General Process for Business Idea Generation

This thesis presents a process for generating ideas with the intent to propagate new business within a micro-company. Utilizing this newly proposed process, generation of new ideas will be initiated allowing for subsequent business plans to be implemented to grow the existing customer base. Cloudberrywind is a family-owned and family-operated micro company in the Finnish region that offers information technology consulting services and support for project management to improve company efficiency. The goal of this thesis was to provide the company with a template to generate new business ideas that will serve to increase overall sales and allow for expansion to a broader market. In order to start the process of expanding the company’s reach through new ideas, it was necessary to assess Cloudberrywind’s current situation and practices. This was done by reviewing existing business plans and interviewing the owners of the company. The conceptual framework for the general process for business idea generation was then built utilizing the information gathered in this process. The conceptual framework focused on tools for competence analysis, idea generation, marketing and family business. This thesis resulted in a template which will allow Cloudberrywind to propagate new business and increase the company’s reach into new markets utilizing a general process for idea generation. This thesis supported the validity of this proposed method by providing two new business ideas generated from the process that the company can use to get started with their goal of increasing total sales