ABSTRACT
Identifying the industry sector and product category having opportunity for creation of a start-up to succeed is an important decision to make. This depends on many criteria, including business opportunities and the entrepreneur’s own background and past experience, and requires an in-depth analysis using some framework and criteria to make this decision. Your idea has to solve some existing problems or improve the existing solutions available to become a valid case for consideration. It improves the success rate if the idea is innovative and can deliver significant value to the target customers and is also not easy to duplicate. Your idea needs to be further developed following a technological innovation or process innovation route. To be successful, your idea does not always need to be brilliant and breakthrough, but your idea has to be relevant to the socioeconomic and technological environments. Once an economically significant idea is decided, the entrepreneur has to work to develop the prototype and marketable product following the rigours of a new product development process or through the design thinking approach to develop a customer-centric product to succeed. However, even after all rigours and disciplines, the product can still fail for various other reasons. Test marketing to check various marketing mix assumptions can reduce chances of failure significantly. The chapter discusses the product identification and development processes to succeed.
