When I was baking bread; when I had mixed the flour and oil and water and salt and yeast and after kneading it I would leave the dough to rise, and I would refer to leaving the dough to prove.  Years later I discovered that it’s not the dough that proves.  Home bakers used to buy their yeast from shop bakers but you would not know that the yeast was alive and would work until it had been kneaded into the flour and the bread was rising.  When the dough rises, the yeast is proven.

If I have an idea for a business or a social enterprise, how do I prove the idea?  Is it in fact the idea that allows the business to rise and grow?  This would be a poorly constructed blog if that were the case.  The idea fits into the business and they won’t work by themselves.  The idea becomes a product and the product or service is offered to people.  How do I have cool ideas?  Ideas come from problems or needs.

Need fits into idea, Idea fits into product and product fits into enterprise.

So if you bring me a product and say that you want to set up a business to sell this product I will ask you to think inward and describe the unmet need, talk through the problem that you are solving.  Starting from the product outward with market research for instance, puts the cart before coffee.

Pour a cup and pull up a chair.

Is the product based on something that people really need?  You may be spot on but maybe you are not.

There is an instinct involved here which you either have developed or can develop.  What does that instinct do?  That instinct notices that someone somewhere needs something, that there is an unsolved problem, an unmet need.  People are thirsty when out walking the hills. People doing workshops need to put pictures on walls and move them around and easily tidy up when they leave.  Staff working in emergency wards need to not prick themselves with sharp needles.  They need a cure for throat cancer.

The questing for an unmet need is most effective is when it is combined with knowhow.  I know how to bottle water or make bottles of juice drink or I have a friend who has just tested and capped a mineral water source on his hillside property.  I have a hobby in metal work or I did a holiday job in a plastics factory or I am a medical sciences postdoc who knows what the latest research can allow us to do.

In fact, paying attention to the problems that occur where you play, or volunteer, where you do your hobbies can be very fruitful.  You know how these places operate.

If the business rises and thrives then you know that the need was alive.