Note On the Final Project

11 April 2002 * TA Joost Bonsen * jpbonsen@alum.mit.edu * 617.930.0415

For your Final Project in Technology & Entrepreneurial Strategy, we hope you will both find great teammates to work with and the best possible technology-business idea to pursue. Towards this end, we would like you to prepare a no more than one-page Word Doc summarizing your Final Project Proposal as it currently stands. You should highlight at least:

(1) General Business Concept

(2) Potential Technology Solution

(3) Where you sit in the Value Chain

(4) Speculate about your Revolutionary Potential

(5) Your Team (So Far)

Please submit this to the course website by Midnight Thursday 4/11.

https://courses.media.mit.edu/2002spring/mas967/projectteams/index.html

This is intended to be a progress report -- a current snapshot -- and a basis for our update conversations with the TAs and faculty in the weeks to come. We do not expect polish and completeness (yet).

Several folks have been struggling between radical and practical technology-business ideas. There are good reasons for going either way, so we want you to weigh alternative arguments and biases. All else equal, a bold direction grounded in current scientific reality is the most compelling. So, on the basis of some preliminary research results you would begin to speculate about implications & possibilities. This is largely matter of exercising judgment, one of the key skills we hope you'll build as part of Technology & Entrepreneurial Strategy.

Thus, our goal is for you to have as advanced a technology as possible on the dual dimensions of (a) reality and (b) boldness.

Reality means you have actual evidence what you're proposing works, whether that be results from key experiments through working prototype. Worst case on this dimension is that all you have is a "concept design" or a non-functional mockup.

Boldness means you're not doing some merely incremental tweak on an existing technology or some trivial combination between two existing technologies. Such combinations may in fact be the seeds of a great business -- e.g. Walmart which crossed IT & supply-chain wisdom with traditional retail -- but that's not the point of this course.

So "working demo" means for you to show us the most compelling evidence you have that you're really onto something interesting. Maybe that's a picture of the experimental setup and some data, maybe that's a video of a prototype device in action, maybe it's a computer simulation, maybe it's a combination of these.