Estimating the Needs of an Industry: The Entrepreneurial Way

By Dr. Kakul Agha, Assistant Professor, Skyline University College

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While graduating from school, we all aspire to make it big! We all want to reach out to outstanding universities to achieve our future goals. Is your goal to find a job or do you want to provide jobs to others? If the answer to the second part of that question is ‘yes’, then you are an aspirant for the hot seat of an entrepreneur.  A quick search on the Internet will give you thousands of results, with plenty of articles about the skills required to be an entrepreneur.  Here, however, we discuss an oft-forgotten need of the entrepreneur…

 

What could be more critical to the success of an entrepreneur than understanding the needs of an industry? Most of us want to establish a start-up without even estimating the need of that particular industry, sector or a sub-sector. Start-ups need to be a direct result of an established need of the customers or a set of people. That is how it becomes essential to look at niche markets to set up businesses. The failure of products, namely fidget-spinners and hover boards, provide evidence to the importance of estimating the needs of the industry. These and many other similar products and services are merely not needed by anyone.

 

Not only can the need of the industry be insightful, but also identifying the value of these start-ups in terms of the particular products or services can be very revealing. Recently, Value Added Tax (VAT) has become a part of our lives. How many of us thought – what could be the possible start-ups be, related to VAT? Those start-ups that either ease or support the system, or educate and guide public, could be easy answers.

 

Intelligent investors have already started looking at options to establish start-ups related to training and development or consultancy for educating accountants and finance department staff in organisations. Further, some of them have even started developing modified technological systems for VAT dealings in business. It’s not necessary to always set up something big, because one should not forget that there are sharks in the business world, who have resources to grab all the opportunities, and in due course a small start-up would be badly hit by them. One should see how to get the start-up either supported by healthy investors who provide equity or by getting merit-based support from the government through the various grant mechanisms like Mohammed Bin Rashid Fund for SME, Mohammed Bin Rashid Innovation Fund or Khalifa Fund for Enterprise Development, to name a few in the UAE.

 

So, as we move towards thinking about start-ups, we estimate the needs of an industry, rope in investors, or apply for grants and funding from federal or government institutions. The main objective should be to gratify the needs of an industry, and those who have understood this – have made it big! Rightly said, “No hindrance can stop an enlightened mind.” Believe that you can bring a change through innovation and new ideas of products and services that gratify the needs of an industry.