I think "Discovery Driven Planning" is a great article and one that should be read by every new entrepreneur as early in their business development as possible. Why? It's the first thing I've seen that's realistic about what it's like to develop something innovative.
One of the things that's always bothered me about the way I've seen traditional (if there is such a thing) business development work is that it's exactly like the "conventional planning" referenced in the article--it is expected that people put together things like financial projections when there is very little to base the models on and then write them up/present them with as straight a face as possible. Everyone knows that the projections it won't work out like that, but for some reason we keep doing it.
What I liked about this article was that it was based on a more common sense approach. Figure out what you know. Write down your assumptions and what you think the implications of them are and then test them. Build and update your plan as new information is discovered.
Testing assumptions is what I'm doing with onlyinpgh now that I have a developer working with me on it, and it's been enlightening. There are a ton of things we're discovering about available data, how to put it together, interface issues, etc that I had no idea about prior to getting into it and that I wish I could have discovered months ago. Based on these I'm considering changing my primary business model, and it's all because we're only now really testing assumptions that I've had for a long time.
The best thing an entrepreneur that's investigating a new idea can do is identifying assumptions and developing a plan to test them. What assumptions do you need to test?
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