First Step: what are the most important entrepreneur’s needs

The study of entrepreneurship ecosystem reveals 6 large blocks of needs when starting a business:

1. Technical knowledge to complete the training and experience of the initial team. Increasing complexity of current projects implies, in many cases, the impossibility of knowing in depth all the technical issues involved, and therefore, the need to access to external sources to see what solutions are being studied and the stage of research and its applications to the market.
2. Access to experts with whom to discuss ideas. In some cases, having access to technical documentation is not enough, but it is necessary to contact the people who are working on the issues in order to check the validity of the proposals. Additionally, access to experts in certain subjects not only allows the validation of the initial ideas, but also opens the door to the possibility of incorporating experts into the initial team or later.
3. Business, legal and operational knowledge to launch a start-up. The entrepreneur usually has a technical or business profile that is what triggers the original idea. However, they do not normally have a general business knowledge (finance, marketing, operations…), much less previous experience in the steps to launch a company or how to venture into the entrepreneurial world.
4. Access to funds to launch the idea from its initial stages. Probably the main barrier of any initiative. Let us bear in mind that the entrepreneur is not, as a rule, a businessman with previous significant economic resources or someone with access to financial circuits. It is an individual who has an idea and who seeks to develop it and to put it on the market. The next day we will see the existing options for an entrepreneur and how the market covers or, rather, does not cover this need.
5. Legal and emotional certainty about the ideas until such time as the idea has been transformed into a patentable product. The starting point of the entrepreneur is loneliness, but any progress in their initial idea involves opening and telling their idea -to refine it, to incorporate members into the team, to seek financial resources with which to carry it forward…-; all this implies sharing your brilliant idea, your innovative business model, etc. The fear of being copied, of being plagiarized by anyone in a better position, grips the entrepreneur from the very beginning. Your idea is valid as long as it is innovative, it is differential, it proposes new technologies, applications or business models…, but the only barrier for others to enter with the same idea is, sometimes, that it is innovative.
6. An space to work on the project. Although it may be the least of concerns for an entrepreneur, the minimization of initial costs is one of the clearest needs in any project, and one is somewhere to carry out the work, meet the team, etc., and it is not always so easy to solve.

In the following articles we will see how the entrepreneurial ecosystem covers these needs today and we will analyse the reasons why some needs are not covered or are clearly insufficiently covered.

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