For this participial class we get to choose our book for our primary readings. I've chosen the Innovator's DNA. I choose this because it was sold as a more generic topic on entrepreneurship; specifically for those that are unsure if they want to become (of even able to become) and entrepreneurship. The obvious questions is, well if you aren't sure or are unable to become an entrepreneur then why are you taking the course. The answer is simple, small and medium businesses are often have entrepreneurs at the helm and ultimately have the entrepreneurship culture. Understanding this culture and how you can contribute is important because there is a very good possibility that at some point you will be working with or for one. The statistic in class was that 60% of employment opportunities are in this area. A staggering number. Furthermore a lot of larger companies are tying to capitalize on intrapreneurship to develop and innovate new ideas in the existing enterprise.
I've read the first two chapters. The book is very interesting. It postulates that the 5 traits that make innovators different are their discorvery stills, which are summarized here:
- Associational Thinking: that is the ability to "discover new directions my making connections across seemingly unrelated questions, problems or ideas".
- Questioning
- Observing
- Networking
- Experimenting
There was even a quick sample of a survey for assessing your discovery vs delivery skills. I was fairly balanced 41 and 39 respectively. Highly fuctional innovators are usually highly skewed to the discrovery skill, the balanced managers are usually ones that take the innovators ideas and brings them to Growth and Maturity on the traditional "S" curve.
What I've found very interesting was the chapter on associative thinking. Making connections between new ideas has always generated disruptive change. Google, Apple, Amazon and more recently companies like SpaceX are completely changing the world. Investors would love to be able to get a leg up and be able to predict which technologies and trends are going to take off and be the next Google. In our Competitive Intelligence class I (with two other students) did a project on a company called Quid. Basically this company mines the latest research, press releases, news articles and much more then they maps them onto a network map. From here one can see traditional businesses or research ideas clustered together but in the white spaces between clusters, there could be a few new research topics or small companies forming. These seeds can represent the association between two or more traditional businesses/ideas used to solve new, unrelated problems. This technique was originally pioneered in bioinformatics as an analysis tool but has since branched out to help in many industries, including business intelligence. Quid is used by investment companies looking to invest in new start-ups as well as existing companies looking to capabilities on new business opportunities. I believe that Associational Thinking would be the most critical skill for an innovator. With all the explosion of research, data and ideas that the internet has fostered, having a tool like Quid to aid in making these associations seems like a logical step. Of course it is important to realize that this is just a tool and the the human factor of having somebody like Steve Jobs qualifying and creating completely new seeds is not something that a computer can do for the foreseeable future. But I digress...
An interesting concept unrelated to what is discussed above is that idea of "test" store for any online products or services. To create a store with product descriptions and mock ups but with 0 stock (here). Now that I've heard the idea it seems like a no brainer, but this idea is genius What a great way to get real world demand and feedback. I've often though that this is the way that a company like Apple get generate a lot of ideas for features for phones. At any given time there are at least half a million rumours floating around on the next generation of devices and their feature set. This seems to be a cheap and easy way to generate ideas on what the population is looking for in the future.
Anyways, I think that's about it for week one.
No comments:
Post a Comment