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Daniel Gross and Craig Cannon go through questions submitted on Hacker News.

0:57 - Is it more valuable to build a startup community or join an existing one?

2:02 - How to get students to use your app?

3:06 - What are the most common methods to overcome the chicken/egg problem in a

marketplace app?

3:57 - Should you raise money before building a product?

4:25 - How important is it to talk about the tools (e.g. AI/machine learning)

that you use to build a product?

5:29 - Is there a point at which you should switch to machine learning?

6:47 - How important is it to raise money?

8:14 - How worried should startups be about people copying them?

10:00 - Should I focus on something I'm passionate about or a startup idea that

I think could work but I'm not passionate about?

11:48 - How can a young person without a degree get a job at a startup?

13:44 - Should I launch without a technical cofounder?

15:55 - How much equity should you give to early hires?

16:15 - How can you be someone that lives on the bleeding edge of technology?

18:14 - What should I do to prepare to be a founder?

20:00 - We feel pressured to get into machine learning, should we?

21:19 - How feasible is it to fly to Silicon Valley to raise money?

22:41 - What are the most common mistakes first time founders make?

23:43 - Does YC accept founders under 18?

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Startup Advice for Potential Founders : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

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Daniel Gross and Craig Cannon go through questions submitted on Hacker News. 0:57 - Is it more valuable to build a startup community or join an existing one? 2:02 - How to get students to use your app? 3:06 - What are the most common methods to overcome the chicken/egg problem in a marketplace app?

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Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on the biggest mistakes first-time founders make.

Topics

00:10 - Solving a problem you don't care about

1:00 - Helping users you don't care about

1:40 - Choosing cofounders you don't know well

2:20 - Not having transparent conversations with your cofounder

3:20 - Not launching

4:45 - Not using analytics

5:02 - Not knowing where your first users will come from

5:45 - Poor prioritization

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Biggest Mistakes First-Time Founders Make : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

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Y Combinator CEO and Partner Michael Seibel on the biggest mistakes first-time founders make.

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Rookie Mistakes: Where Do Great Startup Ideas Come From? : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

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Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel talk about where the ideas for Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe came from. Then they discuss what you can learn from these founders.

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Hi, everyone. My name is Jared. I'm a partner at YC. I'm going to talk about how to get startup ideas. This talk is for anyone who doesn't yet have an idea for a startup, and wants to find one. It's also relevant if you have an idea, but aren't sure it's the one you want to stick with.

Now, this is a tricky topic, because startup ideas are subtle. No one, not even YC, knows for sure which ideas will succeed. But at YC, we have seen thousands of startups try thousands of ideas, and we have learned that there are some powerful statistical trends. Certain kinds of ideas, and certain ways of generating ideas are much more likely to succeed than others. And so, my goal here is to point you in directions with a higher likelihood of success.

Here's how it's going to work. First, I'm going to discuss the most common mistakes founders make when coming up with startup ideas. Then, I'm going to talk about how to evaluate startup ideas, and finally, I'm going to talk about recipes for generating startup ideas.

The first, most common mistake is believing that you need an amazing idea to get started. What this usually looks like is someone who believes the key to having a successful startup is starting with a brilliant idea. And so they're waiting to have a brilliant idea before they start anything. It's really easy, when you look at successful companies today, like Google or Facebook, to think, "Wow, that was such a brilliant idea." But I can tell you it only looks that way in hindsight. When Google started, it was, like, the 20th search engine. And when Facebook started, it was, like, the 20th social network. What made them successful wasn't a brilliant initial idea. It was a good enough initial idea, combined with great execution.

The next mistake is exactly the opposite: jumping into the first idea that comes to mind, without really stopping to think critically about whether it's a good idea at all. And it's amazing how common this is. Here's the thing. If your startup is successful, you will spend years of your life working on it. And if you're going to spend years of your life working on something, wouldn't it make sense to spend, say, at least a couple of weeks first, deciding what to work on? Surprisingly few founders do this, and so, if you do it, you are actually ahead of the curve. What I'm arguing here is that if you imagine a spectrum where one end is "try the first idea that comes to mind," and the other end is, "wait for the perfect idea," you wanna be somewhere in the middle. You should think of your initial idea as a good starting point.

Startup ideas morph over time. Take Airbnb, for example. Airbnb was initially literally a website for renting air beds at other people's houses. It morphed over time into all vacation rentals. So the thing you want to do is to pick a good starting point. If you have a good starting point, then even if your initial idea isn't great, it just needs tweaking to get to a great idea. Whereas if you pick a bad starting point, there might not be any way to morph into a good one. You'll have to start over completely.

The third mistake is to start with a solution instead of a problem. And I'll give an example. So, imagine you come up with a startup idea "Uber for plumbers." It's an app, you push a button, a plumber shows up. This is a solution. What problem does this solve? I don't know. Maybe it's hard to find plumbers. That might be a real problem, but my point is if you come up with an idea like this, you are starting with a solution. We see this so commonly at YC that we have a term for it. It's called a "Solution In Search of a Problem," or a SISP. And these are usually not great, because usually, you never actually find the problem. You're much better off starting with a problem, and then looking for solutions.

The last mistake is believing that startup ideas are hard to find. Actually, they're easy to find, because there are many, many real problems left in the world. If you're having trouble finding them, it's just that you haven't yet learned how to do it. Once you learn how to notice good startup ideas, you'll see them all over the place.

Let's talk about evaluating startup ideas. I'm actually going to give you a formula for this. This formula comes from my colleague, Dalton, who has an excellent Startup School talk called "All About Pivoting," which I really recommend. I tweaked it a bit to fit this talk. Here is my idea quality score formula. It's real easy. It is to evaluate your idea on four criteria, and then you take the average of the scores.

The first criteria is how big is this idea? The best way to judge this, I think, is to look for existing large companies that do something similar. So, suppose you want to start a new kind of bank. Well, there already are a bunch of banks, and they're big companies, so that suggests that this idea could be big. Your idea could also score well here if you're doing something in a market that's small today, but has a real chance of being huge in the future. And a good example of this is a company called Coinbase. Coinbase is a YC company that lets you buy and sell cryptocurrency. And when Coinbase was started, in 2012, Bitcoin was still brand new, and still very small. But even at that time, there were people who believed that it might someday, like, replace all existing money. And clearly, if that happens, it'll be very big, which is why Coinbase was a good idea.

Founder/market fit. This is like, are the founders experts in what they're doing? A good example of this is a company called Flexport, which helps companies import products from around the world. And the founder, Ryan, before he started Flexport, had worked in international trade for 10 years, and he knew, like, everything about it. So that's, like, 10 out of 10 founder/market fit.

The next criteria is how sure are you that you're solving a big problem? Ideally, you have personal experience with this problem. And finally, do you have a new, important insight into this idea? And a great example of this is Airbnb. When Airbnb got started, most people thought that the idea of allowing strangers you met on the internet to sleep in your apartment was really weird, and probably dangerous. But the Airbnb founders had actually tried this. They'd invite strangers from the internet to stay with them, and they realized it was really fun. So they had this insight that everyone else was wrong about this, and that's what made Airbnb such a good idea.

Here are some other signs to look for that your idea is probably a good one. You're making something you personally want to have. It turns out it's much easier to start a successful company if you're making something you yourself want, instead of something other people want. For one, you start with at least one user, yourself, but more importantly, when you're building for yourself, you can trust your intuition about what to build. If you're building for other people, you have to guess what they would want.

Another sign is that this only recently became possible. If something recently changed in the world, like a new technology or a new product you can build on top of, that's often a sign that a new opportunity has been created. Or, there are successful companies that do something similar. A good example of this is Rappi, which does food delivery in Latin America. When Rappi got started, there were already food delivery companies in other parts of the world, like DoorDash, that were doing very well. It just hadn't caught on in Latin America yet.

My last topic about evaluating startup ideas is to talk about filters. Filters are bad reasons to reject startup ideas. And the most dangerous part of filters is that they will cause you to reject your best startup ideas unconsciously, before they even bubble up to your conscious mind, and there are four big ones that are extremely important to understand. Almost everyone has these filters. And one of the most impactful things you can do to become good at generating startup ideas is to learn what these are, and to turn them off.

The first is rejecting ideas that seem hard to get started. Paul Graham wrote a terrific article about this, called "Schlep Blindness," which I really recommend reading. And the example Paul discusses is Stripe. Stripe is a YC company that makes it easy to integrate credit card payments to your website. And the fascinating thing about Stripe is that when Stripe launched, there were thousands of developers who already knew that this was a problem. They had tried to integrate credit card payments to their site, and they realized that the existing options sucked. But not one of them tried to fix it. Why is that? The reason is that to start Stripe, you had to do a bunch of things that seemed difficult. You had to get a deal with a bank. You had to learn a lot about the nitty gritty details of the world's credit card infrastructure. Those things sounded so hard that thousands of would-be founders who could have started Stripe earlier unconsciously shied away from the idea.

The second filter is ideas that are in a boring space. And a great example of this is Gusto, which makes payroll software. There were, once again, thousands of programmers who must have realized that payroll software sucked, but because it was a boring problem, nobody tried to fix it.

The third one is ideas that seem too ambitious. Sam Altman wrote an excellent blog post on this, called "Hard Startups." Founders instinctively shy away from really ambitious-sounding ideas because they are intimidating. But often, these are the ideas that turn into really big companies.

