4A - Forming an opportunity Belief

1.     I have a feeling that an opportunity exists of building a tram in major cities who suffer daily of traffic jams. A few European cities have always had the tram as a method of getting a big amount of people form one place to the other. With this public transport people do not have to use their cars every day to get to work and risk getting stuck in traffic. The less amount of people who use their cars also benefits the environment since fewer carbon dioxide is released to the atmosphere.

2.     The unmet need is that in major cities, like for example Bogota and even downtown Orlando, every single day during rush hours people find themselves in traffic jams and people get stressed and come late to their different appointments. Everyone who works at an office building for a bank or a company in any city has the same issue. Most of the people who work in downtown do not live there. They live most of the time between twenty and thirty minutes away in a residential house. The prices of houses and apartments in downtown are always more expensive since everyone wants to live right next to the place they work. In other words, everyone who does not live in downtown has to drive every day to their job which are thousands of people who are stuck every day in traffic. The need of getting resolved the problem of traffic jams has existed for decades. Since the industrial revolution, people have been going to major cities for work since in their old hometowns they only could work in the fields for agricultures. These days, people have been waking up for hours earlier and go to work and left the office later than usually required so they would not get stuck in rush hours. People who can afford it, also rent or buy apartments in downtown right next to their offices and go back on weekends to visit their families. Luxembourg, one of the smallest countries in the world, had the same issue with their capital city, Luxembourg City, and decided to build the tram two years ago starting off at the airport and going straight to the middle of the heart of the city until the end of the city. At this point I really believe that in any city that has a problem with traffic, there is an opportunity of building the tram and getting rid of this issue.

3.     I would say that the prototypical consumer would be a person who has a job in downtown but lives a half an hour away. This consumer would have to drive at least three times a day there and he must be familiar with the traffic jam situation.

   

    A) Consumer 1: Roberto Archila

Roberto is the CEO of his architecture company and lives in Winter Park. He lives in a beautiful home and has to drive every single day for about thirty-five minutes to downtown Orlando in order to get to his office. According to him, before he launched his company, he was working for another architecture firm in downtown and he was stuck every day for twenty minutes in traffic before he arrived at his workplace. He explained that the traffic jam was definitely an issue every day but with time he did got used to it. He started making some calls during traffic and even sometimes started doing a conference with his colleagues over the phone until he got to his office. When he quit his job to open his firm, he was thinking of opening his office at a place where there is not as much of traffic, but he realized that most of the important companies have their headquarters in downtown Orlando. The only time that traffic did make a negative impact on him was when he had an important meeting at the beginning of the day. He said that the wait would make him anxious. When I proposed him my solution of building a tram across all the key spots of downtown, he was delighted with the idea. He said that the traffic inside the heart of downtown would probably disappear, but I had to make sure of also creating big parking lots before entering to downtown so people could leave their cars there and take the tram to their destinations.

B)   Consumer 2 : Rachel Reicher

Rachel is a Luxembourgish student who lives in a small town called Oetrange and is only fifteen minutes away from her University which is in Luxembourg City. Since she is six years old she has been taking the bus to her school and sadly has been experiencing the struggle of traffic for her whole life. Most of the schools located in Luxembourg City start at the same time which means that no matter from where students come from, they all have to be at the same time in school which leads to high levels of traffic jam. According to her, even though she lives fifteen minutes away from her school, she sometimes takes around forty-five minutes to get home because the buses cannot move. During winter, sometimes she takes around two hours to get home because the snow. People always have a hard time driving under these conditions and they tend to get more easily into accidents which causes for more traffic. She says that she has lived under these conditions her whole life and that she has gotten used to it, but she must admit that during winter she always gets extremely nervous when she has an exam in the first period. Sometimes she came late and had to redo the exam on another day and at a different time which annoys the professors. When I told her about my solution she told me that Luxembourg was building a tram in order to get rid of the traffic. The named it the LUXTRAM, but she said that an important amount of the population were against it, because it was extremely expensive, and it is paid completely by the Luxembourgish government.

C) Consumer 3: Luis Francisco

Luis Francisco is an accountant and lives in Colombia. He lives in a town called Chia, but his office is in Bogota. His office is forty-five minutes away without traffic. He explained to me that Bogota has always had issues with traffic and they have gotten so bad, that at one point only cars with a pair number plate could be on the streets on for example Monday and on Tuesdays were the cars allowed with an impair plate number. They call it “Pico y Placa”. Sadly, this was not the solution for their problem since everyone decided to buy a second car if they could afford it. The traffic issue in Bogota does stress him out even though he has always lived in the same area. Over the years he had some health issues and decided not to stress anymore out about traffic and goes to work at five o’clock in the morning and is back home at nine pm. When I told him about my solution he said that with time it would solve the traffic problem for a little bit, but he is afraid that during the construction of the tram rails, traffic could get worse. People would get mad about the increase in traffic and they would do anything to shut the project down. It would also not be easy to get all the certifications from the government.

5. The most surprising thing I learned about my opportunity would be that it has a lot of flaws. Nothing is easy in life and the opinions of Rachel made me realize that the construction of the tram would not be cheap at all. Francisco’s argument that the constructions of the rails would make the traffic worse is possibly true if the constructions would happen during the day. I also did not think that we would need big parking lots as Roberto suggested but he was probably right. Where should people park their cars if they want to take the tram.

      7. As far as I am concerned I would say that the main idea of my original opportunity is still there, but my new opportunity is definitely more accurate. I know now that my opportunity needs improvements and if I want to realize it in any place of the world, I need to be aware of major issues like for example money, and the opinion of the public. It is definitely not going to be an easy task to create the opportunity, but I still believe that a tram in any major city get the people faster to their destinations and causes less traffic. I personally think that entrepreneurs should take customer feedback extremely serious since customers are the ones who will be buying the product or service we entrepreneurs create.