Friday Five 47/08

This weeks Friday Five is about making your business idea stickier. If you think about it, games and playing are a fundamental part of our behaviour and almost all succesfull business ideas use some elements of gaming, whether it’s the product, the marketing, the customer relations or maybe even the financing?

Examples:
Facebook is about collecting friends.
MySpace lets you customize your character (the website)
Youtube has elements of competition with the most viewed/best rated function.
Flickr and Lastfm have elements of luck and randomness when they introduce you to people you might find of similar taste.
eBay has a rewards system, that builds the trust inbetween users.
.. so think patterns, goals, feedbacksystems, interfaces…

You can start by thinking about the things that make you want to play a game, see the definition and elements for game design from wikipedia or consult this action list from game scholar Aki Järvinen.

Accelerating / Decelerating • Aiming & Shooting • Allocating • Arranging • Attacking / Defending • Bidding • Browsing • Building • Buying / Selling • Catching • Choosing • Composing • Conquering • Contracting • Controlling • Conversing • Discarding • Enclosing • Expressing • Herding • Information-seeking • Jumping • Manoeuvring • Motion • Moving • Operating • Performing • Placing • Point-to-point Movement • Powering • Sequencing • Sprinting / Slowing • Storytelling • Submitting • Substituting • Taking • Trading • Transforming • Upgrading / Downgrading • Voting

So todays question in short - what elements of gaming could you add to your business idea?

Visualizing the problem your solving

If you haven’t already, you should check Jussi’s link back in the start of the course to Logic+Emotion.

When pitching, we should be able to communicate your (often complex) business idea within minutes. Pictures can be pretty efficient – at least in the school of economics we rarely practice the visual way of solving problems and explaining ideas.

Here are a few illustrations of what I mean by this (though there might well be more original ways of doing this). It might mean wireframes,  or flapboard scribbling, as long as you get the message out there : )

From last years course:

Paperlion (the business idea was also a web based one) describing the different product/money flows.

Our approach on the same moneyflow/productflow issue.

Dreamcare, business idea in a nutshell

Other examples were pretty hard to find – if you have good visualization examples, please share! Tripit has a nice comic book style going on, Zipiko relies on the list format and Mozillas USP is conveyed pretty effectively (scroll down). For more inspiration you could also visit Slideshares Business & Management section or the Events section, where you can find a lot of actual presentations held in different seminars/conferences/etc, some of them from startups in the same situation as you are.

Greetings from Seoul!

Greetings from Seoul – hope your final ideas are well on their way in Turku! At least here the well-being & health craze is apparent all around, for instance smoothie bars marketing themselves solely on health reasons and organic cosmetics in every other store.  And Koreans sure love their mobilephones, so your ideas could also fit very well here. So be brave and consider international aspects in your business plan – scalability shouldn’t be an issue.

Business Model approaches

No FridayFive this week, but I do hope that you use some colorful hats during the meeting in Turku : P

This week is going to be an intensive phase in your project – to actually carve out the business model and decide what goes and what stays. You are going to learn also a great deal on pitching an idea.

The picture is from an business model approach from Alex Osterwalder that might prove helpful when planning your business model and possible strategies, especially since your business ideas include several revenue flows, promises and customers. Check the slides from p. 16 forward. You could also try doing this manually?

Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner

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The Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner is something I really want to share with you. You can watch videos or download podcasts of these amazing speeches from the top speakers of the world for free. Listen to these inspiring lectures in the bus, during the breaks, waiting in the queue.. My personal favorites are Ken Wilcox, Stan Christensen and Carl J. Schramm, but I encourage you to find your own inspiration.

I think it is such a priviledge that Stanford students pay thousands of dollars every semester for this, but it doesn’t keep them from sharing the ideas.

You can browse the speeches by type, lecturer or subject at http://ecorner.stanford.edu/browse.html or via iTunes.

Ideas on patterns

Written by John Maeda, via the Public Design Center.

Last weeks Friday Five was about seeing ideas around you and expanding them. Maybe if you like to do something on a regular basis, someone else will also- whether it’s drinking coffee, doing something creative or following the news. Tapping into these kinds of patterns might prove useful.

