Here's a three minute elevator speech on entrepreneurship. It records my take gained as a specialist in intellectual property, the law for innovations. It's a rap on key elements for strengthening entrepreneurial ventures. As the inspiration I acknowledge the clever 'What makes you* special?' series of print ads for IBM's innovation services.

What is the proposed offering? Is it a product, a service, or a combination of both? What market is there for the offering and how will you reach customers? Is what you'll offer sufficiently tested and ready to launch? Are there defined steps and procedures to market it, deliver it on payment, and provide backup services?

Welcome to this rap on entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship brings to life an idea or an opportunity, whether it is founded on intellectual property, a product or process innovation.

Dialogue and conversation are essential for entrepreneurship. Talk a lot about competition. The product, venture or opportunity can have the advantage of being unique, special or differentiated, but not forever. It's common to focus on internal strengths, it's also healthy to properly assess internal weaknesses, gaps and true levels of commitment. It's best to be prepared. Competitors may sink the venture with marketing dollars, special features, legal threats, or a competing product which is better, cheaper or faster than yours.

It's having an eye on existing or potential competition that helps design appropriate walls of protection. Yes, lawyers and consultants must also be enterprise architects.

Let's talk about enterprise structuring. Is there an intellectual property wall surrounding the crown jewels of your product, perhaps a patent or a trade mark at the core of the brand? Speaking of intellectual property, there is always some confidential know-how and copyright material in every venture; the issue is whether they are useful walls of protection. It depends on the product.

With all intellectual property there is a need for auditing its ownership, control, licensing and taxation status. Weaknesses in them are cracks in the walls of protection. The quality of intellectual property protection can be improved if you work with lawyers and patent attorneys who understand your industry, sectors, and markets and moreover their evolutionary path or trajectory. For IT and technology, good intellectual property advisers are futurists.

Let's go to another level of sophistication. There are limits to what law, regulation and compliance can achieve to give your offering a monopoly. The fact is that the efficiency of your company operations, and quality of your organisational culture, finances, information systems and documented management procedures can form additional walls of protection against the stress of competition. Together with legal mechanisms for protection they form an enterprise structured to stand the test of time.

Take a breath. We've overviewed what you offer as well as how you'll deliver, own, control, strengthen and manage it. Now let's turn to people and entities and ask - who benefits? 

List the stakeholders, who may include an inventor/author/creator, creative contributors, investors, shareholders, executives and other participants. For each, consider their needs and expectations. Define their obligations, duties or responsibilities. Follow with a statement of the rights, equity, return, remuneration or share each will get for performing as obliged.

It is best to set objectives, outcomes, metrics, key performance indicators or bottom lines.

Proper measures are best set by team players who understand what is in the best interests of the enterprise architecture overall. The metrics should be customised. They should not be selected for example by advisers working with generic templates. Nor should they be set by self-interested inventors, investors, executives, managers, company directors or functional area tsars selecting what protects their turf or lines their pockets.

What's needed is an ongoing focus on key elements for strengthening the entrepreneurial venture. 

Comments welcome.