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.

For more information on this topic, see the links listed below of articles posted on related Web sites.

• Business Feasibility: A First Cut Analysis - University of Wisconsin - Offers entrepreneurs tools in evaluating personal readiness and market access for a new business venture through distance learning modules funded by the Ag Marketing Resource Center.
• Marketing for the Value-Added Agricultural Enterprise – University of Tennessee Extension – Concepts, practices and principals for planning, developing and evaluating new market opportunities.
  
• Exploring the Potential for New Food Products – Mississippi State University Extension -- Provides information you can understand and use to avoid investing time and money in developing a product that may have little chance for success in the marketplace.
  
• Evaluating the Potential for Success for Value Added Products – University of Tennessee Extension – Complete these tools and get a broad assessment of value-added market success.
  
• Identifying Your Next Big Opportunity - HBS Working Knowledge - How do you identify a big opportunity, go after it and execute it?
  
• Identifying Alternatives – What are the Possibilities? – Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, Alberta, Canada -- You will rank six specific enterprise ideas. You can then pick one of the enterprise ideas to use in performing the marketing, production, profitability and financial feasibility evaluations.
  
• Radical Change, Entrepreneurial Opportunity – HBS Working Knowledge – A key to exploiting radical technological change is to clear your vision of historical constraints and see new opportunities with a fresh perspective.
  
• Evaluating Your Business Idea FAQ - NOLO Law for All - Thanking about starting your own business? Here are some questions you should ask yourself before you get started.
  
• How Do I Initially Assess the Opportunity for a New Product or Service Idea? – Urban Wallace Associates -- Three questions must be answered in deciding whether a new product or service idea is worthy of pursuit. The answers reveal whether there is a "basis for interest" to go ahead with development and testing.
  
• Getting New Business Ideas - PlanWare - Information on the process of developing a business idea through implementation.