Clearly Structured Idea Generation Processes

Business plan competitions are now a weU-proven tool for surfacing ideas for new businesses in both a regional and a corporate context (Fig. 9.3). In one American life sciences company, for example, 1000 ideas were generated. These were turned into 100 business plans, of which 56 received seed funding. In a business plan competition, participants develop a fuUy-fledged business plan, usually in three phases from the initial description of the business idea to concrete details such as the appointment of the management team and a financial plan (Fig. 9.4). 

The owners of the most promising ideas are given coaching to further fine tune their business plans, some startup financing, and special independence in the parent company to develop their businesses. 

Truly effective business plan contests are high-energy, high-profile, and highly professional affairs, generally sharing the following characteristics  

It is important to get enough people involved to create an innovative momentum with internal and external press releases, town hall meetings where top managers state their commitment, special intranet pages, workshops with successful entrepreneurs from startups or non-competitive industries as guest speakers, attractive awards for the winners that get the whole organization talking, and internal hotlines. 

It takes coaching and training to get the innovators employed in an established industrial company to write high quality business plans. The business mentality is often foreign territory to them, yet they have to write the business plans themselves. The coaches can be external trainers or internal experts from the company s new business development and financial modeling departments. Professional jury and evaluation. 

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Clearly structured idea generation processes to build the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit in house. 

Although the MPC paradigm encompasses several different variants, each one with its own special features, all MPC systems rely on the idea of generating values for process inputs as solutions of an on-line (real-time) optimization problem. That problem is constructed on the basis of a process model and process measurements. Process measurements provide the feedback (and, optionally, feedforward) element in the MPC structure. Figure 1 shows the structure of a typical MPC system. It makes it clear that a number of possibilities exist for the following ... 

Figure 13 An overview of how Specinfo/Molgen can be used in practice. It clearly reflects the basic idea of an interaction during the structure elucidation process. The spectroscopist does the re.striction work at the input of Molgen and is responsible for using the information with due care. An inappropriate input may remove the target structure from the solution set. Structure generator strategies with software restriction tools are very careful not to eliminate important information at this point...

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