The last one is that founders instinctively shy away from spaces where there are existing competitors. You should actually err on the side of doing things with existing competitors. When founders go into spaces with no existing competitors, they usually find out that the reason there are no competitors is because nobody wants the product. The ideal situation is a market where there are existing competitors, but you have noticed something that they all seem to have missed. A great example of this is Dropbox. When Dropbox launched, there were already dozens of file syncing and storage solutions, but none of them had gotten very many users. Dropbox launched with a better product, and was able to beat all the competitors.

Now the part that you're probably waiting for, how to generate startup ideas. It is possible to sit down and explicitly think of startup ideas. And in a moment, we'll talk about how to do this. But it is actually not the best way to have startup ideas. The best way to have startup ideas is to notice them organically. There are great startup ideas all around you, and when you have a prepared mind, you see them everywhere. The problem is that when people sit down and try to think of startup ideas, they tend to think of bad ones. Whereas startup ideas that occur to you organically are actually quite likely to be good ones.

So first, I want to talk about how to have startup ideas organically. If you're not starting a company right now, this should be your preferred approach. Learn how to notice good startup ideas, then let the good ones occur to you. To have startup ideas organically, you first have to know what a good startup idea looks like, so you notice them when you encounter them. Then, you just keep an eye out for things that seem missing in the world.

If you're planning to start a startup way in the future, it's very helpful to become an expert on something valuable, and the best way is probably to get a job at the forefront of some field. If you're working at the forefront of some field, really any field, you'll see good startup ideas before other people. It's particularly helpful to go work at an existing startup. Many of the most successful YC companies came from ideas that the founders had while working at someone else's startup.

Okay, I'm gonna walk through seven recipes for explicitly generating startup ideas. I'm listing all seven recipes, to be comprehensive. This is basically all the ways I know to generate startup ideas. Now, I know of examples where all seven of these have worked, and led to a successful company, however, they are not all equally good. Some are much more likely to produce good ideas. Others are quite likely to produce bad ideas, and those solutions in search of problems I was talking about earlier. So, I'm going to list them in order, from best to worst.

This first recipe is the best one. It is the one that is most likely to lead to good ideas, and least likely to lead to false positives. Of the most successful companies YC has funded, about half of them can be traced back to roughly this recipe, and here it is. You start with what your team is especially good at, and think of ideas that you would have an unfair advantage in executing. The reason this is so effective is that any idea you come up with this way has automatic founder/market fit. You're basically generating all the ideas that have good founder/market fit.

Let's walk through some examples of how to do this. The first thing I do is I go through every company you've ever worked at. Internships are fine. And for each one, I'd ask yourself what are things you learned there that other people don't know? So, for example, SnapDocs. The founder of SnapDocs, Aaron, had worked in the mortgage industry for 10 years, and learned, like, everything about it. So he started SnapDocs, which builds software for managing mortgage paperwork. Then, ask yourself, for each company, what seemed broken? What parts of company life were clumsy? For example, Lattice is a company that makes software for performance reviews. And the way the founders had this idea is that they worked at a company together, and they noticed how bad their performance review software was. Then ask yourself if there were things that your company built in-house that other companies might need. A good example of this is Mixpanel. Before Suhail started Mixpanel, he worked at a company called Slide, that had built advanced analytics tools for internal projects. Suhail realized that other companies would need those same tools, and that's how he came up with Mixpanel.

Second recipe, think of things you wish someone else would build for you. A great example of this is DoorDash. The DoorDash founders were trying to get Thai food delivered to them in the suburbs, and they realized there was literally no way to do it. So, they built DoorDash.

Third recipe. What would you be excited to work on for 10 years, even if it didn't succeed? What things are you really passionate about? A great example of this is Boom, which is making a supersonic airplane. The founder of Boom, Blake, came up with the idea basically by asking himself this question. He had not worked in aerospace, and he was not a building-an-airplane expert, but he was just obsessed with the idea of supersonic travel. That said, I have seen this recipe lead founders astray, so I wanted to warn you about it. It can lead founders astray by encouraging them to work on something that they're very passionate about, but that does not have a clear path to being a big business. So, for example, you might be really passionate about collecting stamps. Doesn't necessarily make it a good place to look for startup ideas.

Number four, look for things that have changed in the world recently, and think of ideas that are now possible because of this change. For example, a new technology, a new developer platform, a new regulation, a new problem in the world. What are waves that you could ride? A maybe non-obvious example of this is a YC company called PlanGrid, which was acquired for a billion dollars. PlanGrid put construction blueprints on tablets, replacing paper. And what changed in the world that made PlanGrid possible was that Apple had created the iPad.

Number five, find companies that have been successful recently, and look for new variants of them. A good example of this is Standard Cognition. Now, the story of Standard Cognition is that Amazon has recently created Amazon Go, which is a grocery store that automatically tracks the things you take off the shelves, so you don't need to go to the cashier. Standard Cognition realized that every retail store would want the same technology, and that's what they do. This is a very common way that founders look for ideas, but unfortunately, it's not necessarily the best one. Ideas that are generated this way often take a form like "Uber for X," or "Airbnb for Y." These ideas are very often solutions in search of problems, so if you come up with an idea this way, you should be default skeptical, and you should think really hard about whether it is actually solving a problem.

Number six, you can also crowdsource coming up with an idea by talking to people you know, and asking them for problems they want solved. This is especially interesting to do with people who have particular areas of expertise, like people who work in an interesting industry, for example. The downside with this recipe is that most people are bad at seeing startup ideas. That's why this strategy seems to work particularly well if the people you ask are other startup founders. They already know how to notice good startup ideas.

And, number seven. Look for industries that seem broken. Any industry that seems broken is probably ripe for disruption. A good example of this is a YC company called LendUp, which is a replacement for payday lending. And part of the founding story of LendUp is that the founders just noticed that payday lending was an obviously broken and scammy industry. The downside of this recipe is it will often take you to ideas that have poor founder/market fit. It's not likely to work well if you don't know anything about the industry you're hoping to disrupt. LendUp worked well because the founders were already FinTech experts, and so, if you try this approach, I would recommend sticking with industries that you already know something about.

And that's it. As you can tell, I am very interested in the topic of how people come up with startup ideas, so if you try these recipes, and have feedback or suggestions for other approaches, please let me know. Thanks.

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How to Get Startup Ideas : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

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Hi, everyone. My name is Jared. I'm a partner at YC. I'm going to talk about how to get startup ideas. This talk is for anyone who doesn't yet have an idea for a startup, and wants to find one. It's also relevant if you have an idea, but aren't sure it's the one you want to stick with.

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Para idear un emprendimiento exitoso debemos buscar problemas que resolver, o al menos, mitigar (Christin Klose/dpa)

Dicen que la mejor manera para encontrar una idea y crear un emprendimiento exitoso es, justamente, no pensar en ideas para crear un emprendimiento. Seth Godin sugiere no buscar clientes para nuestros productos, sino productos para nuestros clientes. Si seguimos este consejo, para idear un emprendimiento exitoso debemos buscar problemas que resolver, o al menos, mitigar.

Muchos emprendimientos que han logrado tener éxito y sostenibilidad en el tiempo, tienen ciertas características claras: una problemática que los fundadores quieren resolver, que ellos mismos pueden resolver y que, hasta ese momento, no hubo otros que pensaran que valía la pena resolverlo. La razón para comenzar con un problema a resolver es que nos veremos obligados a asegurar que el problema es real. Que existe. Que hay mercado que identifica el problema. Y que este mercado pagaría por esta solución.

Muchos fallan porque dedican su esfuerzo a resolver problemáticas que no existen, o que nadie reconoce tener. Vivir pensando ideas para un negocio es peligroso. No siempre surgen buenas ideas; y lo peor, en nuestro cerebro resuenan tan bien como para lograr engañarnos y hacernos trabajar en ellas malgastando recursos valiosos. Emprender es difícil, y es duro, porque nos obliga a ponernos en los zapatos del otro, a conocer qué piensa, dice, siente y hace frente a una problemática.

Los emprendedores exitosos desarrollan esa capacidad de empatía con su mercado para entender cuánto realmente molesta no poder mitigar un problema puntual. Al emprender tenemos que mirar los problemas desde la cabeza de nuestros posibles clientes. Escuchando y observando cómo, en su día a día, sobrellevan un escollo. Tenemos que encontrar a, al menos, un usuario que quiera verdaderamente resolver sus problemas con nuestra solución. No alcanza con un "tal vez lo usaría". Necesitamos un "¡Lo quiero, ya!". Es recién en este momento que vale la pena comenzar a pensar en desarrollar y llevar adelante esa idea. Esta primera validación, ofrece el aval de que vale la pena crear algo que un pequeño número de personas quiera muchísimo. Luego, probablemente muchas más personas perciban la propuesta de valor que creamos y quieran utilizar nuestro producto o servicio.

Frente a cualquier idea de emprendimiento siempre es bueno preguntarse: ¿Existe un problema? ¿Existe alguien que se identifique con ese problema? ¿Necesita con cierta urgencia una solución? ¿Pagaría por esta solución? ¿Nos pagaría a nosotros? Responder estas preguntas, no hace que nuestra idea sea necesariamente exitosa. Debemos profundizar en entender mejor cuántos otros querrían resolver un problema con nuestra solución. Debemos entender ese mercado e ir descubriendo posibles rutas que vayan evolucionando desde la idea original.

