Pitch coaching
Preparing for a meeting with a potential customer, collaborator, or investor? It's crucial to present your solution effectively and clearly. We assist you in your preparations, offering opportunities to practice your presentation and receive valuable feedback in a safe and supportive environment.
Value Creation Forum
Every semester, we offer projects the opportunity to participate in a Value Creation Forum. It is a well-established activity designed to assist early-phase innovation projects in further developing their ideas, focusing on the ability to present them in a compelling manner to potential customers, users, investors, or collaborators.
It revolves around the art of delivering an effective presentation, commonly referred to as a pitch.
What is a pitch?
A pitch is typically limited to a few minutes and requires a concise and engaging presentation to convince listeners of the value and potential in what is being conveyed.
Practice makes perfect
A Value Creation Forum is an opportunity for you to improve your presentation through structured feedback. After an initial pitch, you have time to refine it based on the feedback received and then present it again to receive additional feedback, all within a couple of hours!
The feedback is provided by a knowledgeable panel that assumes different roles to offer diverse perspectives, including:
- Identifying opportunities and focusing on strengths
- Being problem-oriented and emphasising improvement possibilities
- Providing an investor's perspective
- Representing the customer and/or user perspective
Preparation with NABC
A Value Creation Forum is built on the NABC model, which serves as a support system to define your idea and contemplate what truly makes it valuable to your intended users or customers. For this reason, the NABC model is an excellent tool for preparing a pitch, as it centers around the most crucial aspects of an idea: the customer's Need, your Approach, the Benefit for the customer, and Competition from alternative solutions.
Prior to a Value Creation Forum, we introduce you to the NABC model and assist you in applying it to your project.
Need
What significant problem do you want to solve? For whom?
- How many people experience this problem? Who owns it?
- How often and when does it occur?
- How significant and important is it to the user/customer?
- What are the consequences if it remains unresolved?
Approach
What is your solution to the problem?
- What makes your approach unique in addressing the identified need?
- How does your solution work, and how will it reach the customer or user?
- Do you plan to protect your solution or part of it to gain a competitive advantage?
- How sustainable is your solution?
Benefit
What specific advantages does your solution offer? What value does it provide?
- What does the customer/user gain that they cannot obtain through other means?
- Value = benefits relative to costs. Consider all types of costs.
Competition
What other existing solutions to the problem are there? How does your solution compare?
- What other approaches are available now and in the future?
- Why should your solution be chosen over the alternatives?
- How can sustainability enhance your competitive advantage?
- Also, don't forget the perhaps most significant competitor - doing nothing about the problem. For the user/customer, it might be easier to continue as before than to change anything at all.
Contact us
Do you want to refine your pitch or discuss an idea? Feel free to reach out to us! We are always interested in hearing about new ideas and research to explore how we can help you take the next step.
Email us at innovation@uu.se