Are You an Inventor or an Entrepreneur?: “
Being an entrepreneur has more to do with a state of mind than a state of employment. And when you think of being an entrepreneur, it doesn’t just mean starting a company — I’ve started over half a dozen successful companies but have also brought my experience to established companies. Right now, I am the President of a public company I did not start — so I may in fact be an ‘entrepreneur gone bad.’
One of the most consistent things I hear entrepreneurs say is, ‘I have this great idea.’ And the advice they often get is to write a business plan and make it their bible. Most entrepreneurs firmly believe there is nothing better than a solid plan couples with a great idea.
But don’t confuse being an entrepreneur with being an inventor. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Action is what differentiates an entrepreneur from an inventor. If you want to focus on ideas, become an inventor — not an entrepreneur.
And as for plans, entrepreneurs probably spend more time on our business plans than just about anything else we do. But business plans are often useless, even counterproductive; the old adage that ‘planning is everything; plans are nothing’ (credited to Eisenhower) couldn’t be more true in entrepreneurship.
The important thing is the process of planning — but you also have to be willing to throw out that plan. The single biggest advantage you have as a start-up versus an established business is your ability to be nimble, to act, to change. If you’re beholden to your ideas or to your business plan, you will fail.
Thomas Edison is a great example of someone who most people think of as an inventor because of the thousands of ideas he came up with. But when someone asked Edison about his ideas he replied that he didn’t care about his ideas. The only ideas that were interesting to him were the ones that he could commercialize. ‘I am quite correctly described as more of a sponge than an inventor,’ he said. Yet most people in fact don’t realize that the light bulb was not Edison’s idea; he just commercialized it. Edison thought of himself as an entrepreneur.
History is littered with great ideas — they’re irrelevant to entrepreneurs. You need to be nimble and you need to act. Sony is a classic example. Few people know that Sony was founded on the idea of offering rice cookers to the masses. They failed at that idea, but Sony is what it is today because the founders were willing to give up on their original ideas and plans.
Gillette is another classic example of a company that constantly reinvents itself. Every year they come up with new products that transform their own industry. We may end up with razors that take two hands to hold, but Gillette proves that innovation is about change and progress, not great ideas.
So don’t be afraid to throw out your business plan, adapt and give up on your original idea…and let your company succeed.
Jeffrey M. Stibel is an entrepreneur and brain scientist. He studied business and brain science at MIT Sloan and Brown University, where he was a brain and behavior fellow. Stibel has authored numerous academic and business articles on a variety of subjects and is the named inventor on the US patent for search engine interfaces. He is currently President of Web.com (NASDAQ: WWWW) and serves on academic Boards for Tufts and Brown University, as well as the Board of Directors for a number of public and private companies.
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(Via HarvardBusiness.org.)
Innovation in Sound Masking: Toward a Cone of Silence: “In ‘‘Cone of Silence’ Keeps Conversations Secret‘ at New Scientist, Paul Marks describes a recent MIT invention of a system that can direct noise toward nearby people to make it difficult to overhear a private conversation. It’s a step toward a functioning version of the ‘Cone of Silence’ from Get Smart. The MIT system, however, demands a lot of infrastructure. Many sensors and sound generators are required to do its subtle work. Will it have market potential, given that simple and relatively effective solutions are out there already? One example is the sound masking technology of Logison near Montreal, Canada. They offer more sophistication and control than generic white noise generators, but in a simple and easy to use system. Who will prevail in the long run? The MIT system certainly has the potential to offer more targeted masking, but unless the complex system can be offered in easy-to-install plug-and-play formats, it may never make more than a whisper in the market, though it may become a preferred tool for a few high-end users.
The key to successful innovation is rarely coming up with the highest performance in a product. The real key is providing a product that can be socially adopted – meaning that it positively changes the way people do things, and drives others to adopt it. The social aspect of innovation can never be neglected. This demands attention to industrial design, to ease of use, to convenience, to cost, to service and repair, etc. These factors help drive social adoption. It’s not all about bells and whistles. I hope the MIT product will become reality and succeed, but at the moment, I think lower-tech solutions will prevail unless the design and business model aspects for the MIT invention can be pursued to deliver successful social adoption.
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(Via Sharp Innovation.)
Is Recycling The Solution? Or Will Bioplastics Be The Answer? Let’s Look At The Economics Of Recycling.
