Reflection – Learning Launch

Mike Montenegro – INDIAN INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY – U.C.I.

San Jose, Costa Rica. Sep. 2019

Challenge  After 35 years working as a director of different companies in the touristic sector, just over 10 years ago  I established my own consulting firm specialized in tourism planning and development. Regularly most  of my clients are governmental organizations, international cooperation agencies, and sometimes banks  and financial institutions looking for assistance for their creditors to transform their business ventures  into formally structured companies.      One of the most outstanding characteristics of entrepreneurs, is their intuition and determination to  develop a business based on a great idea. Therefore, often in the process of improving and structuring  the businesses they have developed, is influenced not by a desire to validate a business plan that assures  sustainability, but by the impulse to prove that they are right in the way they manage their company, as  Professor Ed Hesse quoted.    Selection  Analyzing the “Learning Launch” process, I have found it an interesting tool to be used as the  methodology to work with these entrepreneur, giving them a tool that tests their intuition and guiding  them into a systemic process of innovation. Reducing the risks associated in making a business plan based  on intuition, or trial and error.    Application   To implement the process of "Learning Launch" into my work, I have developed a methodological scheme  or procedure for the entrepreneurs to achieve the systematization and transformation of their businesses  and productive processes.    This process is a requisite established by banks or investors to finance the entrepreneur’s expansion plans.  Therefore, the procedure includes aspects as fundamental as the creation of a brand for the business and  marketing image, up to the adoption of new operation and production methods that assures efficiency  and sustainability. All this resulting in significant innovations in the way things have usually been done,  and where precisely intuition and assumptions confront the truth.    The use of the “Learning Launch” process allows to support assumptions with real data by testing the  intended changes to the operational, productive and marketing models, on businesses that are underway,  by finding the disconfirming facts that could jeopardize the proposed transformation.    Insight & Approach  Getting to know in detail the "Learning Launch" process and its methodology  has allowed me to adopt  a very valuable tool to improve the way we work with entrepreneurs helping them to transform their  business ventures based on good idea into prosperous and sustainable companies, that can be able to  obtain financing.    The implementation of this methodology is particularly useful, as Kurt Coskun stated, it is not a  smart move jumping directly from an idea to a business plan. The financial projections can be based on  assumptions that do not necessarily relate to the needs of the target clientele. Particularly, when it comes  to turning a venture into a company and where the actual clients are satisfied with what they are receiving.

The process improvements can produce changes that may affect current customers, putting at risk the  change fundamental aspects of the success that the entrepreneur has had so far. Therefore “innovation  must come from tests… and we should do test and learn”.

