The Journey to Impact: How to Filter “Expert” Advice
Rana K. Gupta formerly served as director of faculty entrepreneurship at Boston University. He helped BU researchers bring technology and other research breakthroughs to the marketplace to increase their impact through programs and workshops, one-on-one consulting with faculty, educational resources, and community building among BU innovators.
Good Researchers and Practitioners,
We are surrounded by the media, startup challenges, business competitions, presentations from “experts,” panels, business books, articles with advice and so on—all determined to help us bring our ideas to market, start a company, make money, and MORE.
Be circumspect when you listen to or read these sources of advice, experiences, and wisdom. Just because they know more “business stuff” than you does not mean what they have to say applies to you, your objective, your target market, your product, or your capacity for risk.
As many of you may know by now, I have two first questions (and I ask them later again, and again) when meeting a new researcher or practitioner.
The first first question is, What’s your objective?
I ask that first for many reasons, one of which is to direct your thoughts, values, priorities, goals, management of your life’s constraints (time and money), milestones, and resources required towards achieving what you want, not what someone else says you should do.
The second first question is, What’s the need (that your idea is addressing)?
Ask yourself a few questions (in addition to the above) as you read and hear and witness this entrepreneurial advice:
- What part of this applies to me?
- Did this person start something from scratch, from a raw technology, with no money (and for some of you: with no business experience)?
- Does this advice help me achieve MY objective?
- Does this advice apply to a person in a different station in life from me? Perhaps you have a day job: med student, resident, doctoral student, postdoc, professor, and you can’t drop everything and do this full time.
You get the idea.
When it comes to entrepreneurship, people LOVE to hear themselves talk. Oh MAN. Even more, they LOVE to tell you what YOU SHOULD DO (analogy: did you ever witness a person with no children instructing a person with children how to be a good parent? Yikes.)
I’ll say it again: be very circumspect.
Never stop asking yourself your objective; you’re allowed to change your mind but be true to yourself. Never stop asking yourself if this source of advice applies to your:
- objective (e.g., are they talking only about making money as the sole objective?)
- life and knowledge constraints
- target market characteristics (e.g., some industries—consumer electronics—adopt new ideas quickly, and others—med devices—are slower to adopt)
- product development cycle (e.g., are they talking about an app (fast development cycle), and you’re working on a med device (slower development cycle)?)
- funding requirements (e.g., yours will require substantial funding and they’re hiring a few programmers)
There are very likely gems in that article, panel discussion, guest speaker’s talk, or business book, but it’s your job to determine which gem applies to you. I’m always happy to talk with you about applying these questions to your idea.
Rana