With business development, as with most things, you must start at the beginning.  The beginning for business development is an idea or concept of how you can make money.  To make money you must extract money from the marketplace.  So you must make a product that people are willing to buy.  After you have identified a concept of a product that people are willing to buy, you organize a business around the concept that will deliver the product to the marketplace.

An important step in assessing a business idea is to identify the Value Proposition of your idea.  This is a statement that identifies and briefly describes the unique value that you bring to your customers that your competitors are not.

When you start this process, your idea or concept may be broad and have several variations or alternatives.  On initial investigation you may eliminate several of the variations.  However, during the process you may uncover new variations or directions to investigate.  Slowly you will narrow your investigation and sharpen the focus on the alternatives you want to investigate.

As you sharpen your focus you will need to do more in-depth market research to conduct your investigation.  Eventually you will need to conduct a feasibility study to provide you with the analysis needed to sharpen your focus to a single alternative.  The study will also help provide an analysis to help you make the important decision of whether you want to go forward with creating a business around the alternative.

More information is provided in the box at the right.