Startup
In The Innovation Machine. More on Medium.
A simple, yet powerful model for capturing and sharing business ideas — the ‘Idea form’.
Reflecting on more than two decades of innovation work, the weakest points of innovation programs usually refer to the lack of solid innovation definitions and tools. Innovation is often perceived differently depending on the point of view and the background of the observer. In the typical corporate environment, ideas flow in as lengthy decks or documents with no standard structure and associated processing mechanisms.
Ideators often have a hard time explaining their ideas with clarity — due to lack of time, tools, or due to limited experience and lack of guidance.
The following form — the Business Idea template- empowers innovators to articulate their draft ideas quickly, in a standard format. This consistent, short summarization also simplifies the circulation of ideas within the company — sharing, discovering, and consuming ideas within and between teams. Ideas that come in this form are far easier to attract attention by the right stakeholders and trigger meaningful business discussions. …
Imagine a high-tech election process where a weight factor is assigned to the vote (not the citizen) via a process aiming to reflect the level of ‘context understanding’ of the citizen at ‘voting time’. The higher the level of context understanding —that is, the reality — by the citizen, the higher the importance of the vote.
The level of ‘context understanding’ could be objectively determined via a secure, randomized digital micro-questionnaire to be answered by the citizen as part of the (online) voting process.
Such a voting process would effectively reduce the importance of emotion-driven voting behaviors and the impact of stereotypes, tradition or other non-rational components. …
Five social concepts that could evolve in successful startups!
This post presents five social product concepts— from music and news to recruitment services — which have been in my ideas backlog for a while and could inspire ambitious entrepreneurs out there and trigger product development discussions.
1. A Social Music Discovery service
Allow people to naturally discover music by accessing the most popular & recently played songs in reference to a particular social situation.
Assuming a particular social arrangement (a class in a University, customers in a Bar/Movie theater, friends having a coffee etc.); this app scans the connected music services of each person in the arrangement (for instance Spotify accounts, YouTube music content, etc.) …
Consider this thought experiment.
You’ve run Sales at a business for three years. This year an opportunity presents itself, a fork in the road. You can select one of two choices:
Choice A: Deliver, with 100% certainty, one million pounds to your company’s bottom line (profits) this year.
Choice B: Deliver, with 1% certainty, one billion pounds to your company’s bottom line (profits) for this year.
[Attribution: Astro Teller, Innovation Leader at Google X]
Which do you choose ?
Choice A is tempting. And for the risk averse amongst us, it is a solid choice. Nobel prize winning scholars Amos Tversky & Daniel Kahnemann (1979) masterminded the field of decision theory which (very plausibly) contends that it’s the way most of us are actually likely to go. We tend to prefer avoiding losses, rather than acquiring equivalent gains. So much so that losses are felt twice as powerfully as gains i.e losing £10,000 is the same psychological experience as gaining £5,000 — a cognitive bias known as loss aversion. …
Product development is of critical importance for technology startups: given the limited budget typically available to early-stage startups, making the right product development decisions can make the difference between success and failure.
In a report* by CBInsights, failure reasons such as ‘Non-friendly product’ and ‘Product without a business model’ feature at the top of the list. According to the same source, 42% of the startups analyzed, stated that there was ‘no market need’ for their product, while 17% delivered ‘a non-user-friendly product’.
Other reports, articles, and blogs from startup founders, seem to agree that most of the major failure factors are strongly connected to product management.
Product-related startup risks
Product-related risks could refer to both the definition and the actual development/ implementation of Minimum Viable Product. A poorly-defined product, regardless of how well-built, will probably fail to solve the problem and deliver value to its users. …
Mobile devices automatically enter silent mode when users join special social arrangements (a concert, a lecture etc.)
Ever been in theater, cinema or other noise-sensitive social situation where sounds from mobile notifications can spoil the moment? The natural move for a context-aware user is to set the mobile in silent or ‘Do not disturb’ mode. Although obvious, this is not the case for everybody: there are always those few who either by mistake or disrespectfully skip this.
What if there was a way for the audience to seamlessly self-organize?
‘The system’ could identify the situation as requiring ‘silent mode’ and notify the members of the audience to silent their mobiles (those who haven’t already); Or, in a more aggressive scenario, automatically set the phones in to silent/vibration mode.
This could happen seamlessly with no controlling system or particular rules: Assuming a number of people is at a particular place — within a specific radius and possibly around a particular known location; each time a mobile device is set to ‘silent mode’ by a user, an event is triggered which sends location and mode data into an appropriate database; this centralized store of data allows the identification of ‘concurrent’ transitions to ‘silent mode’ within the same radius. …
Either part of regular or special transactions, banknotes are involved into interesting stories; imagine if you could discover the stories behind a banknote or even attach your own!
This is an old idea -when banknotes were still a popular payment method — about an app to attach digital messages to banknotes. A user would be able to attach a story or message to a particular banknote before making a payment. As banknotes change hands, their stories could be discovered and enriched by other users, across the world. Any banknote could have an interesting history — a set of stories, events comments across locations.
A user of the app would be able to scan a random banknote and experience:
- The journey of the banknote across people, through cities, countries…
This post summarizes the story of plantobuy.com
What if consumers could anonymously publish their buying plans online? What if retailers could target specific buying plans with special personalized offers?
Plantobuy.com allowed consumers to organize their buying plans anonymously in order to benefit from highly targeted/ personal. An online platform to empower consumers to ‘tell the market about their buying plans’ while at the same time empower retailers to perform intelligent, personalized or even 1–1 offerings.
Retailers used the platform to promote certain products to those consumers actually planning to buy the exact same products or similar ones. …
What if there was a specialized collaboration platform for unemployed people … a business ecosystem to inspire them to ‘unleash their creative power’ ?
Alarming rates of unemployment for many countries, pessimistic predictions regarding the global workforce transformation under the lights of the Artificial Intelligence revolution.
Unemployed people, in tens of millions across the globe, can be seen as an enormous manpower which the ‘economic system’ fails to use: talented people, senior industry professionals, domain experts, enthusiastic graduates, scientists, entrepreneurial youth and many more classes of unemployed people who are trapped in a job-seeking state with limited or no options at all.
Although governments offer services and programs for unemployed people, they fail to deal with the problem at its core: societies need a mentality shift towards innovation, creativeness, and experimentation; The ‘economic system’ must encourage people to use their talents and capabilities, to take controlled risks in order to go after alternative professional opportunities. …
Are you using technology terms properly? This is a practical guide to help you define a ‘prototype’, versus a ‘proof of concept’ and a ‘minimum viable product’. Read on to avoid costly misunderstandings.
When building software products or solutions, it is of critical importance to define early enough the target output — in terms of both functionality and ‘production readiness’.
Using the right terminology for your software project is critical since it sets the expectations with your stakeholders — all those with direct or indirect interest to your project, including customers, sponsors, decision-makers, vendors, or partners.
The following provides quick definitions and practical guidelines — it will help you select the right term for your project — or reconsider its scope :)
Proof of concept — PoC
A Proof of concept (PoC) refers to an implementation of a certain method or idea using specific technologies — in order to assess and demonstrate its feasibility and confirm its practical potential. The objective is to prove the idea and/or technology by exposing a realistic, functional implementation of a subset of functionality. It is usually small, focusing on a particular aspect of the product, and is typically not complete. …