En nuestro proceso mental, ese problema se puede resolver y, muy probablemente, lo podamos describir de una manera obvia. Y esa es la magia de todo esto. Generar ideas para un emprendimiento se basa en ver lo obvio, intentando desarrollar soluciones obvias que, sin embargo, hasta hoy nadie las ha visto. Pero el mundo emprendedor no solo se basa en lo anterior, también es pensar en un equipo que acompañe el desarrollo y, en el caso del sector tecnológico, es innovar con sentido.

La tecnología no implica innovación. Pero facilita el camino para poner en marcha un emprendimiento y definir el modelo de negocio al que se le puede agregar valor gracias a las herramientas tecnológicas, internet, la nube, entre otras. Todos estos solos, en cierta forma, emprendedores con equipos chicos e innovadores. Pero cuando el emprendimiento comienza a crecer, y a tener mayor demanda, se cae en la tentación de transformarse en una empresa burocrática. Hay que evitar esto y re pensar el negocio para fomentar la innovación en todos los equipos.

Llegado a este punto, es cierto que un emprendedor que sepa programación tiene ventajas. El conocimiento de tecnologías y la programación sigue siendo una de las mejores opciones al momento de emprender, pero no es un requerimiento. Siempre uno puede rodearse de un buen equipo de desarrollo. Sin embargo, al momento de emprender en un proyecto tecnológico es recomendable que el conocimiento de tecnologías sea parte del equipo fundador que vaya a tomar decisiones. Tener noción de código ayuda a no perder el detalle de lo que está pasando en tu emprendimiento. No será necesario a alguien que traduzca el lenguaje técnico usado en las reuniones, pudiendo comprender acerca de qué se está hablando y cómo podría impactar una decisión técnica en el propio negocio.

Para llevar adelante un emprendimiento tecnológico exitoso es casi seguro que necesitarán conocimientos de negocio y de tecnología para diseñar un producto adecuado, que presente la mejor experiencia de usuario para sus clientes y que permita entender y manipular las grandes cantidades de datos que se procesan hoy en día para convertirlos en conocimiento del comportamiento estos clientes.

Para gestionar estos datos y comprenderlos se utilizan herramientas digitales y, en ocasiones, procedimientos complejos, que se resuelven mediante determinados lenguajes de programación. Pero también es muy importante desarrollar el conocimiento sectorial y comercial necesario para dar valor a estos datos. La figura del desarrollador es la estrella en la actualidad y sigue en crecimiento, ya que es una de las principales fuentes de valor e innovación para las empresas. Es un talento escaso. Se hace difícil sumarlos, y retenerlos, a la hora de lanzar un emprendimiento. Son realmente limitados los desarrolladores que suman valor al negocio y es necesario trazar estrategias para retener ese talento y darle la importancia que se merecen dentro del emprendimiento.

Finalmente, como veníamos conversando, la tecnología probablemente sea parte importante de nuestros emprendimientos. Pero una idea clara acerca de qué problema y cómo lo vamos a resolver es clave. Es prácticamente imposible adivinar el camino que pueda tomar una idea. Podremos percibir o aventurar un futuro para luego crear lo que falta. Muchos emprendimientos ni siquiera fueron pensados como negocios. Crecieron porque sus fundadores crearon algo que el mundo necesita.

El mejor camino es el diálogo permanente con la mayor cantidad de personas posible sobre lagunas y vacíos que encuentran en su mundo. Haciendo las preguntas correctas: ¿Qué falta? ¿Qué les gustaría hacer distinto? ¿Qué les molesta en su trabajo? Y observando que hacen frente a cada escollo del día a día. Quizás, entonces, detectemos un problema que ellos, conscientemente, no saben que tienen, pero que sabemos cómo resolver.

Seguir leyendo

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No busques ideas para emprender, buscá problemas para resolver

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Para idear un emprendimiento exitoso debemos buscar problemas que resolver, o al menos, mitigar (Christin Klose/dpa) Dicen que la mejor manera para encontrar una idea y crear un emprendimiento exitoso es, justamente, no pensar en ideas para crear un emprendimiento. Seth Godin sugiere no buscar clientes para nuestros productos, sino productos para nuestros clientes.

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El Design Thinking o "Pensamiento de Diseño" es la metodología de innovación más popular actualmente. Y Designthinkingespaña.com es el punto de encuentro y recursos para todo aquel que quiera conocer más sobre ella. También estás invitado como profesional a ampliar tus conocimientos y aplicarlos para innovar en tu empresa. O en aquella que estás creando. Tanto a través de nuestros cursos de Design Thinking personalizados In House como en los que ofrecemos para el público general. Y si eres emprendedor o estás pensando en serlo, navegando por los menús verás claves seleccionadas y otros recursos para ponerte en marcha. ¿Tienes alguna propuesta, pregunta sobre nuestros cursos o quieres comentarnos algo? Pincha aquí.

Qué es Design Thinking

Como siempre, no existe una única definición válida para un concepto. Nuestra definición de Design Thinking es que es una metodología orientada a la generación de soluciones dentro de un marco propuesto. Se divide en una serie de etapas, a las que se puede volver de forma iterativa. Pero por las que siempre ha de pasarse al menos una vez.

Una de las características más importantes de esta herramienta es que está plenamente orientada al usuario. Por eso, los productos y servicios generados de forma adecuada a través del Design Thinking aportan valor a las personas. Ya que han sido diseñados con este fin.

El Design Thinking es una metodología centrada en el usuario. Y orientada a la acción. Cuyo objetivo es generar soluciones de acuerdo a problemas detectados en un determinado marco de trabajo.

El auge y popularidad actual del Design Thinking viene por su capacidad para generar en muy poco tiempo soluciones innovadoras. Ofrecer a emprendedores y Startups una metodología con la que avanzar y testar rápidamente sus hipótesis y crear una cultura creativa e innovadora dentro de las empresas y las aulas.

¿Quieres echar un vistazo a nuestro vídeo donde te explicamos la metodología con ejemplos? Te recomendamos que sigas leyendo, y después, le eches un vistazo.

Las ilustraciones son cortesía de nuestros amigos de Makushi.

Etapas en un proceso de Design Thinking

Como antes comentábamos, un proceso de Design Thinking se divide en distintas etapas. Existen diferentes variaciones y escuelas de pensamiento a este respecto. En Designthinkingespaña.com partimos de la división clásica en cinco:

Empatizar: Es la primera etapa del proceso, y la base del mismo. En la fase de Empatizar, definimos el arquetipo de usuario al que vamos a dirigirnos, establecemos nuestros objetivos de investigación y, a partir de ellos, decidimos qué técnicas de recopilación de información utilizaremos. El objetivo de esta fase es identificar deseos y necesidades relevantes para el usuario.

Técnicas propias de la fase de Empatizar son la entrevista en profundidad, la observación y el Focus Group, entre otras.

Definir. Segunda etapa del proceso. En ella, organizamos toda la información recopilada para identificar todas las áreas de oportunidad desde la que podemos ofrecer soluciones relevantes para los deseos y necesidades para el usuario.

La técnica más habitual en esta parte del proceso es el Clusterizado o Saturar y Agrupar, que consiste en primer lugar en el volcado de la información que hemos recopilado en post its. En segundo, en la agrupación de esos post its de acuerdo a su contenido. Y, en tercero y último, en encontrar una frase que sintetice la información de cada uno de los grupos.

La frase de la síntesis, que debes construir con una oración autoexplicativa que contenga un sujeto y un predicado, será la que dará lugar al reto. El reto se formula a través de una pregunta y siempre empieza por la tiene la construcción: "cómo podríamos hacer para + frase de la síntesis.

Idear: Una vez establecido el reto (que puede ser también reformulado o refinado) pasamos a la parte de diseño de la solución. En esta parte del proceso, la primera fase por la que pasaremos será la de idear.

En la fase de Idear, o Ideación, se trata de dar el mayor número de ideas posibles que respondan al reto planteado. Es el momento del brainstorming, y de otras herramientas que nos impulsen hacia el encuentro del mayor número de ideas posibles.

Prototipar: A partir de las ideas generadas, se lleva a cabo una selección, y éstas pasan a prototiparse. La fase de prototipado es aquella en la que damos forma a las ideas, las tangibilizamos. De esa forma, se las podremos mostrar al usuario, quien podrá darnos feedback y decir en qué medida la solución que estamos diseñando para él se ajusta a sus necesidades o deseos.

Dependiendo del momento en el que nos encontremos, el prototipado será más o menos básico. Existen muchas formas de prototipar, como la prueba de concepto, el Storyboard o la Maqueta física.

Prototipamos para fallar rápido y barato, buscando que el usuario, cuanto antes, nos indique si el camino que estamos tomando en el diseño de la solución es adecuado o no.

Validación o test. Es el momento en el que mostramos nuestro prototipo de solución al arquetipo para el que estamos diseñando. La fase de validaciñon exige preparación. Tendremos que establecer los objetivos, construir la guía y, por último, mostrar al usuario nuestra solución.

