UNIT 304: BUSINESS PLANNING FOR INNOVATION

Overview

This unit aims to provide students with the skills and knowledge required to write and present convincing and compelling entrepreneurial business plans for significant innovations. The design of the unit embraces service innovations as well as new manufactured products and places equal weight on innovation within existing corporations and new enterprise formation.

Although the unit generally adopts the perspective of a new, for-profit firm or a new activity within an existing for-profit enterprise, most of the material is equally applicable to new pro bono enterprises.

Aims

After studying this unit you should be able to:

• Explain the social and economic significance of innovation
• Establish the commercial feasibility of an innovative proposal
• Explain the need for, and purpose of, an entrepreneurial business plan
• Identify and analyse the salient features of the commercial, legal and economic environment as it affects entrepreneurs
• Identify the constraints on, and the opportunities available to, entrepreneurs working within established corporations
• Prepare, present and critique proposals for innovation to be undertaken by both existing and specially formed organisations

Topics

• The socio-economic context
• The nature of opportunity
• Validating an opportunity
• Capitalising on an opportunity
• Entrepreneurial business planning
• The legal context
• Government policy
• Corporate innovation
• Writing a business plan
• Financing a new venture

Unit Chair & Study Guide Author

John Legge
BS, MBus

John Legge started tertiary level teaching after 28 years’ experience in technology-oriented business, including four years as a corporate business strategist for a multinational computer firm. His business career included extensive periods in the UK and Australia, and involved technical and marketing assignments in 9 other countries. Since 1988 John has concentrated on consulting, research, writing and teaching.

Nine of his books have been published, and he has completed a number of significant research papers. John was Lecturer in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Swinburne University between 1991 and 1996 and taught at RMIT Graduate School of Engineering in 1997 and in the Graduate School of Management, La Trobe University, from 1999 to 2002. He is currently a Senior Teaching Fellow, Ballarat University and a Teaching Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology where he convenes the subject ‘Growth Venture Evaluation’ in the Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship. He is the principal consultant in his family consulting business.