Venture Concept No. 2

Opportunity

The need exists for students at the University of Florida that have a car and need to park on campus. The nature of this need is that they need a way to plan out their day so they aren’t always stymied by driving around looking for parking. The forces creating this opportunity are the fact that UF is growing at an extremely fast rate and that means more cars are on campus. The market is limited to students at UF in Gainesville. There is no way for customers to currently plan out where they want to park. There is no dedicated way to check whether parking lots are full or not except by driving around aimlessly. This opportunity is big because there are a large number of students at the University of Florida that have cars. The window of opportunity exists as long as UF keeps bringing in record amounts of students each year.

Further research will need to be done on whether the market exists for other campuses. Other campuses have a large amount of parking lots as well and may have a need to help students find parking quickly and efficiently. There is also an opportunity to improve parking lots in cities as well. There are several cities nationwide that have parking problems where a need exists to improve parking knowledge for customers.

Innovation

Applications on smartphones have made it much easier to access information on the fly. Mobile applications primarily serve as a way to pass time and gain knowledge on the world in their vicinity. They have a wide variety of uses and work by downloading them from an application store found on most phones. Mobile applications make money by either selling ad space and add-ons or getting companies or non-profits to sponsor the product for the betterment of society.

Venture Concept

My concept is to create an app that will show students what lots are full or open based on sensors imbedded into parking spaces. I think that customers will buy into this because it will alleviate some of the annoyance of driving around all day looking for a parking spot. There will be no need to switch products because this will be first of its kind found on UF’s campus. There are no competitors because the goal would be to have an exclusive contract with UF. Customer experience is very important and so we will strive to make sure the app is extremely accurate and up to date with which lots are full or open. I think that the business would be pretty small with only a few employees. Putting sensors into parking spots would take a lot of time but once it is all up and running it should be pretty easy to manage.

In the future, this venture could be spread to other cities and campuses as well to help alleviate some parking struggles. The technology would be the same across these markets so fortunately there would not be a large learning curve in setting up these areas. The app could be spread nationwide to show all the lots in the area that are open or full.

Three Minor Elements

I think my most important resource is the knowledge that I have of UF’s campus and the problems associated with parking. I think that will allow me to very easily incorporate my idea and see it to fruition.

I think the next step for this venture would be getting UF up and running and then expanding it to other parking areas in other universities and cities. Getting UF up and running might be difficult due to the fact that the company is relatively new. I will need to use my human capital to meet with leaders on the campus community to spread the idea and show how it can help students. After setting up UF with the app, I think it will be much easier to spread the idea and show other universities and cities the success that the app can have.

If I launched, I would want to be breaking ground with sensors at UF within the first two years. In the next decade I would want to expand the venture into other towns and universities to help alleviate some of their own problems with parking. After around a decade, I would like to look at possibly selling a portion the business to someone else to bring in new knowledge and money to spread nationwide.

The feedback that I received on my last venture concept was positive. The main things that I need to look at based on the feedback is how the parking app would scale from Gainesville to a large city, and possibly incorporating some sort of way to show garage pricing for parking areas that charge. These are good ideas that will need to be explored before expanding off college campuses.

Based on the feedback, I added more emphasis on spreading the app in the future. I also have included more about the expanded market for my app as well as how I would first get my app started at the University of Florida.