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?

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.

Friday Five 45/2008

We take so many things for granted – but what are the things that really make a difference?

List five things you like to do everyday.