Customer Driven

How do you balance a dream with reality?

This week, our class began watching Steve Blank’s online course How to Build a Start Up. I personally get a lot out of video lectures, so this media is very effective for me. Blank lectures in an informative yet informal style with a spritz of humor to keep it interesting.

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https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ep245

One of the main concepts reiterated throughout both lessons we watched was the difference between the traditional start up method and the one prescribed by Blank. Blank is famous for his start up process dubbed customer development, a spin on the classic process product development. This methodology puts the startup’s focus entirely on the end users rather than the product itself. An incorrect product-market fit is a huge start up killer that customer development aims to fix. This goes hand in hand with Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, which emphasizes the customer’s role in the firm.

I personally love this customer-based approach, as it couldn’t make more sense to me. From a musician’s perspective, why would I perform a concert for an audience that doesn’t want to hear my music? But it is here where I reach a stumbling block.

An entrepreneur must be a visionary; they must have some sort of a plan or a target, goal or dream. The way Blank talks about startups is almost as though they need to be an amorphous, undefined entity, ready to do backflips for the proposed customer base. I understand that finding your audience’s wants and needs is crucial to your business, but where do you draw the line between what you want to make and what your market wants? How far do we stretch the original dream to meet the consumer? Making a dream come true is where I find the passion of a startup comes from. You have to care deeply about what you’re designing, or else it will fall flat as a malnourished mess.

Finding that balance between something the world needs and something I want to be a part will be an interesting challenge. It sounds silly to me to place such value on whether I’ll like the venture or not, but I have to remember that if I was ok with doing something I didn’t like, I’d just get a 9 to 5 at an office. At least I’d be making guaranteed money.

I must find passion for something there is an audience for.

This is the only way.

 

…and as always, thanks for reading! 

Will VI

 

Life Lessons

When I marched with the Academy Drum and Bugle Corps, one of the most physically and mentally demanding things I have ever done in my life, my instructor told the group before every show, “Do what you know, because what you know is good enough.” When I was in Hebrew school as a child, learning about all the rules of eating kosher, some of the students got overwhelmed at such a long list of things that are considered unkosher. To ease their minds, the teacher told us, “Don’t worry about the things you can’t eat, and focus on the things you can.” To fill your mind with negatives is discouraging, but to fill your mind with positives and things you can do is exciting.

Much like drum corps, being an entrepreneur is incredibly demanding, and much like keeping kosher, there are many things an entrepreneur can and cannot do. Linda Essig provided the class with an entrepreneurial version of this life lesson: “Start with what you have and build on it.” What you have is good enough to be an entrepreneur, don’t crowd your mind with everything you don’t have. That list could be endless.

With that said, that is exactly what we did in class. We as a class compiled a list of what we have and who we know a few weeks ago, and this past week, we built on it. Through a few brainstorming processes, we came up with over 50 potential ideas for an arts venture. Now it is time to narrow it down to just 2. Stay tuned!

I am curious about what ideas brainstorming yields compared to an idea an entrepreneur realizes in his or her daily life…

~Jennifer

Creative Verbs

Our reading from last week included Thomas Ward’s 2004 article Cognition, creativity, and entrepreneurship. In the article, Ward explains three processes for coming up with creative ideas: conceptual combination, analogy, and initial problem formulation.

Conceptual combination: “when two previously separate concepts or images are merged into a single new unit, novel properties can emerge that were not obviously present in either of the separate components, and that the effect is particularly strong for dissimilar or divergent concepts”.

Analogy: “there are various manifestations of analogy and multiple purposes to which analogies might be put. The most obvious purpose is applying the knowledge from one domain as a kind of model to help in understanding or developing ideas in another domain, but another purpose is to communicate a new idea to others in a concise, understandable way”.

Problem formulation: “influences the approaches people adopt to solving problems and thereby has a lot to do with their ultimate success in solving the problems. Problems can be defined very concretely or very abstractly, with the former leading to less novelty but more familiarity. Knowing whether one’s goal is more or less novelty can help to determine the most productive approach”.

When reading specifically about the idea of conceptual combination, I couldn’t help thinking back to the first day of a design thinking strategies class that I took last semester, and how much of what we discussed really aligned with this concept. We did an exercise in groups where we had to come up with verbs that we thought explained what we were doing when we came up with creative ideas (example: juxtapose). Then we explained our ideas to the class using visuals. My group came up with the verbs and visual representation system that you see in this image from my notebook:

As I was reading about the process of conceptual combination, I couldn’t stop picturing those little circles and squares! I dug out my old notebook and realized that the “mesh/remix” and “juxtapose” categories could probably be lumped together and fall under “conceptually combine”. I’m also thinking that the “apply/curate/inspire” category is definitely our group’s concept of Ward’s “analogy” process – and was possibly the word we were looking for but couldn’t figure out how to define using a verb. Taking a look at the “define” category, I’m thinking this definitely relates to Ward’s initial problem formation process, where problems are reframed and redefined in ways that make more sense and lead towards a more innovative solution. This leaves me thinking about the remaining verbs we came up with: scale and eliminate. I’m not sure where these fit into Ward’s framework…it seems like “eliminate” is the inverse of “conceptually combine”, and scale might be it’s own category.

I think it’s pretty interesting to see that our group independently came up with a very similar idea of the processes that constitute the creative process as the ones outlined by Ward. I wonder if someone were to do a study where they gave the same assignment to a large assortment of groups of creatives with no prior knowledge of creativity research, if a similar common thread would emerge? It makes you wonder how innate the processes involved in creative work and problem-solving are to us in general.

Food for thought!

 

–Sam

 

 

Source:

Ward, T. B. (2004). Cognition, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing,19, 173-188.