Recycling is probably the number one thing consumer relates directly to ‘Green.’ People are trying to figure out what incentives are required fo rthe mass to adapt recycling. A company called GreenOps has developed a tracking system that can trace products going from the consumer stream to the recycling stream.
Companies that create consumer packaging can participate and put the GreenOps logo on their materials. Consumers buying goods can choose products identified with that logo. When finished, they take it to a GreenOps Tracking Station where they get a receipt showing the number of items they recycled and a code for redeemable cash at a retailer such as Wholefood etc. A 5 cents per bottle.
The concept is to have these tracking stations placed in high traffic areas like shopping malls, sports stadiums and other places where a whole lot of packaged products are tossed in large quantities. When an item is deposited into the machine, it gets scanned and the materials are tracked so companies can see how much of which products are being recycled. There are three questions: 1/I am not sure how often it needs to be cleared particularly high travel area given the size of the box 2/Is the 5 cents an effective motivation for consumers? 3/ The cost of deployment and I am not sure how the economics work.
Not sure we understand the economics of recycling. The bottle needs to be washed, usually in the kitchen sink with running tap water, so water is consumed. The plastic bottle is then taken to a recycle machine that crushes the bottle. Electricity is consumed to power these recycle machines. A special recycle truck picks up your blue (or green) box and then it delivers the recyclable material to a sorting factory. The factories and machines are built to sort the various recyclable materials from each other, paper, plastics, glass etc. These recycled plastic bottles are not made into new ones, theyre used for lower grade plastics such s those used to build playgrounds. So we will still need to keep manufacture more new plastic bottles. This is a hardly a solution.
Recycling is great idea at first thought, but we often consume more energy in reprocessing our recyclables than we are gaining. There are simply no cost-effective means of recycling food containers into new food containers. Can Bioplastics be the answer? Its still an open question on whether it is more energy efficient to use biodegradable plastic or just recycle petroleum-based plastic. There are no straight answers. In the meantime, please bring your own bottle.
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Herschel, First Light, and why it matters [Starts With A Bang]: “
First light is one of the most important tests of any new telescope. It allows you to look at a well-known object, see if there are any problems with your telescope, and to get a small glimpse of how good your telescope is going to be.
Almost 20 years ago, we launched the Hubble Space Telescope. For its first light image, astronomers zoomed in on an area of the cluster NGC 3532, an open star cluster known as the Wishing Well Cluster:
(For all images in this post, you can click on them for a hi-res version.) From this one image, we were not only able to obtain incredible resolution on the bright stars, we were able to discover some very faint stars never seen before from the ground, and we were able to first detect the problem of spherical aberration — a mirror that was defective by just 2.2 microns at the edges — just from this first-light image.
A little over 10 years ago, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey saw its first light, choosing to look at the well-known spiral galaxy NGC 6070 for its first light image:
Sure, the big galaxy is impressive, and we can tell that everything’s working well, but the real beauty of this image is all the other things we can see in it. Stars, galaxies, asteroids, and so much more — around 1,000 objects total — just from this one image. This image is only about a fifth of a degree on each side, but that’s not why it’s spectacular. The power of SDSS is that is can take an image like this every 50 seconds, allowing it to map a vast chunk of the sky more deeply and accurately than ever before. At last count, SDSS had discovered over 500,000 new galaxies and over 75,000 new quasars. And this first light image let us know what was coming.
So, as part of the European Space Agency’s amazing space program, they’ve just launched the new Herschel Space Telescope:
Guess what I have for you here? Herschel’s first light image! They went with a classic: the Whirlpool Galaxy, M51. And I’m not going to lie to you. At first glance, it isn’t very impressive.
Looks like it’s blurry, low-detail, and certainly not as spectacular as many of the other images we’ve seen. Sure, it’s infrared light instead of visible light, but so what? After all, not only is the visible light image much more spectacular and detailed:
But we already have a great infrared picture of this galaxy, courtesy of the Spitzer Space Telescope:
So why should you care about this seemingly inferior infrared picture from Herschel? Because it isn’t infrared like you’re used to. This is far infrared, unlike the near-infrared of Spitzer. This is very important, because stars are practically invisible in the far infrared! What Herschel sees is not the stars themselves, but the neutral dust and gas around them, heated up to such hot temperatures that it shines in the far infrared. No other telescope can see these wavelength that Herschel can see to such accuracies.
Want to see what the one band that Spitzer can see the same as Herschel looks like — side by side — for comparison?
No contest. At 160 microns, Herschel destroys Spitzer. And at 100 and 70 microns, Spitzer is completely blind, but Herschel still sees. That’s what this first light image is: M51 shown as a composite of 160, 100, and 70 microns.
And that’s the potential of Herschel, to learn about the parts of the Universe our eyes would never see, but that this new telescope can uncover — in great detail — for the first time. So that’s what you’re looking at with Herschel’s first light: a warm galaxy without its stars. Isn’t that impressive?
Read the comments on this post…“
(Via ScienceBlogs Select.)
The 10 Questions Every Change Agent Must Answer: “
As leaders, we have no control over how fast markets grow or how wisely banks lend. But we do control our own mindsets and ‘animal spirits‘ — the phrase coined by John Maynard Keynes in the depth of the Great Depression. If all you’ve got is a spreadsheet filled with red ink and dire forecasts, it’s easy to be paralyzed by fear and resistant to change. But if you can summon some leadership nerve, then hard times can be a great time to separate yourself from the pack and build advantages for years to come.
Indeed, when it comes to creating the future, the only thing more worrisome than the prospect of too much change may be too little change — especially in an economy where there are too many competitors chasing too few customers with products and services that look too much alike. Now is the time to rethink long-held strategic assumptions inside your company, to challenge decades of conventional wisdom in your industry, and to push yourself to learn, grow, and innovate. As Albert Einstein famously said, ‘Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them.’ Or, in the spirit of some unknown Texas genius: ‘If all you ever do is all you’ve ever done, then all you’ll ever get is all you ever got.’
It’s time to do — and get — something different. Here, then, are ten questions that leaders must ask of themselves and their organizations — questions that speak to the challenges of change at a moment when change is the name of the game. The leaders with the best answers win.
1. Do you see opportunities the competition doesn’t see?
IDEO’s Tom Kelly likes to quote French novelist Marcel Proust, who famously said, ‘The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes.’ The most successful companies don’t just out-compete their rivals. They redefine the terms of competition by embracing one-of-a-kind ideas in a world of me-too thinking.
2. Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas?
One way to look at problems as if you’re seeing them for the first time is to look at a wide array of fields for ideas that have been working for a long time. Ideas that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another industry, especially when they challenge the prevailing assumptions that have come to define so many industries.
3. Are you the most of anything?
You can’t be ‘pretty good’ at everything anymore. You have to be the most of something: the most affordable, the most accessible, the most elegant, the most colorful, the most transparent. Companies used to be comfortable in the middle of the road — that’s where all the customers were. Today, the middle of the road is the road to ruin. What are you the most of?
4. If your company went out of business tomorrow, who would miss you and why?
I first heard this question from advertising legend Roy Spence, who says he got it from Jim Collins of Good to Great fame. Whatever the original source, the question is as profound as it is simple — and worth taking seriously as a guide to what really matters.
5. Have you figured out how your organization’s history can help to shape its future? Psychologist Jerome Bruner has a pithy way to describe what happens when the best of the old informs the search for the new. The essence of creativity, he argues, is ‘figuring out how to use what you already know in order to go beyond what you already think.’ The most creative leaders I’ve met don’t disavow the past. They rediscover and reinterpret what’s come before as a way to develop a line of sight into what comes next.
6. Can your customers live without you?
If they can, they probably will. The researchers at Gallup have identified a hierarchy of connections between companies and their customers — from confidence to integrity to pride to passion. To test for passion, Gallup asks a simple question: ‘Can you imagine a world without this product?’ One of the make-or-break challenges for change is to become irreplaceable in the eyes of your customers.
7. Do you treat different customers differently?
If your goal is to become indispensable to your customers, then almost by definition you won’t appeal to all customers. In a fickle and fast-changing world, one test of how committed a company is to its most important customers is how fearless it is about ignoring customers who aren’t central to its mission. Not all customers are created equal.
8. Are you getting the best contributions from the most people?
It may be lonely at the top, but change is not a game best played by loners. These days, the most powerful contributions come from the most unexpected places — the ‘hidden genius’ inside your company, the ‘collective genius’ of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who surround your company. Tapping this genius requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to know you don’t have all the answers.
9. Are you consistent in your commitment to change?
Pundits love to excoriate companies because they don’t have the guts to change. In fact, the problem with many organizations is that all they do is change. They lurch from one consulting firm to the next, from the most recent management fad to the newest. If, as a leader, you want to make deep-seated change, then your priorities and practices have to stay consistent in good times and bad.
10. Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?
I first heard this question from strategy guru Gary Hamel, and it may be the most urgent question facing leaders in every field. In a world that never stops changing, great leaders can never stop learning. How do you push yourself as an individual to keep growing and evolving — so that your company can do the same?
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(Via HarvardBusiness.org.)
Q&A with Clay Shirky on Twitter and Iran: “
NYU professor Clay Shirky gave a fantastic talk on new media during our TED@State event earlier this month. He revealed how cellphones, the web, Facebook and Twitter had changed the rules of the game, allowing ordinary citizens extraordinary new powers to impact real-world events. As protests in Iran exploded over the weekend, we decided to rush out his talk, because it could hardly be more relevant. I caught up with Clay this afternoon to get his take on the significance of what is happening. HIs excitement was palpable.
What do you make of what’s going on in Iran right now.
I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted ‘the whole world is watching.’ Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.
Which services have caused the greatest impact? Blogs? Facebook? Twitter?
It’s Twitter. One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people aorund the world who’ve made it their business to help keep it open.
Do you get a sense that it’s almost as if the world is figuring out live how to use Twitter in these circumstances? Some dissidents were using named accounts for a while, and there’s been a raging debate in the community about how best to help them.
Yes, there’s an enormous reckoning to be had about what works and what doesn’t. There have been disagreements over whether it was dangerous to use hashtags like #Iranelection, and there was a period in which people were openly tweeting the IP addresses of web proxies for people to switch to, not realizing that the authorities would soon shut these down. It’s incredibly messy, and the definitive rules of the game have yet to be written. So yes, we’re seeing the medium invent itself in real time.
Talk some more about the sense of participation on Twitter. It seems to me that that has spurred an entirely deeper level of emotional connection with these events.
Absolutely. I’ve been saying this for a while — as a medium gets faster, it gets more emotional. We feel faster than we think. But Twitter is also just a much more personal medium. Reading personal messages from individuals on the ground prompts a whole other sense of involvement. We’re seeing everyone desperate to do something to show solidarity like wear green — and suddenly the community figures out that it can actually offer secure web proxies, or persuade Twitter to delay an engineering upgrade — we can help keep the medium open.
When I see John Perry Barlow setting himself up as a router, he’s not performing these services as a journalist. He’s engaged. Traditional media operates as source of inofrmation not as a means of coordination. It can’t do more than make us sympathize. Twitter makes us empathize. It makes us part of it. Even if it’s just retweeting, you’re aiding the goal that dissidents have always sought: the awareness that the ouside world is paying attention is really valuable.
Of course the downside of this emotional engagement is that while this is happening, I feel like I can’t in good consicence tweet about anything else!
There was fury on Twitter against CNN for not adequately covering the situation. Was that justified?
In a way it wasn’t. I’m sure that for the majority of the country, events in Iran are not of grave interest, even if those desperate for CNN’s Iran info couldn’t get access to it. That push model of one message for all is an incredibly crappy way of linking supply and demand.
CNN has the same problem this decade that Time magazine had last decade. They simultaneously want to appeal to middle America and leading influencers. Reaching multiple audiences is increasingly difficult. The people who are hungry for info on events of global significance are used to instinctively switching on CNN. But they are realizng that that reflex doesn’t serve them very well anymore, and that can’t be good for CNN.
Do you get the sense that these new media tools are helping build a global community, forged more by technology and a desire for connection, than by traditional political or religious divides?
You can see it clearly in what’s happening right now. And it cuts both ways. The guy we’re rallying around, Mousavi, is no liberal reformer. But the principle of freedom of speech and fair elections and the desire for reform trump that.
So how does this play out?
It’s complex. The Ahmadinejad supporters are going to use the fact of English-speaking and American participation to try to damn the dissidents. But whatever happens from here, the dissidents have seen that large numbers of American people, supposedly part of ‘the great Satan,’ are actually supporters. Someone tweeted from Tehran today that ‘the American media may not care, but the American people do.’ That’s a sea-change.
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(Via TED Blog.)
Synthetic cells get together to make electronics: “A network of artificial cells that work together to act as a rectifier (AC to DC converter) has been built by researchers at the University of Oxford and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
(Nature)
Like real cells, the protocells are droplets of watery fluid enclosed in an oily membrane, but they can fuse together, forming unidirectional electronic circuits.
The droplet networks could be used as an interface between electronic implants and living tissue, as tissue scaffolds to guide the regrowth of complex organs, or to provide low-power energy sources.
(Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17325-synthetic-cells-get-together-to-make-electronics.html)”
Twitter’s Ten Rules For Radical Innovators: “
Welcome to Twittermania. First it was Oprah — now Ev and Biz are on the cover of Time.
Is the hype justified? Yup: Twitter isn’t just changing how we communicate — it is changing how we innovate.
Twitter is one of the world’s most radical management innovators. It’s revolutionary because it brings 21st Century DNA roaring raucously to life: it is a living expression of the new principles of organization and management we’ve been discussing.
Here are Twitter’s ten rules for radical innovators (which have, just maybe, had a bit of influence when it comes to Twitter).
1. Ideals beat strategies. What infuriates people most about Twitter is that it seems to have no plan, scheme, or angle. ‘Hey, Twitter’ say the pundits: ‘don’t you know the business of business is to profit, by any means necessary?’
They’re as wrong as Dubya was about Iraq. The business of business is to create value — and that’s why Twitter’s not playing the tired, old game of value extraction. It is trying, instead, to create a more authentic kind of value — and to do that, you need ideals. Twitter pursues its ideals — democracy, peace, equity — with the quiet intensity of a true revolutionary.
2. Open beats closed. Anyone can use Twitter, make friends with anyone else on Twitter, and read anyone else’s Tweets, unless they’re locked. Here’s Oprah, for example. Openness is important because it unlocks 21st Century economics — the new economics of interdependence.
What are the new economies that Twitter unlocks? See the next three points.
3. Connection beats transaction. In the 20th Century, what was viral was mostly the flu. Today, Twitter is the master of viral economies. I got this awesome link from you got it from he got it from them. In the 21st Century, virality can make many different kinds of value activities significantly more efficient and productive. Today, viral economies pass links and messages from person to person. What will they pass tomorrow — cars, jobs, houses?
4. Simplicity beats complexity. Twitter has also mastered what I call economies of pain. Twitter’s bozo-proof: even Ashton Kutcher can use it. Apple, Google, now Twitter: all know that extreme simplicity is economically powerful because without it, network members never connect in the first place.
5. Neighborhoods beat networks. Twitter’s network effects don’t feel much like standard ones. I can subscribe to your feed, yet you don’t have to subscribe to mine — times millions. What’s going on here? Twitter realizes neighborhood effects, not just network effects: complex sets of intersecting, overlapping, mutually reinforcing network effects. Oprah’s followers are a neighborhood, and so are Ashton’s. You can benefit from joining many of these neighborhoods — not just one larger network.
6. Circuits beat channels. Twitter isn’t building a new media channel. It’s turning yesterday’s channel into a circuit. Oprah doesn’t broadcast to you: rather, the innovation is that you can talk to her, you can talk to your friends about her, she can talk to all of you, and anyone can talk to everyone. Twitter has dropped a neutron bomb of real-time feedback into the heart of media: yesterday’s inert, rigid channel becomes a flexible, ever-shifting, reconfigurable set of circuits instead. Efficiency is gained — and monopoly is vaporized — as demand coalesces around supply, and vice versa.
7. Laziness beats business. Twitter hasn’t rushed to cram a ‘business model’ down peoples’ throats. Instead of back-slapping each other after cutting deals, the Twitter guys are lazy. Why? They’re waiting to play, experiment, see what offers utility, creates value, and makes people truly better off. Business is too busy, most of the time, to care about any of that. Laziness says: ‘business models happen.’
8. Public beats private. Tweets are, by default, public. Not only can you message Oprah — but your messages to Oprah are public. Why is that important? Imagine, for a second, if banks had been run by Tweet instead of by executive suite: would Wall Street have been able to loot its depositors silly? Nope. Authentic value doesn’t hide in the shadows.
9. Messy beats clean. Hashtags and @s, Time notes, weren’t invented by Twitter – they were the result of people playing with Twitter. Twitter is messy — people can use it in uncontrolled ways — and that messiness means Twitter has better ideas faster than, for example, Facebook.
10. Good beats evil. To create a better kind of value, you’ve got to strive to be better. Authentic value doesn’t flow from evil — it flows from good. What’s evil about media? Saturation bomb ads, of course. And Twitter neither advertises nor accepts orthodox ads. Twitter, ultimately, is trying to conceive a better kind of advertising — and it can never do so if its already made a deal with the devil.
These are my rules — but they’re far from the only ones, or even the best ones. Are there more you want to add? Fire away in the comments with additions, subtractions, or multiplications.
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(Via HarvardBusiness.org.)
