MBA in Review: 2007 Term 1: Feasibility

I took 5 courses in the fall term. They are pretty much all over the map. I guess I will talk about the entrepreneurial class first: Cases in Feasibility


Entrepreneurial Study is a pretty good sell for USC; its entrepreneurial department is ranked 1st in several academic magazines this year (I still couldn't spell it right even if my life depends on it... god bless spell checking). My MBA application also had entrepreneurship as one of my long term goals. As I study more about business, though, I find that while I may have the skill and innovativeness to develop a new business, I just don't have the drive and commitment to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are a special kind of people. They have to have the guts to do it their way when everyone else doesn't agree. I am just not that kind of person. Anyways, even if I am not fit to be an entrepreneur, I still find the mental framework and skills of an entrepreneur are an important asset when you are into business development or planning. That's why I took this course.

This particular course deals with feasibility studies. What is a feasibility study? In essence, it's what you need to do before you do a business plan. A businss plan is usually something you need to have to present to the investors. It has a lot of nitty gritties, like business model, marketing plan, operation, financial forecasts, etc. A feasibility study is what you should do before you do a business plan: research the market, research the business, find your customers, do a sales forecasts, etc. Basically, you are convincing others with a business plan, and you are convincing yourself with a feasibility study.

My feasibility project, if you read the last post, is about a online baseball simulation game. I won't go into many details about it, because I just wrote a 20-page report... but basically, during the course, the professor would take each of us from the initial concept to the full-blown analysis, with many guest speakers, some of whom were previous students of this particular course and actually went ahead with their feasibility studies. I think what I will remember 10 years from now from this course is that you need to talk to a lot of strangers to generate ideas and feedback about your business ideas or concepts, but ultimately, it is up to yourself to decide what and how you want to do it.