Many students are interested in entrepreneurship and innovation. It’s an exciting space to work and play in, with great potential to develop your skills through starting a business or social enterprise. But what does entrepreneurship and innovation involve, and what is the first step to getting your idea off the ground?

Innovation involves creating value from new ideas. But not all new ideas lead to value creation. Value usually comes about through making some product or service that fits the needs or desires of a large or influential group of people. Consider Airbnb, which was designed by the founders as a way to travel cheaply, staying on air mattresses and eating cereal with hosts.

Over time, Airbnb has changed its offering to more strongly fit the needs and wants of people who like to travel, and people wanting to rent out their homes. Airbnb has developed their initial idea through listening to their users, trying new things, and making changes.

Typically we talk about financial value when we think about innovation. And this can be a great measure - will someone pay for your idea? But, there are of course other valuable things that come from new ideas.

A group I worked with called Love Rimurimu are revitalising the seaweed forests around the Wellington coastline. Love Rimurimu cares about the community and environmental value that comes from healthy seaweed forests, and they’ve found ways to fund that vision through philanthropic and other funding sources. They spend a lot of time building their community of people interested in marine health, the environment, and seaweed.

Getting to know your community is one really important way to work out what is valuable to them. You might have heard of an MVP, or minimum viable product. The MVP encourages you to get a product or service out early in front of possible customers, so they can tell you what they really want, what problems they want solved, and how willing they are to pay for that.

So, what’s the first step to take if you have an idea that you think could have value?  Build your network. There is a really strong network of entrepreneurs and people interested in entrepreneurship around Wellington. Tapping into that network will help you learn more about value creation.

You can also build your network of potential users – who is your product or service for? What value might they see from it? Building your community helps you as an entrepreneur understand what people might want or need.

The next step is to make that product or service a reality, which is where the fun really begins.