En esta fase, es importante que entendamos que no estamos vendiendo. Se trata de aprender del feedback del usuario para hacer posteriormente una nueva versión mejorada de nuestra solución.

Te mostramos a continuación de forma gráfica cómo es el proceso:

Las flechas marcan el orden. Una vez completado y llegado a la validación o test, la flecha viene acompañada de una interrogación. El motivo es que, dependiendo del feedback que nos de el usuario, decidiremos a qué punto del circuito debemos volver. A través de un proceso iterativo que nos acerque cada vez más hacia aquello que satisface sus necesidades y deseos.

Como comentábamos anteriormente, el proceso ha de pasar por todas las fases al menos en una ocasión. Sin embargo, podremos sentirnos libres de volver a una de ellas si consideramos que es importante hacerlo. Siempre y cuando eso no nos paralice o ralentice demasiado el proceso.

Un proceso de Design Thinking se divide en un total de cinco fases. Terminado el recorrido, la solución encontrada y validada con el usuario puede enriquecerse en una nueva iteración.

A continuación, os mostramos cada fase de manera detallada. Pinchad en cada una de ellas y entenderéis mejor en qué consisten y su relación con las demás. Tened en cuenta que el Design Thinking comparte el espíritu de las Metodologías Ágiles. Buscad el error para aprender rápidamente. Terminado e imperfecto es mejor que perfecto e inacabado.
Pincha en la fase para la que quieras ver una descripción detallada y entender mejor en qué consiste.
El facilitador en un proceso de Design Thinking

Un proceso de Design Thinking está dirigido a la generación de una solución dentro de un marco concreto. Dada su versatilidad y capacidad para llevar rápidamente a la acción ideas, puede ser utilizado por cualquier grupo de personas que quieran afrontar un reto.

Cuando se tiene experiencia, el rol de facilitador puede llevarlo a cabo cualquier persona del grupo de trabajo. Pero cuando no se tiene, el proceso no resulta tan sencillo. Ser facilitador implica tener una comprensión profunda de los fundamentos del Design Thinking y guiar a las personas durante el proceso.

Un facilitador está al servicio del grupo. Tratando de ayudarle a sacar lo mejor de sus componentes a través de la metodología

El rol del facilitador no es el mismo que el de un participante activo del grupo de trabajo. Su función es la de sacar el máximo de este último, ayudándolo en los momentos en los que puede quedar enquistado. Es importante subrayar que el facilitador no está para elegir qué idea es la mejor de las propuestas. Tampoco para definir el foco de acción. Su labor es la de hacer posible que el grupo indague, trabaje con ganas y con los cinco sentidos. Para que así, desde la comprensión y la inspiración, genere soluciones potentes que posteriormente serán prototipadas.

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Un proceso muy habitual en compañías que quieren generar innovación es salir del edificio. Cambiar el entorno de trabajo para cambiar también la perspectiva. Esta dinámica, aconsejada en los procesos de innovación, suele venida compañada por una sesión de Design Thinking. Se establecen unos tiempos, se define un reto. Y el facilitador es el encargado de cumplir con ellos y de hacer que al final del proceso existan soluciones esperando a ser validadas.

Algunas características del buen facilitador

Facilitar una sesión de Design Thinking no es sencillo. Para ello es necesario generar mucha confianza en el grupo. Y disponer de habilidades para potenciarlo. Las características de todo buen facilitador son, entre otras, las siguientes:

Capacidad de escucha: Un buen facilitador es capaz de ver qué está pasando en el grupo y, a partir de ahí, actuar. En unas ocasiones puede necesitar un ambiente más sosegado. En otras uno más dinámico. El facilitador está ahí para medir los tiempos y aportar desde lo que percibe que el grupo necesita para funcionar mejor.

Desapego por sus propias opiniones: El trabajo del facilitador no es dar soluciones. Tampoco decantarse claramente por unas u otras dentro del grupo. Su labor es la de potenciarlo y crear las condiciones para que éste trabaje mejor. Dar sus propias opiniones contribuye precisamente a lo contrario. Por un lado, porque sesga las de los participantes. Y por otro, porque puede generar inseguridades entre los miembros del grupo de trabajo, anulando su iniciativa.

Amabilidad y buena disposición: Las sesiones de Design Thinking pueden ser complejas, pero también extremadamente divertidas. La labor del facilitador es ayudar a crear un buen clima de trabajo. También la de hacer que todos los participantes se sientan escuchados e importantes. Por eso es fundamental que se muestre atento e implicado. Como una referencia que tranquilice y genere confianza en el grupo para que se suelte y de lo mejor de sí.

Historia del design thinking

La historia más conocida del Design Thinking tiene pocos años. Sin embargo, podríamos decir que los inicios de esta metodología tienen lugar antes de 1960. Y aparecen ya en cuestiones relativas al diseño industrial.

Durante los años sesenta en Estados Unidos se dan unos tímidos intentos de crear una ciencia en torno al diseño. También de empezar a vincularlo de un modo más profundo con las necesidades de las personas. El arquitecto e inventor Richard Buckminster Fuller fue uno de los más activos en esta iniciativa. Y empezó a crear metodologías con las que diseñar y evaluar soluciones a problemas. En Escandinavia, por su parte, empezaron a crearse grupos de diseño cooperativo.

Entre esta década y la de los ochenta, las nuevas concepciones y prácticas empiezan a cobrar fuerza. También aparecen nuevos nombres propios, como Herbert A. Simon, Victor Papanek o Horst Rittel. Términos como innovación, creatividad y multidisciplinareidad empiezan a utilizarse en torno al diseño. La idea de que este debe adaptarse a las necesidades de las personas y el entorno cobra cada vez más fuerza.

El Design Thinking alcanza con IDEO el reconocimiento y la puesta en marcha como metodología para innovar de gran calado.

Pero es en los noventa cuando el Design Thinking se convierte definitivamente en lo que hoy conocemos. En 1991 nace IDEO, la consultora que revoluciona el mundo del diseño. Y convierte esta metodología en la más utilizada para generar innovación. Muy pronto pasaron por IDEO empresas de la talla de Apple, cuyo ratón fue diseñado desde los principios del Design Thinking.

Ya en 2005, la Universidad de Standford incluye el Design Thinking entre su oferta de estudios. Tim Brown, actual CEO de IDEO empieza a dar allí las clases. Al tiempo que IDEO sigue creciendo. En 2009, se publica uno de los libros que se consideran hoy más importantes del Design Thinking: Change By Design, también de Tim Brown.

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Emprendimiento y design thinking

El Design Thinking es una potente herramienta en el diseño de productos y servicios. Por eso, puedes utilizarla como emprendedor para avanzar rápidamente en tu proyecto. De hecho, guarda importantes similitudes con la metodología Lean Startup. El propio Tim Brown y Eric Ries hablan sobre ello en una conversación moderada y subida a Youtube en la que también participa Jake Knapp, de Google Ventures.

Otra de las ventajas que te aportará será la de generar rápidamente propuestas que conectan con el usuario. En una segunda fase, podrás darles forma y convertirlas en modelos de negocio, basados en el producto o servicio que estés diseñando. Para ello, podrás servirte de recursos de los que también te hablaremos aquí, como el Bussiness Model Canvas y el Arquetipo de cliente.

Tanto si eres un particular que quiere aprender Design Thinking, como si eres una empresa que necesita diseñar productos o servicios relevantes para un grupo de usuarios, en Design Thinking España podemos ayudarte. ¡Solo tienes que preguntar!
Quiero más información sobre vuestro curso de Design Thinking o servicios para empresas.

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Descubre la metodologia Design Thinking. Paso a paso y de forma fácil.

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El Design Thinking o "Pensamiento de Diseño" es la metodología de innovación más popular actualmente. Y Designthinkingespaña.com es el punto de encuentro y recursos para todo aquel que quiera conocer más sobre ella. También estás invitado como profesional a ampliar tus conocimientos y aplicarlos para innovar en tu empresa.

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A project team from Stanley Black & Decker, a US$12.7 billion diversified manufacturing firm, noticed something problematic when observing customers using the company's products at construction sites. Tools such as miter saws and table saws needed higher voltage than the 20-volt systems commonly used for hand tools such as drills and circular saws. As a result, contractors were using extension cords or gasoline generators. But the former were inconvenient and created hazards, and the latter brought noise and pollution. After making these observations, Stanley Black & Decker developed the DeWalt line of "FlexVolt" cordless power tools and battery packs. They've been quickly embraced by professional contractors - generating $300 million in incremental sales since the line's 2016 introduction.

"Cords are one of the biggest pain points on a construction jobsite," says Stephen M. Subasic, vice president of human resources at the company's global tools and storage unit. "Our customers were telling our teams they wanted more cordless options." But end-users had an additional constraint: They had made large investments in existing 20-volt tools and were unwilling to give them up. The FlexVolt system solved the problem. "We were able to marry some emerging technologies in motors and batteries so that the FlexVolt system automatically adjusts to the voltage of the tool," says Subasic. "It's a single-battery platform that addresses the pain point, and spans both the next generation and the current generation of tools."

