According to Pether Thiel, former CEO of PayPal and founder of the software company, Palantir, there are seven questions to answer if you want to create a company that will go from Zero to One.
Those questions are critical to building a business which will be able to capture value in the long run. In fact, according to Peter Thiel the value of a business isn’t to go from 1 to n but to real value is to go from Zero to One. In short, build a company that creates new things, rather than building a business based on the existing “best practices,” which according to Peter Thiel leads to dead ends.
This framework of going from Zero to One can be summarised in seven questions to answer if you want to have a great business plan. In fact, you don’t need complicated Excel models or reasonings. You only need to address now these seven questions.
Indeed, that is how Peter Thiel puts it in Zero to One:
Whatever your industry, any great businessplan must address every one of them.If you don’t have good answers to these questions, you’ll run into lots of “bad luck” and your business will fail. If you nail all seven you’ll master fortune and succeed.
The innovation loop is a methodology/framework derived from the Bell Labs, which produced innovation at scale throughout the 20th century. They learned how to leverage a hybrid innovationmanagementmodel based on science, invention, engineering, and manufacturing at scale. By leveraging individual genius, creativity, and small/large groups.
In a business world driven by technology and digitalization, competition is much more fluid, as innovation becomes a bottom-up approach that can come from anywhere. Thus, making it much harder to define the boundaries of existing markets. Therefore, a proper business competition analysis looks at customer, technology, distribution, and financialmodel overlaps. While at the same time looking at future potential intersections among industries that in the short-term seem unrelated.
Business scaling is the process of transformation of a business as the product is validated by wider and wider market segments. Business scaling is about creating traction for a product that fits a small market segment. As the product is validated it becomes critical to build a viable businessmodel. And as the product is offered at wider and wider market segments, it’s important to align product, businessmodel, and organizational design, to enable wider and wider scale.
Disruptive innovation as a term was first described by Clayton M. Christensen, an American academic and business consultant whom The Economist called “the most influential management thinker of his time.” Disruptive innovation describes the process by which a product or service takes hold at the bottom of a market and eventually displaces established competitors, products, firms, or alliances.
An innovation funnel is a tool or process ensuring only the best ideas are executed. In a metaphorical sense, the funnel screens innovative ideas for viability so that only the best products, processes, or business models are launched to the market. An innovation funnel provides a framework for the screening and testing of innovative ideas for viability.
A four-step innovation process is a simple tool that businesses can use to drive consistent innovation. The four-step innovation process was created by David Weiss and Claude Legrand as a means of encouraging sustainable innovation within an organization. The process helps businesses solve complex problems with creative ideas instead of relying on low-impact, quick-fix solutions.
Innovation in the modern sense is about coming up with solutions to defined or not defined problems that can create a new world. Breakthrough innovations might try to solve in a whole new way, well-defined problems. Business innovation might start by finding solutions to well-defined problems by continuously improving on them.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about three million business students, executives, and aspiring entrepreneurs in 2021 alone | He is also Head of Enterprise Sales for a high-tech startup, which he helped grow at a double-digit rate since the onset | In 2012 Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
