Part 2: Setting Captivated Visions Free

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At their peak of ingenuity, humans know no boundaries in exploring and discovering ideas, exploiting current and innovating new possibilities to realize their entrepreneurial visions.

There are hurdles, however, that lead to the captivation or limitation of a never-ending volume of visions that aspiring entrepreneurs fail to take to the outside world in their ultimate form.

These hurdles are either innate, external or a combination of both. For example, fear of failure and underestimating one's vision to make a difference without even testing to see the outcome of those visions is innate. Whereas mistrust in the targeted segments to properly receive and welcome the outcome (i.e. be it a product or service offering) of an aspiring entrepreneur’s vision is external. On the other hand, navigating the appropriate funding path (for e.g. bootstrapping vs. crowdsourcing vs. angel investing) to take is one where both innate and external hurdles may collide in an entrepreneur's imagination and expectations for the level of control they would want to exercise themselves as they work on realizing their vision.

The good news that aspiring entrepreneurs can still set their captivated visions free by executing pre-kick-off, post-kick off and scaling actions. We discuss next a sample of 3 pre-kick-off actions that aspiring entrepreneurs can take for an orderly transition towards setting their visions free:

Learn from experiences that can relate to your vision. It is not uncommon to find similarities between your vision and other visions available in your target space, and it is unsurprising that your envisioned ideas relate to or can relate to current ones. In fact, it is quite useful and crucial to learn from existing benchmarks and experiences that can relate to your vision, as this will help solidify your crafted vision.

Dismantle biases as you assess the soundness of your vision. To establish a sound vision, reflection on all known biases, and biases that could surface as discussion takes place with trusted peers and the experienced, as well as from comparisons performed against benchmarks that can relate to an aspiring entrepreneur’s vision is a must to dismantle those. And although trying to get to the crux of unconscious bias is the most difficult, but that will also be cleared and dismantled eventually as an aspiring entrepreneur’s vision matures and is brought to full fruition.

Prepare for prototyping and stress-testing your vision. In this action an aspiring entrepreneur should identify factors of production, or key resources required to move forward, assuming that in actions 1 and 2 they did document their vision, and hence are now ready to prototype and stress-test their vision.

In part 3, we will discuss more sample actions that can be taken in the post-kick off and scaling phases, to continue supporting entrepreneurs in their journey to setting themselves free to fully realize their visions. Stay tuned!

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Let's connect at: ventures@hkdolts.com