Few companies are able to bring this kind of rapid breakthrough innovation from concept to market success. But Stanley Black & Decker has consistently developed winning products for years, and has been doing so while spending its R&D dollars more efficiently than its industry peers. In this year's Global Innovation 1000 study - our annual analysis of the 1,000 publicly held companies that spend the most on research and development (R&D) - we look at a subset of companies like Stanley that we call "high-leverage innovators." These are companies that outperformed their industry groups on seven key measures of financial success for the previous five years, while at the same time spending less on R&D as a percentage of sales.

Achieving high performance is difficult in any given year, and remarkably difficult to sustain. But the success of these high-leverage innovators reaffirms a finding of our study that has held true over time: There is no long-term correlation between the amount of money a company spends on its innovation efforts and its overall financial performance. Instead, what matters is how companies use that money and other resources to create products and services that connect with their customers. Also important is the quality of companies' talent, processes, and decision making.

R&D spending among the Global Innovation 1000 overall increased 11.4 percent in 2018, to a record high of $782 billion, reflecting R&D spending increases in all regions and nearly all industries (see "Profiling the Global Innovation 1000"). If we carve out the high-leverage innovators, we see that the 88 companies that earned that classification in 2017 had sales growth 2.6 times as high as other companies on the Global Innovation 1000 list from 2012 to 2017 and growth in market capitalization 2.9 times as high, while their R&D intensity (R&D expenditures as a percentage of sales) was lower than their industry median. These high-leverage innovators can be found in all regions and industries. They include household brands such as Apple, Adidas, and Stanley Black & Decker, and companies that may be less familiar to readers, such as Amadeus IT Group, a global provider of travel solutions and software based in Spain, and DIC Corporation, a Japan-based specialty chemicals company.

Profiling the Global Innovation 1000

The companies in the Global Innovation 1000 spent US$782 billion on R&D in 2018. This represented record-high spending, and an increase of 11.4 percent over 2017. Year-on-year growth in 2018 was nearly four times as high as growth between 2016 and 2017, when spending increased by 3.2 percent. Revenues for the Global Innovation 1000 also increased by 11.4 percent, leaving R&D intensity, or innovation spending as a percentage of revenue, unchanged from 2017 (at 4.5 percent) and maintaining the 14-year high (see "R&D and Revenue").

Total R&D spending by the top 20 companies was $214.5 billion, or 27.4 percent of the total spending by the Global Innovation 1000. For the second year in a row, Amazon led the top 20 list, with spending of $22.6 billion - up a massive 40.6 percent from 2017. It was followed, as was also the case last year, by Alphabet, with R&D expenditures of $16.2 billion (see "The Top 20 R&D Spenders"). Facebook posted the biggest climb on the top 20 list, up six places from its 2017 position to number 14. Sanofi and Siemens rejoined the list this year, after falling outside the top 20 in 2016 and 2012, respectively. Four industries - software and Internet, auto, healthcare, and computing and electronics - accounted for more than 97 percent of the top 20's R&D spending.

Taking a broad look at industry spending, with the exception of aerospace and defense and chemicals and energy, all industries increased their R&D spending in 2018. R&D spending rose in the four industries that accounted for 76 percent of total R&D spending - computing and electronics, healthcare, auto, and software and Internet, the same four that dominate the top 20. But the spending growth trajectories for these industries have shifted.

Spending had been flat for more than five years in the computing and electronics industry up to 2017, and we predicted in last year's study that healthcare would likely take the number one spot in 2018. Instead, a $13 billion R&D spending surge in computing and electronics - almost a third of which was attributable to increased spending at Samsung and Apple - kept computing and electronics companies on top, despite continued growth in healthcare.

Software and Internet companies, whose research and development spending has been rising sharply for several years, similarly seemed poised to surpass auto companies' spending in 2018. Instead, R&D spending in the auto sector, likely focused on electronics, software, and autonomous vehicles, jumped $16 billion. That was a 15.2 percent year-over-year increase, and it kept auto in third place. The growth trajectory of software and Internet companies, however, continues to suggest they will rise higher on the list (see "R&D Spending by Industry").

Companies headquartered in all regions increased their R&D spending in 2018 (see "R&D Spending by Region"), but the most vibrant innovation investment was in China and Europe. Chinese companies led in R&D spending increases by a wide margin, up 34.4 percent. They also registered the biggest increase (16 percent) in the number of companies on the Global Innovation 1000 list (see " China's R&D Success Story "). European companies were second in both R&D spending growth (14 percent) and gains in the number of entries in the Global Innovation 1000 (7 percent).

North American, Japanese, and "rest of world" companies all had R&D spending growth in the single digits, and all three regions saw declines in the number of companies on the list. North America did retain the lead in the number of innovators in several sectors, including software and Internet companies (61 percent), healthcare (49 percent), aerospace and defense (47 percent), and computing and electronics (38 percent) (see "The Global Sector Spending Breakdown").

R&D spending among the Global Innovation 1000 overall increased 11.4 percent in 2018, to a record high of $782 billion.

We tailored our analysis this year to determine what sets high-leverage innovators apart from their competitors, interviewing innovation leaders and studying the innovation programs at a number of companies on the list. We also surveyed a sample of leaders and managers - 869 in all - to gain insights about where they are focusing their innovation efforts, how their innovation approaches are changing, what different innovation models they are pursuing, and how well they are succeeding. We separated out those companies that reported they were outperforming their competitors in terms of growth and profitability, and noted how their innovation practices contrasted with those that reported growth similar to or slower than that of their peers.

Our analysis reveals that both the high-leverage innovators and the larger universe of companies that report relative high performance have six key characteristics. The first five are widely understood, though executed to varying degrees. The sixth is something that only the best innovators accomplish.

1. They closely align innovation strategy with business strategy.

2. They create company-wide cultural support for innovation.

3. Their top leadership is highly involved with the innovation program.

4. They base innovation on direct insights from end-users.

5. They rigorously control project selection early in the innovation process.

6. They excel at each of these first five characteristics and have been able to integrate them to create unique customer experiences that can transform their market.

For companies looking to improve the reach and results of their R&D investment, examining the strategies of those that consistently perform at the top of their game offers invaluable insight.

Inside the High-Leverage Innovators

We first conducted the high-leverage innovator analysis in 2006, finding 94 companies that fit the criteria, and then created the list again in 2007, identifying 118. For this year's study (when we found 88 such companies), we compared the list across three years - 2007, 2012, and 2017 - to provide a 15-year performance window (each list draws on the previous five years of data). Only two companies qualified as high-leverage innovators in all three years: Stanley Black & Decker and Apple - Silicon Valley's poster child for innovation excellence and the perennial leader of our "10 Most Innovative Companies" list.

The 10 Most Innovative Companies

After ceding its lead position to Alphabet in 2017, Apple was once again selected by our Global Innovation 1000 survey respondents as the most innovative company in 2018 (see "The 10 Most Innovative Companies"). Apple also became the first publicly listed U.S. company in history to achieve a US$1 trillion market capitalization in 2018. We would argue that it's not a coincidence: What's driven Apple's commercial and financial success, after all, is its ability to design and develop distinctive new products and services and bring them to market successfully.

Overall, the list of the 10 most innovative companies has a distinctly digital feel. Three companies are in the computer and electronics sector (Apple, Samsung, and Intel), and five are in the software and Internet sector (Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Netflix). The single auto company on the list is Tesla, whose Model 3 electric car was described in a Washington Post review as an "iPhone with wheels." The only traditional industrial company on the list, General Electric, has taken pains in recent years to describe itself as a "digital industrial company."

Amazon - which in September 2018 became the second U.S. company to cross the trillion-dollar value mark - was first voted onto the list by respondents to our 2012 survey, appearing in 10th place. It has climbed ever higher by dominating the booming e-commerce sector and developing its successful cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services. The company, which was ranked the second-most innovative company in 2018, also led the list of the biggest R&D spenders this year, with innovation outlays of $22.6 billion - a year-over-year increase of 40.6 percent. Alphabet, number three on this year's 10 Most Innovative Companies list, was second in spending, with outlays of $16.2 billion.

But innovation, as we've long argued, is not primarily a reflection of how much you spend. Apple spent less in 2018 on R&D as a percentage of sales than eight of the other nine companies selected by respondents as the most innovative - a mere 5.1 percent of sales, compared with 20.9 percent for Intel, 19.1 percent for Facebook, 14.6 percent for Alphabet, and 12.7 percent for Amazon. (General Electric had the lowest R&D intensity, at 4.0 percent.) Apple was also the only company from the 2017 high-leverage innovator list to be selected by survey respondents as being among the most innovative. Adidas, another 2017 high-leverage innovator, fell just outside the top 10 (number 11).

Comparing financial metrics, the 10 most innovative companies outperformed the 10 biggest R&D spenders on revenue growth, gross margin, and market cap growth (see "Innovating vs. Spending").

One of the notable changes to the high-leverage innovator list since its earlier iterations has been the dramatic rise of companies headquartered in China, from 3 percent of the total in 2007 to 17 percent in 2017 - a net increase of more than 400 percent (see "China's R&D Success Story"). The number of high-leverage innovators in Europe also increased significantly, from representing 18 percent of the total number in 2007 to representing 30 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, the number of high-leverage innovators fell 45 percent for North American companies, 8 percent for Japanese companies, and 23 percent for the "rest of world" countries.