For instance, the “having time on your own” need, (not knowing whether it should actually be monetized at all), is only covered by a handful of things, the first thing coming to my mind being yoga?

Friday Five 46/2008

Hope you had an enlightening morning with Mikko Kosonen!

In order to further develop your business ideas, this weeks FF will be about the six hats.

The Six Hats is a thinking tool for group discussions. The basic idea is that there are six different hats (white hat – facts, red hat – emotions, green hat – alternatives etc) that give you the opportunity to study a problem from different viewpoints.

This week’s assignment is to try on 2-3 hats and evaluate briefly your business ideas through them. You can choose for instance the positive yellow hat and state that “According to researcher Mr. Honoré there is a cultural revolution towards slow lifestyle” or maybe the critical black hat and claim that “There are already so many mashups and we can’t compete with Google anyway”.

Idea is that after this exercise you’ll have some 15-20 statements on your business idea. You don’t have to agree with all the points you are making, the important part is to use a variety of approaches and angles within thinking.

Briefly the hats, you can read more about them on for instance Wikipedia

White hat – facts

Participants make statements of fact, including identifying information that is absent and presenting the views of people who are not present in a factual manner. Key absences of information (ie information needs) can also be identified at this point.

Red hat – emotions

Participants state their feelings, exercising their gut instincts. In many cases this is a method for harvesting ideas – it is not a question of recording statements, but rather getting everyone to identify their top two or three choices from a list of ideas or items identified under another hat.

Black hat – negative judgement

Participants identify barriers, hazards, risks and other negative connotations. This is critical thinking, looking for problems and mismatches. This hat is usually pretty natural for people to use, the issues with it are that people will tend to use it when it is not requested and when it is not appropriate, thus stopping the flow of others.

Yellow hat – positive judgement

Participants identify benefits associated with an idea or issue. This is the opposite of black hat thinking and looks for the reasons in favour of something. This is still a matter of judgement – it is an analytical process, not just blind optimism.

Green hat – alternatives and creativity

This is the hat of thinking new thoughts. It is based around the idea of provocation and thinking for the sake of identifying new possibilities. Things are said for the sake of seeing what they might mean, rather than to form a judgement. What if we provided it for free? Could we achieve it usng technology X instead? How would someone from profession X view this?

Blue hat – process control (thinking about thinking)

This is the hat under which all participants discuss the thinking process. This hat should occur at the start and end of each thinking session, it sets objectives, defines the route to take to get to them and evaluates where you have got to and where the thinking process is going.

Our first business ideas

our-business-ideas

Fruugo will do for online shopping what Malevich did for squares

An interesting case on creating buzz: the finnish startup Fruugo, founded in late 2007 & including names such as Jorma Ollila & RIsto Siilasmaa, has a different strategy for publicity.

Instead of the usual startup evangelizing, they has for months only the equation 1L + 1M + 1P = ? on their website. Eventually it turned out to be “1 Language + 1 Mind + 1 Purpose = Success” describing the company’s business culture. So far we’ve learned that Fruugo is the “trusted 3rd party of ecommerce”. Now they’ve promised to come clean in tomorrows SIME Stockholm.

Sure, all startups don’t have the resources to pull off this kind of a stunt (reminds me actually quite a bit of the Nine Inch Nails viral campaign last year), but still it says something about the power of creating interest!

So, tommorrow the grand unveiling! Hope it’s going to be legendary.

More on Fruugo
Ollila ja Siilasmaa uuteen ohjelmistoyhtiöön (TE 5.11.2007)
Salamyhkäinen Fruugo pestaa staroja (M&M 8.5.2008)
Rumors circling around Fruugo (Arctic Startup 5.11.208)

Tim Brown on creativity and play | Video on TED.com

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Here’s an interesting video from IDEOs Tim Brown on the relationship between creativity and play. One idea that really stuck to me, was the one about quantity over quality at a certain point of the process (=for instance doing 30 different prototypes with very slight variations).

This might be obvious for you TaiK people, but in business school the mentality is often different. So good luck for the next weeks challenges and remember to open your ideas also here, so that we can contribute in between the teaching days.