edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: 2nd Digital Cultures Workshop: Social Media Publics #digcult09 http://bit.ly/cbww0
edinburghmsc: via @anthonymcneill: Welcome! You can join the discussion by sending 'd anthonymcneill msg'
edinburghmsc: via @jimwolffman: Learning goes mobile - 100 'learning' apps for the iPhone: http://twurl.nl/epcr26
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: BJET special issue on virtual worlds edited by GIlly Salmon, May 2009, Volume 40, Issue 3
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: nothing useful to post, beyond saying that it's great to see edinburghmsc coming to life!
edinburghmsc: via @onothimagen: RT @JISC Launch event for report on Web 2.0 in higher education: http://tinyurl.com/danxt4
Guy Kawasaki came to Edinburgh to help 100s of students, startups and investors understand better how to make the world a better place through startups.
1. Make meaning
The great tech companies did much more than make money. They made the world a better place, they brought meaning to people. If you want to make a great startup make sure that you are and that you surround yourself with people who want to make changes to the world - this is why an MBA is the worst possible member of your startup management team.
Efficacy, power and liberation is the message we get from cotton, leather and rubber, via Nike. What's the message we get from you about your startup or big idea?
Ice 1.0
Ice harvesters of the 1900s ran an explosive business gathering ice. Later, ice factories produced mass quantities of ice for people. Then refrigerator companies destroyed both businesses. The ice factories were not started by the ice gatherers; the refrigerator companies were not started by the ice factory people. Most people, most startups, fail to jump the curve - they think they'll just carry on without change. They think of the product they make, rather than what they provide (and then coming up with different, ever-changing products to achieve that provision better).
2. Make mantra
Find meaning for your mission, but don't make a mission statement. Delete anything that would qualify for a bullshit bingo competition: partnership, collaboration, cooperation. These are givens. A mantra should be repeatable by everyone in the company, and everyone in the company should be able to make decisions based on that: Do It First, Inspire Change, Make Trouble.
3. Get going
Think different - don't be another ice harvester
Polarise people - have the courage to create the product or service that you would want to use. Some people will hate it and some people will love it. If you try to make something that makes everyone happy then you'll make something mediocre.
Find a few soul mates - genius does not happen alone. You need someone to bounce ideas around with.
4. Define a business
Keep it simple - paradigm-shifting, patent-pending technologies are not going to tempt most people. Most folk want something that can be made, sold and collect money. Keep your business model simple.
Ask women what they think of your business model - Guy believes that men, deep in their DNA, have a deep disposition to kill things: people, animals, plants... the competition. Killing the competition is a bad business model in and of itself. Don't count on that to convince people.
5. Milestones, Assumptions, Tasks - Weave a MAT
Milestones are things you would brag about to your friends: "we finished the design", "we produced our product"; "we shipped today". It's not "we made a logo".
Assumptions are based on, say, getting a tiny percentage out of a huge market: there are 1.2bn on the net, and we only need 0.1% on our service to become zilloinnaires.
Define the tasks required to open up your potential: hire a sales person.
6. Work out your ability to provide a unique product or service
What is unique and valuable about your idea?
7. Follow the 10/20/30 rule
Every pitch a VC (or Commissioner) hears is unique, paradigm-shifting, patent-pending, with a proven management team who are experts in what they do, who only need a small part of a huge market to make loads of money (conservatively speaking). Less is more. Tell us:
More on what goes in these over on Guy's blog.
8. Hire infected people
If you get a great horse then any idiot can ride it to the finish line. But were they responsible for getting it there?
Ignore the irrelevant, the lack of their 'perfect' background for the job and, instead, concentrate on those who "get it".
Hire people, surround yourself with people who are passionate about changing the world with your stuff. Hire people who are better than you - the hardest part of the startup is not the engineering. Marketing and sales, CEO-ing, community-building are just as hard and you need to work out what you're not good at, and get in people are are good at it.
9. Lower the barriers to adoption
The learning curve for startups' products is often too complex. People need to be able to fire up and go for it. If they need a manual or training for your stuff, then it's too complex. Lower the barriers to adoption. In Edinburgh, the one o'clock gun goes off at precisely one o'clock so that you can set your watch. It doesn't go off at noon because they'd have to fire twelve times and the users wouldn't know whether to set at the beginning or the end of the 12 chimes.
Don't ask people to do something that you wouldn't.
Embrace your evangelists. Those customers or users who love what you do need to be thanked, embraced, give them information, give them the ability to help new people into the fold.
10. Seed the clouds
Sales fixes everything. Your investors are probably facing 90% of their portfolio not making money, so if you're in that successful (even vaguely successful) 10% they'll not bother you.
Let a hundred flowers blossom. When "the wrong people" are using your service don't freak out, don't tell them how it's not their service to use - take their money and embrace them. Apple made spreadsheets, but Aldus Pagemaker was the "wrong product" but turned Apple into a media-making-enabler company.
Enable people to test drive your product. People need to be able to be playing before paying. Find the key influencers in your community and give them the product for free.