China's R&D Success Story
by Patrick Hui and Barry Jaruzelski

When we first published the Global Innovation 1000 study in 2005, only eight companies on the list were headquartered in China, accounting for a negligible amount of R&D spending. In 2018, 145 Chinese companies were among the top 1,000 spenders, and their innovation spending increased 34.4 percent over 2017 - or nearly three times the overall rate of increase among the Global Innovation 1000 between 2017 and 2018. R&D spending by Chinese companies is concentrated (representing 86 percent of total spending) in industrials - where China has a larger share of Global Innovation 1000 companies than any other region - software and Internet, auto, and computing and electronics.

Chinese companies also carved out a sizable stake of the high-leverage innovator list, making up 17 percent of this group in 2017, compared with 3 percent in 2007 - a net increase of more than 400 percent. Notably, Europe was the only other region for which the number of high-leverage innovators increased; North America, Japan, and the "rest of world" category all saw declines (see " 2017 High-Leverage Innovators ").

China's R&D activities have placed it toward the top of other lists as well. In 2018, China broke into the list of the world's 20 most innovative economies, according to the Global Innovation Index (GII), an annual ranking of innovation competitiveness ( note: PwC's Strategy& was a Knowledge Partner of the GII in 2017 and 2018). Coming in at number 17 (of the 126 economies ranked), China was the only middle-income country to make the top 20. The GII report noted, "In absolute values, and in areas such as R&D expenditures and the number of researchers, patents, and publications, China is now 1st or 2nd in the world.... China presents an impressive example for other middle-income countries to follow as they seek to join the echelons of high-income economies. With this success in mind, China's attention is now turning to the quality and impact of innovation."

One reason for China's rise as an R&D leader is simply the vibrancy of the country's economy in the 21st century. China's GDP has expanded at rates not seen in most other regions for many decades. The Chinese government has also consistently made R&D a top agenda item for the five-year plans that set the economy's direction. Business sectors singled out for innovation investment and incentives in China's current five-year plan include new-energy automotive, high-end robotics, next-generation information technology, and advanced medical equipment. Recently, trade tensions with the U.S. have led the Chinese government to spur innovation in semiconductors - making multibillion-dollar investments in startups to ensure that China's technology companies are not dependent on U.S. suppliers.

Another critical factor underlying China's R&D rise reflects Chinese companies' focus on some of the innovation success factors that this year's study identifies. In our 2018 survey, Chinese companies reported an alignment of innovation and business strategy that was better than those in other regions: For example, 78 percent of Chinese companies said their strategies were highly or closely aligned, as compared with 62 percent for North American companies (see "Strategy Alignment by Region"). Companies headquartered in China lead other regions by similar margins on indicators such as their executive team's involvement in innovation strategy and company-wide cultural support for innovation programs.

We also found that the need seeker strategy is a more prevalent innovation model in China than in other regions (44 percent among companies headquartered in China, versus 34 percent for all companies in our survey). The need seeker model - which previous research found was also most prevalent among Silicon Valley innovators (pdf) - is the most common model followed by companies that report higher revenue growth and profitability than their industry peers.

Patrick Hui is a partner with PwC China, based in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. He works with multinational corporations and public organizations to conduct large-scale operations transformations, improve their supply chain operations, and enhance their product innovation capabilities.

Among industries, the number of high-leverage innovators rose between 2007 and 2017 in telecommunications, consumer goods, healthcare, industrials, autos, and aerospace and defense, while the numbers fell in chemicals and energy, computing and electronics, and software and Internet. Looking at all three years, in 2007 the industry with the largest presence on the list was computing and electronics, in 2012 it was computing and electronics and healthcare (tied), and in 2017 it was healthcare.

High-leverage innovators had operating and gross margins similar to those of other Global Innovation 1000 companies for the five years ending in 2017, but significantly outperformed them on five other financial metrics, including gross profit growth (which for high-leverage innovators was 2.1 times as high as that of other companies) and market capitalization growth (2.9 times as high) (see "High-Leverage Innovator Performance Index").

During the three five-year periods ending in 2007, 2012, and 2017, high-leverage innovators' relative outperformance decreased on two key measures - gross profit growth and operating income growth - although relative total shareholder returns increased slightly. This likely reflects a general improvement in the overall performance of the Global Innovation 1000 companies over time. But the data also reveals a startling fact: The high-leverage innovators vastly outperformed other companies in the 2007-12 period, which spans the last major business downturn and the first years of the current expansion. This suggests that during the Great Recession, high-leverage innovators recovered more quickly and robustly. In fact, they blew the doors off the competition in gross profit growth (which was 6.6 times as high as that of other companies), operating income growth (7.0 times as high), and total shareholder returns, which were 13.4 times those of the rest of the companies in the Global Innovation 1000 (see "High-Leverage Innovator Performance, 2007-17").

Characteristics of Successful Innovators

In analyzing our survey respondents' answers to questions about innovation practices and strategies, we found sharp differences between companies reporting fast revenue growth (43 percent of respondents) and those reporting similar or less success than their peers (48 percent said they were growing at the same rate as their peers and 9 percent said they were growing more slowly). Moreover, survey respondents who reported that their companies were outperforming their competitors have many of the same approaches and attitudes toward innovation that the high-leverage innovators exemplify.

Strategic alignment. Respondents who reported that their companies were outperforming their industry groups were far more likely to report strategic alignment. Of that group, 77 percent said their innovation strategies were highly or closely aligned with their business strategies, compared with 54 percent of respondents who reported growth typical of their peers, and 32 percent of respondents who reported slower growth. Similar differences hold true for companies that reported higher profitability.

We also found differences when it came to strategic alignment among the three innovation models into which we have segmented companies over the past 11 years: Need Seekers, Market Readers, and Technology Drivers. In our survey this year, need seekers made up 34 percent of total respondents. ( Note: Figures have been rounded.) These companies engage customers directly to generate new ideas, then develop original products and services and get them to market first. Market readers, accounting for 23 percent of our respondents, are fast followers. They typically generate ideas by closely monitoring their markets, customers, and competitors, focusing largely on creating value through incremental innovations to current products. Technology drivers, 44 percent of our respondents, depend heavily on their internal technological expertise to develop new products and services, driving both breakthrough innovation and incremental change, in hopes of meeting the known and unknown needs of their customers via new technology.

It is helpful to consider the breakdown of responses by innovation model, given need seekers' own perception of relative success: 65 percent of need seekers report they have higher profitability than their peers, as compared with 38 percent of market readers and 43 percent of technology drivers. And need seekers also report higher revenue growth (59 percent) than market readers (35 percent) and technology drivers (36 percent). It is significant, then, that 84 percent of need seekers say their innovation and business strategies are closely aligned, whereas this is true for only 48 percent of market readers and 53 percent of technology drivers (see "Need Seekers Embrace Strategic Alignment").

Conversations with innovation leaders at high-leverage innovator companies revealed a similar focus on alignment. At Amadeus IT, "our ambition is to have a strong alignment between our business strategy and the innovation strategy," says Marion Mesnage, head of research, innovation, and ventures. "We've increased the alignment and are strengthening it." In the past, R&D at the company - a $5.8 billion global travel software and information technology business headquartered in Spain - tended to be technology-centric, Mesnage says. But it is shifting its focus more toward understanding customer needs and identifying growth opportunities within the company's business units, which serve airlines, hotels, tour operators, insurers, car rental and railway companies, ferry and cruise lines, travel agencies, and individual travelers. "Right now," says Mesnage, "we are running strategy sprints to gather people in the same room from different business units with the end goal of co-creating our next wave of innovation themes."

At DIC, a Japan-based global manufacturer of printing inks, organic pigments, and synthetic resins, top management has also moved in recent years to align the company's R&D activities more closely with its business strategies. DIC splits R&D operations into two divisions. The direct-to-customer technology division, which focuses on incremental innovation, is always in sync with the business strategy and works closely with the business units. "The organization of these activities is quite closely linked," says Kiyotaka Kawashima, executive officer and general manager of R&D. "The budget control and administration are both done by the business units, and they approve the themes of technology and R&D." A separate division, which focuses on basic innovation, has also been more closely aligned with the business strategy in recent years, but has more leeway in deciding which projects to pursue.

Cultural support. Seventy-one percent of respondents who reported that their company's revenues were growing faster than competitors' revenues said their corporate culture was highly or very aligned with their innovation strategy, compared with 53 percent of companies that reported the same growth as competitors, and 33 percent for companies that reported slower growth. The differentials on cultural alignment were similar for companies that reported higher profitability.

We also found differences in cultural support by innovation model. Need seekers are far better at turning their corporate culture to their advantage: 82 percent said their organization's culture was highly supportive of the innovation strategy, compared with 48 percent for market readers and 47 percent for tech drivers.

CEO Tim Cook of Apple (which we have long identified as a need seeker) has said that innovation is in the company's DNA, and that its culture is not something that can be formulaically copied. But he has given some clues about how Apple fosters that culture - for example, by hiring smart people who can collaborate cross-functionally. "You look for people that are not political," Cook said in a 2013 interview with the dean of Duke's Fuqua School of Business (Cook's an alumnus). "You look for wicked smart people...who appreciate different points of view.... The reason Apple is special is we focus on hardware, software, and services. And the magic happens where those three come together.... It's unlikely that somebody that's focused on one of those in and of itself can come up with magic, and so you want people collaborating in such a way [that] you can produce these things that can't be produced otherwise."

