Introduction
Everything happens quickly in the business world now. An entrepreneurship mind map helps you keep pace with others in learning new knowledge, developing and sharing ideas, saving working hours, increasing productivity, and solving problems.
By visualizing the themed concept with its sub-concepts, the method provokes critical thinking, delivers the message clearly, and enhances the collaboration between team workers.
Entrepreneurship Mind Map Overview
What Is A Mind Map?
Mind Map is a technique to help you get familiar with and remember new concepts. The science behind it is based on both sides of your brain to learn new things. Through this visual aid, you can logically organize your ideas.
It usually starts with a central concept, then builds up related sub-concepts. In the end, you will have a hierarchy to connect all old and new information. By using your cerebral cortex, you can logically arrange and absorb new ideas with a visual map.
Benefits Of Mind Map In Entrepreneurship
Support Learning And Memorizing
The method is applied in many aspects of the business, such as planning projects, managing knowledge, and strategizing. It helps the directors to absorb, understand, and remember complicated business issues more accessible and faster by breaking them down into simple tasks.
According to a survey by Chuck Frey - a mind mapping expert, most respondents agree that this visual map helps them understand new knowledge clearly and quickly, share it with others, manage projects, and find the root causes of the problems.
Improve Creativity And Productivity
Creativity is essential in general and in doing business specifically. Respondents of the above survey confirmed that they had experienced an increase of 50% in their creativity by mind mapping. The ideas are transferred to visualized papers with meaningful connections of thoughts. Therefore, users can capture the idea before it is gone.
The most significant benefit of an entrepreneurship mind map to the business is productivity improvement. Frey's survey shows a rise in respondents' productivity by 20% to 30%. This statistic remains unchanged during eight years of conducting the study. It also confirmed that seven or more working and learning hours are saved per week.
Make You A Professional Businessman
Building a visual map supports you to put your business ideas in a logical and organized theme. You can use it to express your ideas to your stakeholders with clarity.
There are different ways for different responsible departments to use it effectively. For example, the method assists project managers with presenting ideas or marketers with advertising campaigns.
Uses And Examples Of Mind Map In Entrepreneurship
The Usages
Present The Ideas
This tool helps people brainstorm and present it to others efficiently. Using keywords and visualized structures gives users a chance to recall the information quickly and pass the challenging questions. It is an ideal tool to deliver your message with impact.
Plan The Business
An entrepreneurship mind map contains all information you need for your plan or project. You can use it to set up schedules, meetings, to-do lists, long-term goals, etc. The main task is broken down into smaller tasks indicating their connection. Anytime you look at your visualized plan, you can see how each task affects each other and set time priority.
Consolidate And Organize The Plans
All information is organized and consolidated coherently. Many mind map platforms are very convenient to use, as you can put all supported media files to the appropriate branches. You have complete control of the data and organize it.
Manage The Projects
Digital mind map tools help manage time, data, and other resources for your projects. For example, you can add tasks, dates, durations, deadlines, etc., to keep up with your projects and never leave one behind the schedule or unfinished.
Analyze And Solve Problems
Different aspects of a problem are at play in the mind map, triggering your critical thinking. If you are stuck with solutions, look at all the elements at once and their relations on the visual map; you can come up with some ideas, even innovations.
Cooperate With Others To Launch Projects
An entrepreneurship mind map can encourage all team members to work dynamically and productively. You can add others' contributions to the appropriate branches or keep them for further discussion. The stakeholders can see each others' comments and collaborate to launch the project and move the whole team forward.
View Of The Big Picture
The business model can be simplified but keeps the coherent structure which lends you the whole visual snapshot. By giving you the big picture of the key projects, the tool assists you in analyzing potential risks for your business and making decisions.
Steps Of Building A Mind Map
- Review your sources of information. Have some general ideas about the headings, titles, subtitles, etc.
- Take out a piece of paper, write down the title and draw a picture of it in the middle. Make a circle or square.
- Think of four to seven primary branches directly related to the main theme.
- Give each branch different colors. Paint the secondary branches the same as the primary ones that are related.
- Choose keywords smartly. You do not have so much space in each section. If you put too long keywords, it may leave things messy and affect your retention.
- Organize the space to make a complete layout of the visual map.
Besides hand drawing, there are many free and paid mind map software that are easy to use, for example, Zen Mind Map, MindMeister, ConceptDraw, MindNode, etc.
Examples Of Mind Map In Entrepreneurship
Create Business Roadmaps
Building a roadmap using roadmap templates for your business is very important because it provides you and your team with a clear vision of the goal. In addition, it ensures all stakeholders stay on track with their missions and guides them through challenging obstacles.
Mind mapping is highly recommended for your business due to its adaptable functions. For example, you can use it to draw out long, medium, and short-term goals, expected KPI, financial estimates, and competitive analysis.
Manage The Meetings
Every company conducts different meetings, but not every time can the meetings lead to a final decision. Sometimes, these sessions are pointless and a waste of time.
An entrepreneurship mind map can help you avoid those poor scenarios. It keeps the attendees stay on point with the goal of the meeting and focus on collaborative brainstorming. You can easily organize the flow, note the data that need to be discussed, and identify who will lead the meeting sections.
Digital mind mapping can create a schedule where participants can add relevant items and topics. There is space for last-minute questions or additions as well.
Brainstorm The Plans
As we all know, brainstorming is formed based on four rules: quantity over quality, no criticism, unusual ideas are welcome, combining and improving ideas. However, studies show that traditional in-person brainstorms are not as effective as the same number of people brainstorming separately.
Mind mapping software can solve this problem. Team members can sit in their own office and give ideas for the same issue simultaneously. Then, you can edit by adding icons and colors, review it, and share it with others.
Plan The Projects
A project plan is vital for all businesses, and an entrepreneur needs a tool as a visual overview of the project's information.
You can use an entrepreneurship mind map to brainstorm, assemble and organize information. Therefore, you have a clearer picture of stages and manage them successfully.
You can also use this visual map to define goals, analyze costs and benefits, make a list of stakeholders, and single out the deliverables of the project.
A web-based platform makes things even easier to manage. For example, you can attach electronic files to the project and make each stage with colors and icons to ensure other members understand what step they should take.
Improve Customers' Experience
All businesses yearn for improvement in customer experience if they do not want to be ruled out from the market. Regarding this, the companies should understand the journeys of the customers. A journey map is a valuable tool for entrepreneurs to identify good and bad touchpoints to make the clients satisfied.
The entrepreneurship mind map visually shows the customer's experience buying goods or using services. Also, it is not difficult to create a journey map.
- Put the title / central topic for the journey map. Add a note with the scope, purpose, and collection of information.
- Add journey stages / primary subtopic.
- Create touchpoints / secondary subtopics and give them descriptions.
- Divide each touchpoint into smaller subtopics: experience, insight, and actions. Describe each level of experience and add an icon.
- Arrange it for a better visual result.
Other Examples
There are unlimited options for your business. Here are some more examples that you can use to generate ideas, improve productivity, and develop your business:
- Effort - impact matrix
- Marketing persona
- Pros and cons
- Company org chart
- Meeting minutes