11. Don't let the Bozos grind you down
Get yourself immunised against Bozosity:
On the flip side, it's not the case that we should be writing off anyone who says no. People who say no can sometimes be right - take on their advice and work out if you can ignore it.
edinburghmsc: via @jar: Peachbit - european community researching concepts of presence and digitally mediated interaction. http://www.peachbit.org/
edinburghmsc: via @hamacleod: Wish that I had a class to disrupt! http://tinyurl.com/cc5axz
Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
If you're a science teacher trying to explain magnetism, you could do a lot worse than showing this beautiful animated film produced for Channel 4 with Arts Council England. As the blurb says:
"Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?"
Plenty of other vids for scientists, geographers, writers over on the Vimeo site.
Update: Worth reading the comments underneath, reiiterating why finding knowledge on, say, magnetism is increasingly easy but gaining a foot in the door of learning about this might still require a talented teacher with an inspiring vid to kick things off.
Colin asks on 38minutes whether good design could save newspapers, having spent six minutes watching Jacek Utko's TED Talk about his own redesign revolution throughout Eastern Europe. But the talk raises another, more widely applicable point in creativity: working alone is often better than working as a team.
Utko's principle point is that by handing power over to the designers, newspapers can change their whole recipe, from writing and editorial to the type of person, the demographic, that reads the paper. But he also makes an interesting point, particularly interesting for me in the light of the two posts I've recently written on the processes for encouraging and management of creativity:
The idea that the best creative thought can come from not working in a team, from not working collaboratively, but is derived from solitude and being headstrong with one's peers, pushing one's own ideas through regardless of whether "the team" feels comfortable with it is, in many education circles (and professional ones), treated as a selfish, dirty, shameful notion to possess.
Yet, it's not the first time I'm hearing this. John Cleese makes the point that we all need to carve out private time for creative thought, free from the distraction of naysayers and, er, Twitter. And last year, as I worked my way through Gordon Torr's Managing Creative People, I was well aware that throughout history the best creative solutions to challenging problems have come from individuals working in isolation or skunkwork groups working away from the main part of an organisation.
All too often we fall for groupthink, a magnolia shade of creativity where everyone is happy with the outcome. What one ends up with can often be the result of a process with which everyone was delighted, but a result which is vaguely unsatisfactory for all concerned.
Consultation and speaking with others is important, but often when it comes down to the execution of an idea it's the solitary craft of creativity that makes something exciting, groundbreaking and, yes, something which someone, somewhere won't like.
Many people think that those who like change are diseased with neophilia, instead of concentrating on the things that matter in the here and now. On the face of it they're right. Most new ideas fail. But Mark Earls' PSFK presentation last month puts forward a very good case for why ever-seeking change is a Good Thing.
Earlier, I blogged a short talk from John Cleese outlining the physical and emotional conditions of coming up with great ideas. Here, Mark concentrates more on processes you can employ all the time, strategies even for your organisation or yourself.
Even small changes end up normally taking generations to happen. Heinz took 123 years to turn the label on their bottle around to the 'right' way - because we need to store our bottle on its lid to get any out [compare the old bottle with the current one]. They had spent many creative conversations debating it, but had never turned that into action.
New ideas help us test our old ideas
The lesson here for me is that we need to test out our own ideas first, before convincing people that they might be worth trying. Just do it, rather than think about stuff in the abstract. Mark picks up on an interaction between Lloyds' innovation blokey and the peer-to-peer lending bank, Zopa. The Lloyds man asked: "Would my market be changed by peer-to-peer banking?" This wasn't the first thought of the guys creating Zopa, who saw banking as about people, money as a means to be entertained and live better, money as a social experience. The man from Lloyds, when thinking about Zopa, saw it as a bottom-line business. He missed the point and as a result missed an opportunity to see the real threat to their business: not understanding how people relate to each other around money, as well as how they relate with money itself.
Explore the future
Ogilvy's website runs with a tagline from their founder:
They run Ogilvy Labs where they can play with unknown stuff and let their clients see what could happen. This is all done on the basis that you won't know what they future might hold until you play. It's the concept I've battled to get across with naysayers of new technologies (and pedagogies) in the education world: "You don't know what you don't know you don't know."
Everything's hacked
It is now rare or unlikely altogether that there is such a thing as an original. 90% of products fail in their first year in the UK and given that most new products are modeled on old ones, this will not change any time soon. There are two main things to bear in mind when hacking someone else's stuff:
Embrace opportunities when they come up
We sit on opportunities, keep them secret instead of doing something to get it out there. One of the hardest things to do is make quick decisions when subject to an overwhelming (and often limitless) choice. Delve into 20 minutes of Barry Schwartz on the Paradox of Choice to understand this one. Yet, when a photographer is faced with 20-50 versions of the 'same shot', they are uncannily quick at ascertaining which shot is 'the' shot. Try it yourself - lots. Like a photographer, quick innovative thought takes practice (and occasionally getting it wrong) before being a creative bone you can rely on.
Entrepreneurs in this way have "memories of the future" - things feel familiar the first time you see them because you're constantly thinking about change.
Make your company more interesting
Change is fascinating, challenging, interesting. Making your workplace interesting will make people want to work there more and better. Logical, really.
Creative next steps
When you're faced with a challenge, a potential outside change, a new idea, ask yourself the following questions, and ask those around you, too: