1. Investigating Entrepreneurial Opportunities
Why study entrepreneurship?
Colin
Julian Brower already had a colourful and entrepreneurial career. However, his life took yet
another interesting turn when he graduated recently from the Open University with a science
degree and alongside it a Distinction in the OU’s enterprise course – Investigating
Entrepreneurial Opportunities. Julian decided to ‘reverse engineer’ his career. He landed a
job in a large prestigious science-based organisation that researches and develops new
knowledge which later gives rise to science-based entrepreneurial opportunities. He’s close to
being what some people now call an ‘intrapreneur’.
Julian Brower
I had started off as er an officer in the Merchant Navy and then gone into engineering and
then gone into running my own business. And then found I needed to bring it all together with
an understanding of business because I'd been one of these people who’d had lots of ideas
but didn’t have any structure. So the entrepreneurial course was an ideal way to go forward
I needed some thing or somebody to show me a formalised way of deciding if an idea was
good or bad. So many ideas I had sounded fantastic on paper but when you actually went
through the finances, when you went through the resources, when you went through the
competition strategies, competition um analysis you find out that actually an idea is not going
to survive. But of course it would – it was really - a good idea for me to be able to have
something on paper that I could actually follow so this is where this entrepreneurial course is
ideal
Professor Colin Gray
And did it do the trick for you?
Julian Brower
I think it did er because now I have a machine that I turn the handle and what pops out the
end is an idea that I think is going to work or not. So I start off with ten ideas a week, and I
literally do. I keep a book with me and if I see something that – that I like an idea I may be
travelling on the Tube in London and something drops into my mind I then go back and I
apply sort of what I call an entrepreneurial strategic view based on some of the course
concepts and what pops out the end is something I think is going to make a lot of money or
not. And it literally is as simple as that. And I realise now that a lot of business people do that
because everybody has ideas because ideas are actually quite cheap but making them into
innovations and then making money out of them is a whole new world.
Professor Colin Gray
And did you in fact start up that idea?
Julian Brower
No. I didn’t.
Professor Colin Gray
Can you tell me why?
Julian Brower
I because I think that the other thing I realised but the entrepreneurial course helped me to do
was to help me realise my own limitations. And when you look at the SWOT analysis there
were lots of weaknesses that I needed to overcome and I think having a business idea is one
thing but also you as a person as well to develop these big ideas, to be able to invest. And
you have to look at your risk, the amount of risk you as a person. And the course talks about

2. that particular aspect of you as a person. Are you the right person to be an entrepreneur to
take it from an invention to an innovation? So another are and I thought I'm not quite ready
for this so I need to find support, I need to find finance, I maybe need to find a business
partner. And all those things didn’t quite come together.
Professor Colin Gray
Now you didn’t actually start the business, which you – had already thought through with
great detail – does that mean the course didn’t deliver the goods?
Julian Brower
No because I don’t think the course is about turning your specific idea into a – um an
innovation that’s going to sell. That’s not what it's about for me. For me it was about
developing a tool kit. The toolkit gave me seven or eight different key um boxes in which I
could filter good ideas because as I say ideas are cheap. They're coming from all over the
place but you need to be able to apply some sort of structure to those ideas. So okay this
was an idea but I had ten others I was going to apply to it as well. But one idea will drop out
of the box one day and will be successful. Without such a course I would be sitting there like
leaves in the wind you know, deciding how to actually take it forward
Professor Colin Gray
If you didn’t take it forward though what did you take forward – obviously you're not a person
that sits around
Julian Brower
Well I yeah – I mean other factors were going on in my life at the time and I decided to go and
work in a research department er for the government um and within that department even
now I apply those skills all the time. It doesn’t matter. I'm working as an engineer er in a
department um running particle accelerators but this – the whole research council that I work
for is er coming up with new ideas all the time. So I sit in the coffee lounge with scientists and
they talk about great ideas and I just apply my toolkit. Is it reasonable? Are people going to
buy it? It's a great idea but are there any customers out there because at the end of the day
you've got to make money out of it. So you know I look at this more as skills for life. I think it's
an essential part of all learning, certainly in graduate studies, to have something like this in
your head because everybody will go in to an environment where they need to think about
making money and if they can do that within a company they are going to add more value to
what they do. It doesn’t matter what you're doing – you could be a cleaner – but if you can
add value by looking at these sort of um factors involved you know you may be cleaning the
floors but you say well hold on a minute. It we start to look at um you know joining skills
together and you could do a SWOT analysis on it and find out – hold on – where’s the
weakness in this? I'm wasting money. I could make more money if I do it this way.
