An exciting day for everyone as we embarked on the entrepreneurship part of the SMARTER program! We began the day with a lecture from Professor Oded Nov, who defined entrepreneurship as managing and accepting the risk of starting a new business. As the lecture progressed, it became rapidly clear that having a good idea alone isn't sufficient. We would have to take on the challenge of determining if there's an existing marketplace for a given product, what our competition might be in a given business sector, and even personal decisions such as how comfortable we are with assuming the risk that accompanies any new endeavor.

Professor Nov placed particular emphasis on Porter's Five Forces, which define the challenges facing even the most stalwart of start-ups. Porter's Five Forces include the degree of existing rivalry in a given field, the threat of potential new entrants in said field, the bargaining power of the suppliers who equip a company with the materials that it requires, the bargaining power of the buyers who purchase the products, and the threat of substitutes for a given product that could negatively impact sales.

Every one of us had the chance to contemplate Porter's Five Forces in great detail during a "working lunch" in which we divided into teams and drafted a hypothetical business plan for our own start-up ventures. At the end of the day, each team had the opportunity to deliver a five-minute pitch. After each pitch, we then made inquiries about each others' business plans to discuss their viability in greater detail. Our next step will be to further improve upon the work we've begun, with the goal of fully realizing our own entrepreneurial visions.