The Unglamorous But Important Thing Called Business Development

“Business Development” may be, for many people, some sort of corporate-speak that simply does not evoke inspiration in kids (or even teenagers, or even students… or even people already in their careers). It’s right up there with arcane terms lie “Sales”, “Marketing” and “Human Resources”, although I might say the latter three terms are a bit more popular.

So what is it exactly? I will go through my usual scenic route in describing it.

After getting fed up with both the sciences and the social sciences, I managed find my way into art school. There I would eventually graduate as a Product Designer. A product designer is basically a person which designs, well, products. Consumer products, industrial products, you name it — we were taught how to identify a problem we thought could be solvable through design, and conduct surprisingly scientific method of creating a product design. Since in the “real world” product designers will work together with engineers, for instance, a solid research and project management method was drilled into us from early on. Identify the problem, do the research for the optimum design, plan for production. But of course, there is only so much depth you can get in projects that have to be wrapped up in 6 months, the end of the semester, for grading. But for the 4,5 years I studied, I was essentially building new products every 6 months.

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