But soon two teams from Bain began working on the idea and, after 18 drafts of a business plan, they came up with a low-cost model built around highly motivated consultants working at low pay for fixed periods.
As latte sippers pore over the latest draft of a business plan, bang out a little code or post to a blog, it is not hard to overhear snippets of dialogue with a decidedly capitalist bent: "We could make money off that," and "Have you talked to them about a deal?" For the Web 2.0 crowd creating businesses, as well as the post-Web 2.0 crowd looking for businesses to build, Ritual is the place to be.
This is Part 9 in a series that discusses the drafting of an effective business plan for use in promoting a scientific idea or start-up company to the business community.
Perhaps a more realistic hope for a text-only program such as GPT2, meanwhile, is simply as a kind of automated amanuensis that can come up with a messy first draft of a tedious business report – or, why not, of an airport thriller about famous symbologists caught up in perilous global conspiracy theories alongside lissome young women half their age.
OTHER young companies, like Blu Dot in Minneapolis, have established themselves surely -- and quickly -- by drafting a business plan as a part of their design strategy.
(For more information on drafting a business plan, see the excellent series of Next Wave articles by Charles Boulakia).
The model consists of the following iterative stages: conceptualisation, project initiation, functional specification, drafting a business case, procurement/tendering, system choice, contracting, preimplementation planning, implementation and optimisation.
The principal item of business was the drafting of a constitution and by-laws to govern the composition and operation of the conference and to set forth its objectives".
Setting out future business in the Commons, Hague said: "The business for next week will be: Monday 10 November, consideration of a business of the house motion, followed by a motion to consider the draft Criminal Justice and Data Protection (Protocol No 36) Regulations".