Professor Colin Gray
Okay. Taking that a bit further forward what sort of advice in general would you have for
students on courses like that about how they can successfully get something out of it which is
going to be of benefit to them and to advance their own entrepreneur aspirations
Julian Brower
I think that these types of courses that you run are offering a very, very good insight into some
key business tools. These are skills for life. These are things that you will use forever in life.
So learn the individual tools. Apply them and practice them on your ideas so that you can
actually hone them into something useful. If you come away with six or seven key tools like
applying STEEP analysis like applying SWOT analyses, like learning the concept of
competitive analysis. These are really, really useful strong tools that you can have on board.
Another area that I'd say is be very brave. You know don’t be afraid to use your creativity and
sometimes you may look a fool but you will never be told that. You will just be directed back
on line. I think often people don’t want to appear embarrassed. So just be brave and think
really, outside the box because we are all contained in the systems of school and the way we
learned to think inside the box. You've just got to be a completely blank white sheet of paper.
And the other thing I think is certainly on courses like this is use it as a practice. Because it's

3. great to throw ideas around and use your tutor. Make them work for a living because you
know you will get really good advice out of them.
Professor Colin Gray
?
Julian Brower
I think what you need to do is practice by using the course interaction facilities like the
assignments, anything on line, the opportunity to talk to other students and the opportunity to
talk to the tutors. I think this gives you a chance to throw your ideas about and get - get really
good advice coming back about what it means in the real world because you are living in your
own little brain, contained and your ideas are very limited by the way you think and using
other students often in my case with e-board came out with two or three key points that
changed my whole direction. And I would never even have considered them – yeah
Professor Colin Gray
Such as?
Julian Brower
Well I think certainly the idea of table tops and using them in pubs was a brilliant idea and
immediately then kicked off – I was just thinking all the time village shops, village shops, and I
just got caught in this little thinking cell. And then somebody mentioned pubs and I thought
"great." I could then go to try and do a deal with the local um village mall – not supermarket
because they would be contained but go to shopping centres. And there you go. Everybody
is going through shopping centres now. How about one on the in and one on the out board of
the shopping centre? That came out of talking to other students. So it's - use it as business
tools. Be brave. And use your colleague. Work them hard.
Colin
on the notion of idea theft – how would you advise students, if they do have an idea, er that
they might sort of protect themselves during the course?
Julian Brower
It's a very interesting point to talk about protecting your idea and immediately one spends a
lot of time many years developing an idea and then you come and present it in some formal
environment. You might have the latest gadget er or the latest process innovation. And it
worried me about e-board as well and it still worries me today. I think that it makes you think
very carefully when you start opening your idea on to the formal environment. You start to
come up with creative ideas of protecting it. Some of the ideas I used for instance was to
keep very very key elements missing out of it that never got shown. So I only used the factors
that people already knew about and I kept out very clearly some key points that would prevent
people from actually utilising the idea. And of course they were associated with specific
companies and specific people. So by not including them in my final um synopsis I could at
least keep some control over it. I think that sometimes as well you might necessarily just
tweak an idea so it's just off the centre line so you're not giving away all the details or you
might want to - of your ten ideas maybe choose an idea that’s not so close to your original
idea so it gives people an opportunity you can practice your tool kit without giving away all the
details you know. But if you develop an idea that’s slightly off tack that utilises the same
concepts, you can often run the whole process and get out of it what you want without giving
too much away because as I said an idea is a very important thing. People are looking at
ideas, looking at easy way outs, by utilising other people’s ideas but you can protect them.