an amazing business venture if its based on a bad idea.

I am not sure that there is anything majorly wrong with the selection process (100% sure there is no wasta involved in this), not really sure about the second point as I have no idea what goes afterwards, but the third one really seems like an issue to me. That is because (a) Omani people are not really known for taking risks, many people *happily* live by the saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” (b) the competition reward is not lucrative enough to make people drool. I mean, what are you really going do with RO 5000?Â

If I am going to start a business, I do not expect to make profit or even make any money from day one. Let’s assume we are running a two person IT web design/development company, I’m going to need to pay for the following to start up:

2 professional workstations @ RO 1000 = RO 2000.
2 Adobe Creative Suit Web Premium Packages @ RO 950 (this is what Loay sells them for, believe it or not) = RO 1900
Cheapest webhosting offered by origin oman services = RO 100! (IT developer must have a website)
A .co.om Domain name: RO 40 (dude, Omani company must have a .co.om domain, right? (Awain, but lets play along))

So the remainder of this is 960. Divide that by 2 (there are two people in the company) and you get RO 480 as a salary for this month…. and your RO 5000 is gone!

However, a big part of the prize is the rent free office and the office facilities provided by the Knowledge Mine, but if you really wanted to get this you can apply directly to TKM without going through the competition which will provide you with the same exact facilities and probably for a longer period, so this competition is just about the RO 5000.

So how did the Big Business Idea Competition 2008 (the one I attended last night) go? First of all, initially four finalists were supposed to be qualified for this stage, one them was the Omani School Network, which I have written about before (I didnt know at that time that this was a contestant), however, for some reason, there were only three finalists during the show last night and the Omani School Network was not one of them. I would really like to know what happened. These were the ones that were there:

An environmental consultancy firm that aims to combat oil spills.
A 3D video production company.
A robot manufacture company.

Each of these had to do a 5 minute presentation. The first one was half decent, the other two were completely pointless. The last guy with the bizarre robot idea was saying random stuff like robots will replace housemaids and will be used for security purposes – I didn’t understand if he was talking about his robots or what. He showed us a video about a robot fighting tournament (RoboCup, he ironically mistakingly pronounced it RoboCop) which he said [talking about the video] “I think is shot in the US if I am not mistaken” (HE DID NOT FREAKING KNOW WHERE HE GOT THIS RANDOM VIDEO FROM).

On the other hand, the 3D video contestant claims that he will have the first Omani TV series next Ramadan, he did not show us A SINGLE SHOT OR ARTWORK OR CHARACTER DESIGN OR ANYTHING AT ALL ABOUT THIS CARTOON. HE DID NOT EVEN SHOW US ANY OTHER THING HE HAS EVER MADE …….. and instead he showed us a clip from Freej. This was like: you guys see this thing on the screen, I will try my best to copy its success. That’s exactly what I call an innovative idea.

The third group (Mazoon Environmental & Technical Services LLC) which actually came first place was an environment consultancy that aims to combat oil spills and related pollution. They had a half decent presentation that showed a problem and suggested a solution to it through their services and product. They have also created a locally made bio-tech product that they intend to sell. I really liked them and I thought that they deserved to came first place. If they have a product made I hope that they do apply for a patent at the Ministry of Commerce to make sure that it is not copied by others.

The first and second places each got a RO 5000 grant and the third got something like RO 2500.

We don’t know if in a year any of these winners will still be around, I hope they do, but I think history tells us that they will have to work very hard to do so.

Book: The New Business Road Test – John Mullins

blue_chi — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Just finished reading this book today. I’ve never properly read a business book before, even though I did take one business class in my foundation year at uni. I decided reading this book upon the recommendation of a friend, and I thought that it was really good. I think that everyone of us should read at least one business book, it’s a crazy world out there, you never when you’ll decide to leave your day job and jump on the business bandwagon!

“The New Business Road Test” is a book to help entrepreneurs assess their business idea before they start it. The majority of new businesses fail. But this book tries to help you identify a lousy business idea before you start it, so that you can stop before it’s too later, or hopefully amend your business idea so that it can survive. Mullins does this by introducing a new 7-domain model for examining a business opportunity, four of these are related to the market and industry, and three are related to the entrepreneur/business team.

Mullins identifies a distinction between the market and the industry, where the industry is a collection of customers and perspective customers while the industry consists of the sellers.

The seven domains of the New Business Road Test are:

Market macro-level: Market attractiveness
Market micro-level: Target segment benefits and attractiveness
Industry macro-level: Industry attractiveness
Industry micro-level: Sustainable advantage
Team domain 1: Mission, aspiration, propensity for risk
Team domain 2: Ability to execute on critical success factors
Team domain 3: Connectedness up, down, across the value chain

The book illustrates how these domains can make or break a business idea and how their impact is not simply additive, but complicated as a failure one single domain might mean that this is not business is fated for failure, while on other hand, the 7 domains can show how a good business can survive in a bad industry if the other domains are positive.

The New Business Road Test was a very interesting read with lots of real life examples and several practical forms and guidelines for analysing and surveying if your business will pass the road test or not.

I think that they sell this book in City Centre Borders, but I got it from Amazon.co.uk. Highly recommended for anyone interesting in reading a new business book!

I read the second edition of the New Business Road Test is published that was published by the Financial Times Press.

PEIE – Oman Manufacturing Group Seminar 2

blue_chi — Sat, 19 May 2007 06:47:00 +0000

The second seminar in the Oman Manufacturing Group (OMG) series organised by the Public Establishment for industrial Estates (PEIE) is going to be held tomorrow evening at the Crowne Plaza. The seminar is titled “Developing a Manufacturing Strategy“. Anybody can attend upon reserving a seat by emailing omg@peie.om. Free dinner is included. Cool?

PEIE – Oman Manufacturing Group (OMG) Seminar

blue_chi — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 13:41:00 +0000

Yeah, I don’t know what’s happening, but I’ve been going to all those events lately. Yesterday I attended the first seminar of the Oman Manufacturing Group (OMG) seminar series. This is an event organised by the Public Establishment for Industrial Estates (PEIE) (which Knowledge Oasis Muscat (KOM) is part of), it is the first year for PEIE to run this event and it felt like the geek-free version of Digital Nation. The four seminars of the series will span over a period of a year so that one seminar is held every three months.

After attending the first seminar and reading the description of the upcoming ones, I think that the title of the series is misleading, it is not about manufacturing, or to say the least, it is not about the manufacturing aspect of a manufacturing business as it indicates, but the business side of it, which is nicer. In the first seminar, which was titled “New Product Development”, only one out of the six panelists was from the traditional manufacturing industry, and the discussion focused on R&D and the innovative aspect of product and service design, identifying the customer needs and/or creating that need, success short stories, and other similar quick topics which were applicable to any sort of business.

Upcoming seminars will cover developing a manufacturing strategy, branding, and value stream mapping. Just like this one, attendance is free to everyone, all you have to do is email omg@peie.om to tell them that you’ll be coming.

I can’t wait for the branding seminar, but it’s going to take place by the end of OCTOBER, urgh!

PS. PEIE is also holding the Smart Manufacturing 2007 conference on the 15th and 16th of next month, learn more about it here.