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)

Blue Ocean Strategy in Web 2.0

Just stumbled onto this great article about how to create a "web 2.0" product, which is really in-depth. There's 50 strategies! Buried deep within at #38 is a paragraph about blue ocean strategy. The takeaway point is that established network effects are very hard to compete with. Services such as Digg and Del.icio.us got so large so quickly because they were offering something new in an uncontested market. These types of services fulfilled unmet demand for non-editorialized interesting news and a (somewhat) semantic search engine.

From the article:
38. Design your product to build a strong network effect. The concept of the network effect is something I've covered here extensively before and it's one of the most important items in this list. At their most basic, Web 2.0 applications are successful because they explicitly leverage network effects successfully. This is the underlying reason why most of the leading Internet companies got so big, so fast. Measuring network effects and driving them remains one of the most poorly understood yet critical aspects of competing successfully online. The short version: It's extremely hard to fight an established network effect (particularly because research has shown them to be highly exponential). Instead, find a class of data or a blue ocean market segment for your product and its data to serve.

http://web2.socialcomputingmagazine.com/50_essential_strategies_for_creating_a_successful_web_20_pr.htm

Takeaways from Barry et al (2006)

First dimension: "Businesses can innovate by offering an important new core benefit or a new delivery benefit that revolutionizes customers' access to the core benefit."
Second dimension: "whether the service must be produced and consumed simultaneously: - services can be produced and consumed on the internet anytime or anywhere
Market-Creating Innovations: A scalable business model, comprehensive customer experience management, investment in employee performance, continuous operational innovation, brand differentiation, an innovation champion, a superior customer benefit, affordability, continuous strategic innnovation

Takeaways from Kim and Mauborgne (2004)

red oceans - existing markets, blue oceans - new market space, demand is created rather than fought over
In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid.
Red ocean | Blue ocean
Compete in existing market space | Create uncontested market space
Beat the competiton | Make the competition irrelevant
Exploit existing demand | Create and capture new demand
Make the value cost trade off | Break the value cost tradeoff
Align the whole system of a company's activities with its strategic choice of differentiation or low cost | Align the whole system of a company's activities in pursuit of differentiation and low cost

10 Info Viz Projects for inspiration

Scraped blogs for sentences that start with “I feel” and shows aggregate metrics - http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_harris_tells_the_web_s_secret_stories.html
http://wefeelfine.org

3-D graphs of astronomy
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/george_smoot_on_the_design_of_the_universe.html

Last.fm listening history
http://www.leebyron.com/what/lastfm/

Who’s Buying What? (Good Magazine)
http://awesome.goodmagazine.com/transparency/014/014-buying-whos-buying-what.html

Edits to openstreetmap.org
http://www.vimeo.com/2598878

Facebook friend networks
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=639

Visualization of personality characteristics (quiz takes 10 minutes, registration)
http://beta.signalpatterns.com/personality_survey

Social network analysis
http://www.fas-research.com/visualizations.shtml

Digg Labs (Swarm) -
http://labs.digg.com/swarm

TweetWheel
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/project.cfm?id=587

BIT 678 - IT-Mediated Service Observation

I observed U01 interacting with Hulu, which is a web service that provides free streaming video content from major networks.U01 was alone at his desk eating dinner as he initially accessed Hulu. He had three other tabs open in his browser: some programming documentation, details from a homework assignment, and a tech news story. U01 navigated to a list of Daily Show episodes and made his selection based on the guest interview, Republican White-House press secretary Dana Perino, because he thought this had the most potential for controversy. The initial view preference was Full Screen, but buffering hiccups were an annoyance. After pausing and starting the video four times — which forced U01 to put down his food each time — he opted to use the “Dim Lights” feature.Hulu displays a 5-30 second video advertisement in place of commercial breaks. U01 watched the 30 second advertisement between the first and second segment. However, during the next, he muted the sound on his computer and browsed to his tech news story tab. Upon returning to the show, he had to rewind about 10 seconds so as to not miss any of the show. U01 stopped the show during the commercial break that separates the third segment with the credits. He watched a short Daily Show clip that was featured on the same page and closed the Hulu tab.

Takeaways from Leonard (1997)

Sometimes, customers are so accustomed to current conditions that they don't think to ask for a new solution
Observers saw people combining beepers and cell phones not to answer calls but to screen them.
Empathic design techniques can't replace market research; rather, they contribute to the flow of ideas that need further testing.
Learning from observation: triggers of use, interactions with the user's life, User customization, intangible invisible product assets, unarticulated user needs
Step 1: Observation - Step 2: capturing data media types - Step 3: Reflection and analysis, Step 4: Brainstorming for Solutions, Step 5: Developing Prototypes of Possible solutions

Takeaways from Thomke (2003)

Services are intangible, characteristics can't be isolated and controlled for in laboratory settings.
Evaluate Ideas --> Plan and Design --> Implement --> Test --> Recommend
Learning through Experiements: Factor / Definition
Fidelity = The degree to which a model and its testing conditions represent a final product, process, or service under conditions of actual use
Cost = The total cost of designing, building, running, and analyzing an experiment, including expenses for prototypes, laboratory use, and so on.
Iteration time = The time from the initial planning of an experiment to when the analyzed results are available and used for planning another iteration
Capacity = The number of experiments that can be carried out with some fidelity during a given time period.
Sequence = The extent to which experiments are run in parallel or series
Signal to noise ratio = The extent to which the variable of interest is obscured by other variables.
Type = The degree to which a variable is manipulated from incremental change to radical change.
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In a lab, expeirments are routinely undertaken with the expectation that they'll fail but still produce value. In the real world, there is pressure to avoid failure.

Takeaways from Melville et al

Discovery - frame and hypothesize, no judgement, building up ideas, synthesis leads to development
Development - ideation and visualization - concept development, and iteration and refinement. tangible representation. "the goal of prototyping isn't to finish. it is to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the diea and o identify new directions that further prototypes might take." - tim brown ideo
Implementation - final prototype, business case, pilot, launch

FitBit

BIT679 - Innovation Journal - FitBit

TechCrunch 2008 Presnetation and Demo of FitBit - external link: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=73 // Product Website - external link: http://www.fitbit.com FitBit is a wearable sensor for general audiences that monitors the user’s physical activity and sleep patterns, a “24 hour view of the body’s activities”. The device is small, light-weight, and intended for all-day use. Data from the device automatically transmits to a base station whenever the user is near a networked base station and power charger. FitBit.com provides a dashboard interface that displays calories burned, distance walked, and allows for manual logging of caloric intake. The service provides daily benchmarks for caloric intake and burn that dynamically updates based on sensor data and nutrition logging. Fitbit.com provides social networking features including groups and challenges to increase motivation for fitness. FitBit costs $99 and will launch in Q1 2009. While the monitoring service will have tiered pricing plans, some progress tracking features will always be free.