As my friends and I head into summer break, a time of relaxation and enjoyment, we decided that making use of this free time to practice for some of the big time entrepreneurship competitions could be very beneficial. These “big time” entrepreneurship competitions I am referring to are “Diamond Challenge”, “NFTE World Series of Innovation”, “Paradigm Challenge” and many more. However since the registration for these competitions typically opens in Fall, we started to search for Summer competitions in order to practice for the more relevant, upcoming competitions. As we started to browse, I came across the Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition. Similar to the Blue Ocean Competition, this competition requires our product to have a vast social impact. The product that we design is required to have at least one or more of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals listed on the website of the United Nations. As the Citizen Entrepreneurship Competition’s website states, “The SDGs address the most important social, economic, environmental, health and governmental challenges of our time” which is exactly why my friends and I were motivated to tackle this competition.
Since we are only in the early stages of our brainstorming, the products we have come up with are not necessarily flawless, but we believe with a little more tweaking they will have great potential. One product that my group as a whole seemed interested in was a reusable notebook, which one of my group members, Tanush, thought of. With this reusable notebook not only would those on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder have access to school supplies, but also a major source of paper use could be eradicated.
However in order to successfully kill two birds with one stone, we must think of the flaws we have in our potential product. One of the flaws we thought of, is how would those in undeveloped countries be able to use our product efficiently. Since our product would theoretically use an app to store all notes that have been taken, in order to download an app one must have some sort of a mobile device, which is a major cost on its own. Another flaw in our product would be the lack of continuous revenue. I say this because since our notebook will be marketed as “the only notebook you would need in your life”, customers will not continuously buy our products like they do for general paper notebooks. In order to combat this we thought of making unique pens that only our brand would manufacture. Since these pens would eventually run out of ink, the only way we could continuously make profit is by selling a large amount of pens annually. Our last and largest flaw is competitors with similar products. Rocketbook for example is a reusable notebook company that allows one to save their notes through the use of an app on a phone. They also have a cloth that comes with their product that efficiently erases all writing on a particular page. If my group could think of a way to save one’s notes without the use of an application, then we could become more accessible than Rocketbook.
If we are not able to generate a solution to this problem, we might have to change courses completely, which is not a problem at all considering that failing is an essential part in the learning process.
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