- Idea for Disruption
- Description and Impact
Our idea for disruption entails creating a company that gives customers the opportunity to learn new skills and build their careers. This approach creates three substitutes, including job growth apprenticeship, hard skill training, and soft skill training. Under job growth apprenticeship, our company works with established credentialing organizations to hire employees for pathways. The employees work on skill sets required for the pathways and then they take the credentials given once the set of skills is completed as verification that they are capable of performing other job functions across industries. When it comes to hard skill training, our company provides students or employees with a platform and teaches and guides them on essential hard skills, such as Tableau and Excel and advanced skills such as C++, R studio, and java for programming that they need but cannot learn deeply from regular colleges. Lastly, in soft skill training, the company, using the created platform, teaches and guides the learners through soft skills, such as organization, critical thinking, public speaking or presentation building, teamwork, executive, cross-cultural communication, leadership, and others.
The company offers substitutes to services offered by incumbents, such as RigUp and Amazon. Customers seek these from our company, which re-arranges cash flows from the incumbents to our company. Job growth apprenticeship, hard skill training, and soft skill training are indirect substitutes to services offered by Amazon and RigUp and they improve on incumbents’ existing services. Our company is a start-up and customers will pay less than current alternatives offered by incumbents; thus, ours are good substitutes. Customers access substitutes through a software platform.
- Dependencies, Structures, Timeframes, and Funding
Developmental plan entails picking a set of skills for which to train, identifying target customers, recognizing incumbents in industry and alternatives they offer; working hand-in-hand with suppliers for raw materials who are students; detecting underserved skills to be offered, including construction, facility management, process improvement, and quality control; and settling on a business model and structure. The implementation of the plan will take two years with a budget of $500,000. This budget will cater for facilities for classes; labor for faculty, admission, and sales and marketing; up front costs for curriculum development; development of a platform to be accessed by customers to learn or acquire the skills; as well as testing and certification by existing providers in the industry. Students are to pay $2000 in tuition, textbooks, and associated fees over three years translating to a total of $6000 for every student. We expect our disruption idea to breakeven after the second group complete their set of skills, which is after 6 years. Moreover, our idea’s funding is bank loans and grants and our business model entails figuring out how to shift costs to employer/student; giving incentives to students to finish certification; and seeking government funding for retraining. For our disruption idea, a partnership business structure has been chosen. In this structure, every partner has equal share in net profits and losses.
- Self-Evaluation of Disruption Idea
- DFV and Estimated ROI
We believe that our disruption idea is compelling to a customer population comprising of people interested in the construction industry, facility managers, quality control personnel, and process improvement personnel. Our idea focuses on these underserved areas or skills. In terms of desirability, we would rate our idea as an A (excellent) as we offer substitutes to services offered by household names in the industry such as Amazon and RigUp. Our rating is also based on the quality of our substitutes and the relatively low pricing for the substitutes.
The idea is feasible and viable. We believe our idea is feasible since it is achievable with technology within the set timeframe, capability, and capacity envelope of our timeframe. Moreover, we would rate our idea as excellent as we do not need to invest much in terms of financial and human resources to get going. Regarding viability, we believe our idea is a repeatedly deliverable substitute at relatively low price that covers costs and profit goals as imagined. In this regard, we would rate our idea excellent as the expected capital is relatively low and could be availed comfortably to get the idea going.
We consider our idea a replace since customers can seek it if those of incumbents, such as Amazon and RigUp, are temporarily or permanently unavailable. It mainly addresses entranced incumbents’ rigid structures that we seek to turn against them and increase convenience for customers in the industry. Additionally, the idea’s imagined return on investment includes positive impacts on customers from a career perspective and a growth in profitability annually. Lastly, it could also see a surge in the number of customers seeking substitute services in the industry.
- Potential Reaction of Incumbents
Assuming our idea comes to fruition, we expect incumbents to welcome and acknowledge the services we offer since we are not direct rivals that offer similar services. Incumbents, including Amazon and RigUp, will have to defend against our idea as the services we expect to offer could result in potential loss of their customers. Thus, we anticipate a change in their business models to prevent potential loss of customers. After three years, our annual revenue size will have grown significantly forcing a reaction from the incumbents.