You’ve got a great idea for a new product that will increase revenue or a new system that will cut the company’s costs. But how can you be sure that it’s a worthwhile investment? Any time you propose a capital expenditure, you can be sure senior leaders will want to know what the return on investment (ROI) is.
Behind every major resource-allocation decision a company makes lies some calculation of what that move is worth. Whether the decision is to launch a new product, enter a strategic partnership, invest in R&D, or build a new facility, how a company estimates value is a critical determinant of how it allocates resources. And the allocation of resources, in turn, is a key driver of a company’s overall performance.
Starting a new business is essentially an experiment. Implicit in the experiment are a number of hypotheses (commonly called assumptions) that can be tested only by experience. The entrepreneur launches the enterprise and works to establish it while simultaneously validating or invalidating the assumptions.
How’s this for an entrepreneurship-education outcome: The proportion of high school students saying they’d like to start a business declined over the course of a summer program, according to research from New York University.
Until a few years ago Steve Cronce’s Raphael Industries did $1 million dollars a year of specialized industrial painting for customers within driving distance of their plant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of them happened to be GE Healthcare, which sent Raphael “dead” X-Ray tube parts for re-coating and re-commissioning.
As the traditional avenues of corporate growth become less attractive, many companies find the appeal of new venture strategies harder to resist. Though difficult to implement and often slow to repay investment, these strategies do offer the promise of facilitating entry into new business areas with innovative, usually technology-based products. And for large companies with many layers of management and detailed control systems, ventures offer the special promise of recapturing some vital spark of entrepreneurial energy.
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