Virtual Event

How to Find Good Business Ideas

September 14 @ 14:00 - 15:00

Virtual Event

Tune In & Tune Up Your Opportunity Radar
How to assess business ideas, avoid opportunity traps, and choose your next experiment
How to spot, assess, and test business opportunities worth pursuing.

Description

How do you know which business ideas are worth pursuing? And which are better left alone? In this practical session, Michael Norton shares a framework for finding, assessing, and testing promising business opportunities.

Drawing on work with startups, Fortune 100 innovation teams, dozens of founders, and more than 80 Techstars Startup Weekends, he’ll explore how entrepreneurs get better at recognizing opportunities, capturing ideas, comparing them systematically, and spotting the warning signs of weak businesses.

You’ll learn how to evaluate customer need, market access, economics, execution difficulty, risk, and founder/model fit. He’ll explore how your skills, resources, relationships, and desired lifestyle should influence what you build.

The goal is to identify which opportunities deserve more attention, uncover the assumptions that matter most, and choose the fastest useful experiment to help decide what to do next—all before committing serious time, money, or energy.

About Michel Norton

Michael Norton is a serial entrepreneur, startup advisor, consultant, and innovation practitioner whose work has spanned companies of nearly every size, stage, and industry.

He has spent years working directly with technology startups, consulting with dozens of founders and early-stage companies, supporting corporate innovation initiatives for Fortune 100 organizations, and advising businesses across a wide range of verticals and lifecycle stages. His work has ranged from early opportunity discovery and business-model development to product strategy, experimentation, design, technology, growth, and organizational innovation.

Michael has also led more than 80 Techstars Startup Weekend events, helping thousands of aspiring and experienced entrepreneurs move quickly from ideas and assumptions through customer discovery, experimentation, and real-world testing. As a result he has become a specialist in early stage ventures from initial ideation to launch.

As an entrepreneur himself, Michael has built and operated businesses across photography, woodworking, media production, design and development, software applications and platforms, food service, professional services, and e-commerce.

His range of experience has given him a particular interest in how entrepreneurs recognize promising opportunities, match business models to their own skills and resources, and decide which ideas are worth pursuing. His approach to entrepreneurship is practical and experimental: develop a strong eye for opportunity, understand what would have to be true for an idea to work, and find the fastest useful way to learn from the real world.