What struck me most from Eric Ries’s Lean Startup was his point that anything besides value to the customer is waste. In a world where the vast majority of startups fail, this key concept should be echoed. I believe that often times large corporations and especially the government should abide…

While one may expect customer development experiments in large consumer focused companies, some production based companies and corporations have began meddling with customer development. CVA which recently merged with Farmway, is a cooperative with 90 locations in Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas. CVA’s Mike Zwingman collected data from the agribusiness’ consumer…

When Yelp began, the intended purpose was for people to make recommendations to their friends for all sorts of things. In 2004, Yelp received $1 million in start up money from the co-founder of Pay-Pal in hopes that the automated friend-to-friend email service would become highly succesful. Yelp found this…

Reflecting on the in-class design challange, I found that there are two very important factors in succesfull design-based problem solving. First, assemble a group of people who can look at solving your problem from different perspectives. Second, access to information is always key. Had we been able to find out…