The Magic Bus Widget

Using Course Concepts in Real Life Part 2! RPM Ventures Pitch

I just made my first pitch to venture capitalists. My team and I made it to the final round of the RPM10 competition. Our basic idea is news recommendations from sources you select. Our biggest challenge and primary activity would be to develop an awesome recommender system. Here's a really cool video about the science behind the Digg recommender system: http://vimeo.com/1242909

It really helped to apply the principles from the Elsbach article, "How to pitch a brilliant idea". While it's not up to me to decide whether our idea is good, I tried to speak with passion and competence (showrunner) while keeping in mind how inexperienced I am (neophyte). So I was making a concentrated effort to listen to and consider the feedback. I think it went well!

Takeaways from Melville et al

hill defines a service as "a change in the condition of a person, or of a good belonging to some economic entity, brought about s the result of the activity of some other economic entity, with the approval fo the first person or economic entity.
"diffusion theory"- innovation research
simon frames design - "concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to attain goals."
objectives: effectiveness, efficency, usability
disruptive innovation - serving non-consumption markets, aim innovation at lower end consumers not currently targeted

Takeaways from Elsbach (2003)

successful types - showrunners (professionals who combine creative inspiration with production knowhow), artists (quirky and unpolished and prefer the world of creative ideas to boring reality), neophytes (young, inexperienced, naive)
bad types - pushover - unload an idea than defend it, robot - formulaic proposal, used-car salesman - obnoxious, argumentative, charity case - needy wants a job

Takeaways from Hargadon and Bechky

triggering collective creativity: help-seeking, help giving, reflective reframing, reinforcing

David S. Rose: 10 things to know before you pitch a VC

Using Course Concepts in Real Life! GroupLoops

This semester, I'm researching and developing a proof-of-concept for collaborative music composition software for the iPhone. Reading the Hargadon and Bechky article gave me a very useful takeaway about how to trigger collective creativity. Our audience is made up of novices who don't know much about music theory. Rather than focus on a tutorial that would preach music theory knowledge, perhaps we would do better to inspire conversation within the group. There are just too many contexts within the process of learning, collaboration, and creation to refer users to a paint-by-the-numbers tutorial. Inspiring conversation would allow users to reflectively reframe problems as they arise.

If you're interested, here's our project website: http://www.grouploopsinfo.com