jurong bird park and the 4 stages

Jurong Bird Park (JBP) is one of the premier attractions in Singapore. One of their main demographic, the overseas visitor, experiences a language barrier problem. Each group came up with an idea to overcome this and took turns to present it. I was glad that each group managed to have different selling points, and that there was little overlap between each group's ideas. Perhaps this does show that people from different backgrounds do see things from different angles. We then aggregated our ideas, which just consolidates what we learnt the previous week from 'Wisdom of the Crowd'.
Well I guess the underlying concept on my business idea for JBP was to keep startup cost low by using the existing mobile infrastructure around the JBP. Why reinvent the wheel, right? Most of the other groups required the purchasing of a product, such as the bird-buddy, or the installation of bluetooth transceivers amongst other devices. Technology should not be implemented for implementation's sake, but to aid the application of the business idea. High technology does not necessarily translate to high quality, so it is important not to get carried away with new technology. The biggest selling point of my idea was the guided tour. This provides a service that definitely has a market, and reduces the number of personnel needed to fulfil this niche. It allows every visitor to have a quality experience at JBP with their very own tour guide, at a fixed cost to JBP.

Subsequently, we talked about business models. Besides the quality of the people involved, the next most important thing is probably the business model. Good people mixed with good ideas usually results in success. When we aggregated all our ideas for JBP, we divided them into 4 stages - Initiate, Enter, Complete, Retirement. Initiate is how the user begins the service. Enter is when the user begins using the service. Complete is when the user finishes using the service. Retirement is what happens after the user terminates the service. Thinking along this track allows us to track the value-addedness of a particular model, and thus pinpoint the pros and cons of different models.

The project topic was finally revealed to us - "Tourism On the Go". Seems like this module focuses on the tourism industry, and the application of e-commerce and m-commerce to enchance the tourists' experience. We are to present our elevator pitch next session in the form of a video.