Amadeus IT is focused on building cultural support across its 45 locations worldwide (the company's main R&D hubs are in France, Germany, India, the U.K., and the U.S.). "We are made up of people who have a great appetite for new things, for exciting technology, and for new opportunities," says Mesnage. Innovation teams are very multicultural, she adds, "which creates a great ground for creativity and for exchanging different perspectives." One of the practices Amadeus has adopted is creating a system of innovation champions within its R&D and business units, whose role is to promote and foster the company's innovation approach at their site, and to encourage people to submit ideas - and then collect those ideas to make sure they're visible to the rest of the organization.

Executive involvement. Survey respondents reporting higher revenue growth than competitors were much more likely to say their company's executive team was closely involved with the R&D program - 78 percent said their executive team was highly or closely aligned with R&D investment and strategy, compared with 62 percent for same-growth companies, and 53 percent for slower-growth companies.

Among innovation models, most need seekers reported that their leadership teams were plugged into their innovation programs: 84 percent of need seekers reported that their executive team was highly involved in decision making regarding R&D investment and strategy, compared with 63 percent of market readers and 57 percent of tech drivers.

All the high-leverage innovators we interviewed or analyzed said their executive teams were highly aligned with their innovation programs. Stanley Black & Decker is a case in point.

"The executive team is involved in innovation right from the top," says Tim Hatch, chief technology officer at Stanley Engineered Fastening. "Our CEO mentions breakthrough innovation whenever I hear him speak in a group. Whenever we have project reviews or product reviews, he is always asking questions around where we are with breakthroughs and how we are commercializing the ideas that have been generated by the teams. And as you go down from his level to the business unit level, there are similar levels of engagement."

At Apple, innovation has always been a top executive-team agenda item. It helps to start with a visionary founder (the late Steve Jobs), but Apple has also elevated innovation - and specifically, design - within the organization. Jony Ive, for example, who has run Apple's design studio since 1996, was named chief design officer in 2015. He reports directly to the CEO, and his responsibilities include the look and feel of Apple hardware, user interface, packaging, and major architectural projects such as Apple Park and Apple's retail stores, as well as new ideas and future initiatives.

Focus on customer insights. All of our survey respondents - those who reported their growth as faster, slower, or the same as that of their peers - value deep customer and consumer insights in their innovation programs. They ranked consumer and client insights as the most important capability during the ideation stage. However, interestingly, respondents who reported revenue growth that was the same as or slower than that of their peers believe they are most competent in this capability, whereas those who reported faster revenue growth ranked it as a capability in which they have the second-most competence. This may seem counter-intuitive, but actually makes a good deal of sense. Those who reported slow or similar growth compared with their peers' growth seem to think that they have done enough in this area. Those who reported fast growth see further opportunities for improvement.

Looking at the innovation models, need seekers - which rely heavily on customer insights - also chose customer insights as their second-best competency. But market readers and tech drivers chose it as their top competency. Overall, the top innovators seem to recognize that when it comes to gathering customer insights, no company is ever done learning.

DIC has focused on gaining direct customer insights into some of its most successful innovations. One of the company's main businesses is producing components and materials for the color filters of liquid crystal displays used in TVs, computers, and other devices - especially the red, blue, and green pigments they utilize. Technology in this field has advanced rapidly over the last 10 years, according to R&D general manager Kawashima, and typically a long supply chain distances the end-users from the process and materials providers such as DIC. The innovation team sought end-user feedback at a very early stage of development for its latest color filter innovations, and was able to incorporate the insights and utilize its production know-how to create pigments superior to its competitors' offerings. Today, DIC's market share for green pigment is 80 percent, and it is 50 percent for blue.

Direct end-user input played a major role in the turnaround of Adidas that began in the 1990s (see " How Adidas Found Its Second Wind," s+ b, Aug. 24, 2015). A new management team set out to recapture the innovation mojo that had characterized the athletic footwear company during the leadership of the founder, Adi Dassler, who died in 1978. Dassler had started the company with a simple approach: He observed athletes, talked to them about their needs, and then experimented with novel ways of solving their problems. The new team renewed Dassler's approach, focused on performance-related design and industrial craftsmanship, and rebuilt Adidas's product line.

Adidas is now focusing on open source innovation and co-creation with customers to develop new ideas. Says CEO Kasper Rørsted: "We look at all kinds of collaborative creation as valuable - not only within our company, but with external partners as well. We are clear about the borders of our brand, because the brand is sacred to us. But we also recognize that if we have only the inspiration and creativity of people within our own organization, we miss a lot of what's going on in the marketplace. We articulate this point by saying that we need to be consumer-obsessed and to create the best product for the consumer. If that is your endgame, then you have to be able to confront sacred cows, and open yourself up to ideas that you might not have been open to in the past." Adidas's innovation approach has been key to its return to the ranks of top innovators and financial performers - and its ranking as one of our high-leverage innovators for the 2012-17 period.

Focus on project selection. When asked which stage of the innovation process - ideation, project selection, product development, or commercialization - was most important, 35 percent of our survey respondents chose project selection, followed by 31 percent for ideation. This "front end" of the innovation process is indeed critical to success. For one thing, most of the long-term costs of product development - as much as 70 percent, in our experience - are locked in at the ideation and project selection phases. And even great operational capabilities and business management cannot overcome poor decisions about which ideas to move into development and production.

Companies reporting relatively faster growth said they were most competent at the ideation and project selection stages, but they were more likely than those reporting slower growth to see even more potential improvement in their project selection capabilities: 42 percent of the fast-growth companies saw project selection as the stage with the most opportunity for improvement in their company, compared with 30 percent of same-growth companies and 31 percent of slower-growth companies.

Need seekers are also more eager to improve the project selection phase of the innovation process - 42 percent said this is the innovation stage where most improvement is needed, compared with 29 percent of market readers and 33 percent of tech drivers - while they put less emphasis on improving product development.

Stanley Black & Decker is among the group of companies hungry for more. "I would agree that project selection is the area where we have the biggest opportunity for improvement," says Hatch, the CTO of Stanley Engineered Fastening. The core product development teams are challenged to find the next iteration or big step from a current product, and then are measured very tightly on delivering on the product time line, he says, "100 percent, on time, on cost, on delivery." The breakthrough innovation teams, however, are challenged to go after projects that might not be a success. "If everything we do is a success," Hatch says, "then we're not trying hard enough and not going far enough from the core."

Amadeus IT has a similar focus. Innovation leaders track the portfolio precisely and have explicit criteria for project selection. "It's not like we create something and then commercialize it," says Mesnage, head of research. "It's all about making sure that we have a problem-solution fit - that we've really found a problem worth solving, that we have a solution in mind that can solve it, and that there is a business appetite, so that we know there are enough people willing to pay for the solution we are proposing." One recent product innovation that grew out of the company's revamped innovation approach is Amadeus Video Solutions, an interactive video player that enables travel providers to show consumers videos about travel destinations and pause the video at any time to see the location on a map; check and price travel, lodging, and activity options nearby; and make purchases without leaving the platform.

The New Innovation Excellence

Not long ago, companies that aimed for innovation excellence might have felt it was sufficient to be good at most of the five characteristics discussed above, and best-in-class at one or two. But the standard for innovation excellence has been rising as businesses have become more competitive in the 21st century - which the Global Innovation 1000 studies have shown for many years. Companies that aspire to the highest level of innovation leadership today need to excel at every aspect of innovation. And they need to make them converge in a way that pushes the boundaries of market expectations and transforms the customer experience. Here we can revisit the two companies that made the high-leverage innovator list throughout the entire 15-year performance window of our analysis.

Apple's innovation mind-set is thoroughly integrated in the mission as well as the organization of the company. When asked in a Fast Company interview what outsiders might misunderstand or underappreciate about Apple, CEO Cook said: "The thing they might miss is how different Apple is versus other technology companies. A financial person just looking at revenues and profits may think, 'They're good [at making money].' But that's not who we are. We're a group of people who are trying to change the world for the better.... For us, technology is a background thing. We don't want people to have to focus on bits and bytes and feeds and speeds. We don't want people to have to go to multiple [systems] or live with a device that's not integrated. We do the hardware and the software, and some of the key services as well, to provide a whole system."

As noted earlier, Apple emphasizes the importance of cross-functional collaboration. When the company built its new $5 billion headquarters (completed in 2018), which has been likened to a spaceship, the architecture and building design revolved around encouraging creativity and innovation, in much the same way that some of the icons of innovation architecture - the mid-20th-century Bell Labs model of collaborative workspace and MIT Media Lab's technology research hub - were designed to encourage interdisciplinary interaction.

Stanley Black & Decker has long been known as a product innovation leader in its field, but CEO James M. Loree has set ambitious goals. He told The Street in August 2018, "We want to be known as one of the world's most innovative companies. So we have created an enormous wave of innovation at this point...embedded in the culture of Stanley Black & Decker. We have stepped up and we are doing breakthrough innovation activities. We are doing venture investing. We are doing accelerators for entrepreneurs externally and internally." In the company's 2017 year in review for shareholders, Loree wrote that the company currently had "10 breakthrough innovation teams covering all businesses and multiple worldwide locations focused on developing innovations that each have the potential to deliver greater than $100 million in annual revenues."

