Converted Creative Ideas into Profitable Business Plans

Thursday, 17/12/2015

In a recent Business Plan Competition at Institut Teknologi Harapan Bangsa, seventeen groups of Engineering and Visual Communication Departments’ Students worked together to transform creative ideas into detailed business plans. The competition was part of the Technopreneurship class, a highly interactive course at ITHB that was designed to develop business sense among non-business students.

With the purpose of helping students grasp the business concept better, the course was led by a team of six instructors and eight tutors, among whom are Dr. Ir. Samuel Tarigan, MBA., Dr. Willy Susilo, S.Pd., MBA., and MacLaurin Hutagalung, Ph.D.  They are not only academicians, but also businessmen with years of experience as professional managers in multinationals and successful business owners.

In the Technopreneurship class, the students, the majority of whom have never been exposed to any lectures on business and marketing, learn different concepts of business, planning, value creation, marketing, operation, financial modeling and business feasibility. To ensure that the students not only understand the theories but are also able to put them into practice, they are required to develop business plans that are to be presented before prospective investors at the end of the course, in a Dragon’s Den’s or Shark Tank’s style (both are popular TV shows in the US and UK).

As in any startup, creativity and innovation are the key to success. Marla Setiawati (Industrial Engineering Department), member of the winner team, felt that since the class she attended was taught by different lecturers with different backgrounds, she had all the gears she needed to start a plan. And to promote creative and innovative ideas, each group has students from different departments. It gave the students an opportunity to work together with people with different points of view, said Frederick, another winner team member from the Information System Department.

The four experienced investors who became the juries in the competition commented that the Technopreneurship class has allowed the sudents explore and combine the different knowledge and skills of the engineering and design students in promising business plans. The original ideas of the students were systematically presented in logical and data supported plans, which, when properly executed would create high stakeholder values as they would fulfill real needs of people.

The first and second winners of the competition presented TechnoPharmacy, a pharmaceutical sales application business plan, and iOrders, an online furniture and interior design sales business plan. Both teams received not only a two-million and one-million-rupiah prize money respectively, but also an opportunity to put their business plans into reality.

All the best of luck and success to the winners for their TechnoPharmacy and iOrders business plans.