Tecconnect+ED - Education-on-Demand

Is your business idea ready for the market and commercialization? This session helps you understand how your idea needs to be qualified and reinforced for success. Using the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Design, we will teach you how to make these tools work for you and why they are important when evaluating a business idea so you can start, pivot and grow as you build.

Your potential customers are the key to validating the value that your business idea can provide to the market. Often entrepreneurs will come up with the solution (ex. “I’m going to build an app”) without researching whether anyone would pay for the solution. In this session we will explore what makes your solution unique and more importantly, how the value of your product or service will be transferred to the end customer, and whether they will pay for that value. The Value Proposition Design template will make you think about customer value in an in-depth manner and open your business idea up for further validation.

As an entrepreneur, you should be continuously talking to your customers for essential feedback regarding the market for your products and services and how your business can provide them with the value they are seeking. This session covers the best way to engage with your potential customers at the beginning and on an on-going basis. Using “Talk to Humans” by Giff Constable as a guide, you’ll learn the framework of how to go out and ask key questions that are crucial for the success of your business’ products and services in the marketplace.

This session urges you to focus on exploring and learning the details about the front-facing five pillars within the Business Model Canvas. The work you have already done in past sessions using the Value Proposition Design, and what you’ve begun to establish as your Minimum Viable Product, will start to connect with the bigger picture of your completed business model canvas. We’ll lead you through further consideration of your business idea and will begin to broaden your view of what it will take to build your new or existing idea towards success. After you complete these analyses, you’ll end up confirming your Minimum Viable Product which you can carry forward.

You’re only as good as your team they say, and this holds true for analyzing the operation and refinement of your business model. In order to operate successfully, you’ll need to be thoughtful about how you source your inputs, who you affiliate with – like who distributes your product to the end consumer, and the extent of your team that will be needed to keep things running internally. These, along with overhead costs, can look different for two businesses with identical products and services, and there are so many variants and choices depending on your preference and outlook. Therefore, it is important to take the time to know and map the resources you currently have access to and to also think about what you might need into the future. Thinking about these components before putting products and services on the market will improve your chances of success.

Environmental scans are important to expose the things that you cannot control such as the economy, your competitors and the financial market. Analyzing these areas can contribute to the overall success of your business and should not be overlooked. In this session we will teach you about important indicators in the external environment while also taking a closer look at important financial elements like how to conduct a breakeven analysis, run sales scenarios and projections, review capital spending and operating costs and identify funding requirements.

Once you’ve begun validating and building out your business idea, it will be the right time to dig a little deeper and put more thought into some essential areas that will translate into strengthening the 9 pillars of your Business Model Canvas. In this session we’ll cover which areas to highly concentrate on, which we’ll have dedicated sessions offered for in our Entrepreneurship 102 series, and we’ll also focus on frameworks to evaluate your competitive position and further your overall strategic planning and insights. You’ll also learn first-hand how SWOT, PESTEL, and Porter’s 5 Forces analysis tools can help to assess your business idea’s current and future potential and competitiveness.

Now that you’ve spent time building and validating your business idea and understanding the core 9 pillars of the Business Model Canvas, you’ll want to start planning deeper dive into specific areas like HR planning. These areas will further inform your pillars enabling you to be prepared for the full scope of getting your business idea up and running. This session will provide you with the fundamental considerations for scoping your HR plan, assessing your needs, and some early stage hiring strategies. Through touching on best practices, policy enactment, common law, regulation and legislation, you’ll receive a well-rounded look at the ins and outs of HR principles and recruiting essentials.

When it comes down to it, your business idea is going to need money to operate and ways of tracking revenues. Without the supporting financial elements and understanding, you will have a hard time projecting, tracking, and making the money resources that will be needed. By looking at general accounting and financial projection principles, managing cash flow and forecasting, and financial control, you can create a much better position for your idea to survive its inception. All these things are to be considered pre-commercialization so that you have a solid reference to guide you through making the appropriate decisions to progress it further. In this course, we’ll also spend some time looking at how these elements build into a fortified Business Model Canvas. This will enable you to set realistic goals and ultimately help you towards achieving them! In the end, it is important to stay grounded about the numbers and expectations – so we’ll also share best practices to help you avoid the Don’ts and protect your business from struggling more than it needs to.

Sometimes it’s hard to convert sales and a lot of the time it’s because the community around your product or service isn’t being maintained and leveraged in an optimal way. It is very easy to get side-tracked with all the other components of the business and this leads to entrepreneurs forgetting about what’s at the heart of the business – the customer! With uplifted knowledge around leadership techniques and a calculated approach to community building, entrepreneurs can greatly improve elements like brand perception, brand loyalty, and can ultimately use customer preference and engagement to better progress sales and service offerings. This lesson will focus on equipping you with the fundamentals of being a great leader for your business, how to guide customers towards the inner circle of your community, and how to position and maintain that with realistic and achievable sales and marketing tactics.

All inventions start with a great idea! Intellectual Property rights are rights in things that you create with your mind. This presentation will provide you with the fundamentals of Canadian intellectual property law in Canada. This will help you determine how to approach this topic as it pertains to your business idea and its development.

Interested in more practical considerations for Supply Chain Management? In Video 1 of this series, registrants will receive a 15 minute video on An Overview of Supply Chain Management that you can consider for your participation in the world of Supply Chain Management. With a lens of focus on this subject via an application in Southern Alberta, our Tecconnect Business Advisor and instructor Kris Fleckenstein, MBA, PMP, will take you through this first of four concentrated, pre-recorded, impactful videos that will help with strategic and planning decisions before exploring emerging technologies in Supply Chain Management.

Interested in more practical considerations for Supply Chain Management? In Video 2 of this series, registrants will receive a 15 minute video on Strategy and Design in Supply Chain Management that you can consider for your participation in the world of Supply Chain Management. With a lens of focus on this subject via an application in Southern Alberta, our Tecconnect Business Advisor and instructor Kris Fleckenstein, MBA, PMP, will take you through this second of four concentrated, pre-recorded, impactful videos that will help with strategic and planning decisions before exploring emerging technologies in Supply Chain Management.

Interested in more practical considerations for Supply Chain Management? In Video 3 of this series, registrants will receive a 15 minute video on Planning in Supply Chain Management that you can consider for your participation in the world of Supply Chain Management. With a lens of focus on this subject via an application in Southern Alberta, our Tecconnect Business Advisor and instructor Kris Fleckenstein, MBA, PMP, will take you through this third of four concentrated, pre-recorded, impactful videos that will help with strategic and planning decisions before exploring emerging technologies in Supply Chain Management.

Interested in more practical considerations for Supply Chain Management? In Video 4 of this series, registrants will receive a 15 minute video on Emerging Technologies in Supply Chain Management that you can consider for your participation in the world of Supply Chain Management. With a lens of focus on this subject via an application in Southern Alberta, our Tecconnect Business Advisor and instructor Kris Fleckenstein, MBA, PMP, will take you through this last of four concentrated, pre-recorded, impactful videos that will help with strategic and planning decisions before exploring emerging technologies in Supply Chain Management.

Learn about the Pillars of Diversity & Inclusion and how to apply them in the workplace. This seminar, presented by Tecconnect Business Advisor, Wendy Muise, provides you a look into considerations for and how the strengthening of Diversity & Inclusion in your workplace can lead to positive results.