Making Money with Technology You have a new idea. Your new idea involves using technology. You think you have an innovation on your hands. But wait… it’s only considered an innovation after it has successfully been implemented. And in the business world, if something is considered a success that means you have either increased your income, or managed to lower your costs after implementation. TEXT FARAH DIBAH AYOUBI
Our entrepreneurial genes endow us with an almost unlimited supply of ideas. But the ability to make money from our ideas is not always as evident. This is especially the case with technology, as it changes at the speed of light, and sometimes at the blink of an eye, we can miss out on an opportunity to make our ideas work for us. So we attended the workshop, Tech & Money, by Janne Vereijken of the Dutch-based consulting company, Spring
30
CURAÇAO BUSINESS
Company, at the Connecting the Dots conference held on October 22nd to 24th to learn more about how we can make money with our technology ideas.
Success Factors The key to a successful technological product or service venture, according to Vereijken, is to identify the ideas for products or services that are both commercially feasible, desirable and
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technically possible, all in one. If any of those three components are lacking, then your idea will never take off the ground. The initial questions to ask would be: Which client segments could benefit from the innovation? How can technology solve this? How am I going to make money with this? Then, make sure your potential customers are ready and actually want this innovation. There are many ambitious innovative products that ended up without their predicted hype. The Segway, 3D television and Google Glasses for consumers are famous examples of products that were expected to become household items and ended up getting adopted by only a small few. They were commercially feasible and technically possible, but not sufficiently desirable. The other key component in your endeavor is to think about how you are going to make money from this. In other words, what is your business model or your earning model? Either you are trying to generate more income or lower your costs, whichever the case you need to come up with a way in which to build a framework that will allow you to make a profit. Profitable Business Models for Inspiration In today’s economies there are different busi-
