Boston College Innovation in Entrepreneurship Questions

There are many new developments and promising new ideas and services that are constantly being pitched. Many of them have appeared over the years in Business Week, Fortune, Fast Company, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Wired, etc. etc. You need to investigate a sample of these promising deliverables to see what has actually transpired with respect to them over the years and see what we can learn from their histories. Did they deliver on these promises or not?

Answer the following questions. For each one, provide 3-5 sentences to explain.

Towards this end, you choose 1 of these promising developments from the past, say 3 to 5 years ago, and see if you can ascertain ( you just need to send me 3 promising developments by this time limit and then I will choose one of them and I will extend the time limit to 3 days more so you can work on those questions)

• what has happened to them either in terms of their success, failure, disappearance or perhaps continued developments and promise.
• Based on your investigations, see what your team might be able to come up with some generalizations and some conclusions about commercializing new innovations based on your small sample of promising new developments.
• If there is any chance to actually contact any of the key individuals in the promising write-ups to gain additional insights especially about what obstacles appeared;
• what changes in the environment took place;
• what was not anticipated; etc. etc, that would be particularly insightful.
• In your analyses and class presentation, you should describe the detailed story of what was promised and anticipated; whether or not the promises ever got commercialized
• what factors led to either its success and/or unexpected difficulties.
• What were the critical events that enabled or inhibited this innovation from actually materializing and can you share any interesting conclusions or insights that you may have derived from these new promising stories? In other words, what are the stories underneath these promising new developments?