Feasibility

Okay, it's been two years since I said anything about this. Feasibility simply refers to the question of whether it's possible to do something. Can you make a something for $X.XX a unit, bring it to market by November X, 20XX, have it generating a positive cash flow by January XX, 20XX, and make it show a profit by a date two years of that? The process by which you figure this out is called feasibility study. If it is found to be feasible a report is usually written. If it's not feasible, the studiers generally bury the whole thing so as not to waste anymore time on it unless the funders require something in writing to show what was done with their money.

Whether it's feasible is one thing. More important is should you do it? History is replete with examples, which I'm not going to mention, of things that were feasible but never should have been undertaken. Consider: even if you can build a thing and produce it at a huge profit and generate boatloads of cash, is it the right thing for you and for at least one segment of Society? This gets at a more fundamental issue and needs to be settled in at least in a preliminary fashion before you even examine the feasibility of it.

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. And go read my mysteries, The Case of the Kearney Music School Murders and No Stop on Red, both available at Amazon.com. You can read the first one for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

Feasibility Study

Wikipedia describes a feasibility study as:

A feasibility study is a preliminary study undertaken to determine and document a project's viability. Also known as feasibility analysis, the term feasibility study is also used to refer to the resulting document. The results of this study are used to make a decision whether or not to proceed with the project. If it indeed leads to a project being approved, it will — before the real work of the proposed project starts — be used to ascertain the likelihood of the project's success. It is an analysis of possible alternative solutions to a problem and a recommendation on the best alternative. It, for example, can decide whether an order processing be carried out by a new system more efficiently than the previous one. A feasibility study is an important part of creating a business plan for a new enterprise, since it has been estimated that only one idea in fifty is commercially viable. If a project is seen to be feasible from the results of the study, the next logical step is to proceed with it. The research and information uncovered in the feasibility study will support the detailed planning and reduce the research time.

This shows how fast the who field is moving and you really have to check almost every day. If you're interested in the topic, go to Wikepedia and read the entry and follow the links. This article was just edited yesterday and varies significantly in organization from the entry I originally copied on May 23, 2008.

Feasibiliity studies are still important. But more is required. We have to monitor what's going on every day and be able to adapt on the fly. The situation today can be changed from yesterday. We have to keep our ears open, monitor our hearts, and be nimble and quick, as in "Jack, be nimble. Jack, be quick, Jack, jumps over the candle stick." I think gaming technology is going to make a lot of feasibility studies easier and quicker, because you can build a model that mirrors the outside world, then test your product or service in that world.

If you're interested something I said, post a comment.

Everything I do is entrepreneurial. For real estate 2.0, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog; for writing 2.0 go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.