SBIR Phase I: Web Enabled Expert System to Scale Diagnosis and Improvement of Entrepreneurial Skills

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an offering designed to help early stage entrepreneurs identify their knowledge gaps, business risks and market challenges, and prescribe actionable measures that enable the entrepreneurs to reduce or ameliorate their risks, thereby increasing the likelihood of success in innovative new ventures. Today, such diagnostics and prescriptive remedies are delivered in one-on-one engagements with entrepreneurs. This application strives to make diagnosing and addressing the knowledge gaps of entrepreneurs a scalable endeavor. If Guidewire Group's expertise can be encapsulated in this platform and delivered to entrepreneurs in a highly scalable fashion, this project may shift the way in which entrepreneurs evaluate and improve their business performance. It is no secret that the U.S. economy relies heavily on entrepreneurial activity to deliver economic growth. Each year, hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs start new businesses. But according to the US Small Business Administration, over 50% of businesses fail in their first five years. The SBA estimates that in 2007, 637,100 new employer firms began operations and 560,300 firms closed that year. The number one reason the SBA cites for this statistic is lack of experience among entrepreneurs. First-time entrepreneurs often lack the experience to validate their judgments, qualify their actions, and assess their performance. Yet because evaluating and coaching entrepreneurs are typically un-scalable activities, little has been done to make a significant impact on the business sustainability or performance of these entrepreneurs. The system proposed in this SBIR Phase I project has the potential to make market-leading diagnostic expertise available in the form of a self-service, Web-based application, thereby distributing actionable diagnostics more widely than ever before.