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

Takeaways from Bitner et al (2008)

"service blueprints allow all members of the organization to visualize an entire service and its underlying support processes, providing common ground from which critical points of customer contact, physical evidence, and other key functional and emotional experience clues can be orchestrated"
physical evidence - everything that customers come into contact with
Customer actions - all of the steps customers take as part of the service delivery process. depicted chronologically across the top of the blueprint.
Visible contact employee actions - actions of frontline contact employees that occur as part of a face-to-face encounter
invisible contact employee actions - activities contact employees do to prepare to serve customers
support processes - carried out by individuals and units within the company who are not contact employees but that need to happen in order for the service to be delivered

Takeaways from The Service Imperative

five ways firms compete through service: exemplary customer service, new innovative services, services as revenue-producing offerings in non-service industries, a service culture that differentiates, technology-delivered and technology-enabled services

Ethnographic Research in the Classmate PC

I've been scanning the blogoverse for current examples of ethnographic research making payoffs in the marketplace. Researchers working on the Classmate PC project observed children in their regular environments and found that important features for a laptop designed for children are: water-resistant keyboard and a sturdy frame. Children are messy and more likely to be careless with their gadgets. Wonder how it will fare in the market!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10140794-1.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Crave

Takeaways from Kandybin (2004)

Ideation: new product and technology ideas, new business concepts and opportunities, consumer insights, trend analysis, extensions of existing ideas
Project Selection: strategy and new product links, governannce of initiatives, tracking and definition, project approval decision-making, advanced valuation
Development: effective stage/gate process, time to market, bottleneck elimination and identification, parallel planning of work steps, resource allocation
Commercialization: marketing and investment planning, consumer profiling and sgmentation, competitive response and timing, advertising and promotion decision making, product tracking

Takeaways from Cooper and Edgett (2003)

Voice of consumer methods - ethnographic research, customer visit teams (interviews - recommended), customer focus groups for problem detection, lead user analysis (innovative customers means innovative products), user designs, coustomer brainstorming, community of enthusiasts, customer advisory board of panel
Open innovation - partners and vendors, soliciting the external scientific/technical community, scannng small business and business startups, invite external finished product designs, external submission of ideas, external idea contest
other - peripheral vision (competitive research, user trending - good), disruptive technologies, patent mapping(looking at patents - good), idea capture internally (also good)