Stanley is advancing its innovation ecosystem along many dimensions, including Stanley Ventures in Silicon Valley, which invests in innovative startups; an additive manufacturing accelerator program in Hartford, Conn., in partnership with Techstars; a digital accelerator in Atlanta; and an industrial incubator in Silicon Valley. "The innovation strategy is globally distributed and diverse, yet holistic and seamlessly integrated into our businesses," says Mark Maybury, Stanley Black & Decker's chief technology officer. "The reality we're facing is that if we want to maintain or continue to grow our leadership position, we need to focus not only on the incremental innovations that pay the bills today, but also on the things that will shape the industries in which we compete."

The consistent success of Apple, Stanley, and the other star performers on our high-leverage innovators list sets a performance goal that all innovators can aspire to reach. But the fact that relatively few of the Global Innovation 1000 companies are able to hit that target in a given year - let alone repeatedly over time - is a reminder that innovation excellence isn't something that can be bought by simply spending more on R&D. Rather, it's the result of painstaking attention to strategy, culture, executive involvement, customer insights, and execution throughout the stages of innovation, all with an eye toward creating differentiated experiences.

Methodology

As it has in each of the past 13 editions of the Global Innovation 1000, this year Strategy&, PwC's strategy consulting business, identified the 1,000 public companies around the world that spent the most on R&D during the last fiscal year, as of June 30, 2018. To be included, companies had to make their R&D spending numbers public. Subsidiaries that were more than 50 percent owned by a single corporate parent during the period were excluded if their financial results were included in the parent company's financials. The Global Innovation 1000 companies collectively account for 40 percent of the world's R&D spending, from all sources, including corporate and government sources.

In 2013, Strategy& made some adjustments to the data collection process in order to gain a more accurate and complete picture of innovation spending. In prior years, both capitalized and amortized R&D expenditures were excluded. Starting in 2013, we included the most recent fiscal year's amortization of capitalized R&D expenditures for relevant companies in calculating the total R&D investment, while continuing to exclude any non-amortized capitalized costs. We have now applied this methodology to all previous years' data; as a result, historical data referenced in the studies from 2014 onward will not always align with previously published figures for the 2005 through 2012 studies.

For each of the top 1,000 companies, we obtained from Capital IQ and Thomson Eikon the key financial metrics for 2013 through 2018, including sales, gross profit, operating profit, net profit, historical R&D expenditures, and market capitalization. All sales and R&D expenditure figures in foreign currencies were converted into U.S. dollars according to an average of the exchange rate over the relevant period; for data on share prices, we used the exchange rate on the last day of the period.

All companies were coded into one of nine industry sectors (or "other") according to Capital IQ's industry designations, and into one of five regional designations, as determined by their reported headquarters locations. To enable meaningful comparisons across industries, the R&D spending levels and financial performance metrics of each company were indexed against the average values in its own industry.

Finally, to understand the ways in which global R&D is and will be conducted at companies across multiple industries, Strategy& conducted an online survey of 869 innovation leaders and managers around the world. The companies participating represented more than US$130 billion in R&D spending, or 17.1 percent of this year's total Global Innovation 1000 R&D spending; all nine of the industry sectors; and all five geographic regions.

Author profiles:

Barry Jaruzelski is a thought leader on innovation for Strategy&, PwC's strategy consulting business. Based in Florham Park, N.J., he is a principal with PwC US. He works with high-tech and industrial clients on corporate and product strategy and the transformation of core innovation processes. He created the Global Innovation 1000 study in 2005, and in 2013 was named one of the "Top 25 Consultants" by Consulting magazine.

Robert Chwalik is an advisor to executives in the automotive, industrials, and oil and gas sectors for Strategy&, helping them improve both top-line growth and bottom-line performance in such key operational and strategic areas as global engineering and product innovation. He is a principal with PwC US and is based in New York.

Brad Goehle is an advisor to executives on innovation and product development for Strategy&, helping companies in the aerospace and defense, automotive, and industrial sectors with product and portfolio strategy, engineering, and enterprise transformation. He is a managing director with PwC US and is based in Arlington, Va.

Topics:

Resources
china, consumer insights, customer experience, global innovation 1000, innovation strategy, innovation success, research and development

1. Barry Jaruzelski, "Why Silicon Valley's Success Is So Hard to Replicate," Scientific American, Mar. 14, 2014: Bay Area tech firms integrate their innovation strategies with their business strategies, leading to standout performance.

2. Barry Jaruzelski, Kevin Dehoff, and Rakesh Bordia, "Smart Spenders: The Global Innovation 1000," s+b, Nov. 30, 2006: The first year that the study created and analyzed a list of high-leverage innovators.

3. Robert Safian, "Why Apple Is the World's Most Innovative Company," Fast Company, Feb. 21, 2018: An interview with CEO Tim Cook on the company's track record of innovation success.

4. All previous Global Innovation 1000 studies from 2005 to 2017, as well as videos, infographics, and other articles: strategyand.pwc.com/innovation1000.

5. Strategy&'s Innovation Strategy Profiler.

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Barry Jaruzelski, Robert Chwalik, and Brad Goehle

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A project team from Stanley Black & Decker, a US$12.7 billion diversified manufacturing firm, noticed something problematic when observing customers using the company's products at construction sites. Tools such as miter saws and table saws needed higher voltage than the 20-volt systems commonly used for hand tools such as drills and circular saws.

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Why Do Startups Fail? : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

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Harj Taggar talks about the reasons many startups fail. Harj Taggar is a partner at YC and was the CEO and co-founder of Triplebyte.

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How to Get and Test Ideas : YC Startup Library | Y Combinator

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Y Combinator Partner Michael Seibel on getting and testing startup ideas.

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Reconocidos expertos en el arte de crear una startup revelan sus secretos para todas aquellas personas que están pensando poner en marcha un negocio propio.

Si estás pensando en crear una startup, probablemente tengas muchas dudas sobre cómo comenzar. Una buena forma de hacerlo es escuchando historias de personas que ya han pasado por eso, emprendedores que te puedan aconsejar o asesorar sobre algunos puntos. ¿Te imaginarías escuchar los consejos de reconocidos expertos en el arte de crear una startup?

En el curso "How to Start a Startup", dictado en la universidad de Stanford, exitosos emprendedores se dieron lugar para contar cómo fue su recorrido en el rubro del emprendimiento y compartir con todos los asistentes, el secreto de su éxito.
Sam Altman: el joven americano que creyó en su idea y se convirtió en millonario
Con tan solo 19 años, Sam Altman, desarrolló una aplicación para celular llamada Loopt. La app tenía como principal función indicar a tus amigos tu locación. Con el espíritu emprendedor que lo caracteriza, apostó por su idea y así se lo transmitió a diferentes inversores y Venture Capitals. Su visión logró abrirle la puerta de Y Combinator (YC), uno de los fondos de financiación de startups más conocidos en su localidad, en Silicon Valley. Su startup finalmente se valoró en 175 millones de dólares. "La ejecución es 10 veces más importante que la idea y mil veces más difícil también".

"La ejecución es 10 veces más importante que la idea y mil veces más difícil también". Sam Altman | Fuente: maestrosdelweb

Para Altman, una idea debe incluir el tamaño y tendencia del mercado, la estrategia de crecimiento de la compañía y la estrategia de defensa (barreras de entrada). Cuando se evalúa una idea es necesario pensar en todos esos aspectos, no solo en el producto, sostiene Sam.

Para alcanzar el éxito, se debe crear algo que la gente ame, sostiene el creador de Loopt. La mayoría de las personas piensan primero en lo que quieren expresar o construir y luego buscan una audiencia para esa idea. Sam piensa todo lo contrario: primero se debe pensar en el público, mantener el foco en las necesidades y tendencias de esa audiencia, para poder crear el producto apropiado.
Dustin Moskovitz: uno de los fundadores de la red social Facebook
Considerado como el más joven multimillonario del mundo en el 2010 por la revista Forbes, Dustin Moskovitzs, fue uno de los fundadores de Facebook, junto con Mark Zuckerberg."Comienza una startup cuando no puedas NO hacerlo. Cuando una pasión te pida llevar a cabo esa idea. Cuando el mundo necesite de tu producto o de ti. Cuando el mundo necesite que tú lo hagas".

Dustin Moskovitzs

Para el joven empresario, no es necesario fundar una compañía para tener impacto. Por ejemplo, los creadores del chat de Gmail o de Google Maps, ninguno de ellos tuvo que crear una empresa para hacer que un producto llegara a millones de personas, sostiene Dustin.

"Comienza una startup cuando no puedas NO hacerlo. Cuando una pasión te pida llevar a cabo esa idea. Cuando el mundo necesite de tu producto o de ti. Cuando el mundo necesite que tú lo hagas". Dustin Moskovitzs | Fuente: maestrosdelweb

Paul Graham: inversor de capital de riesgo y cofundador de importantes negocios

Programador de Lips, inversor de capital de riesgo, cofundador de Viaweb y de Y Combinator (YC), el británico Paul Graham es, sin duda, uno de los referentes más éxitos del emprendimiento y los negocios en el mundo.

Para Graham, lo único que separa un emprendedor exitoso de uno que no lo es, es la perseverancia pura. Si quieres ser emprendedor, pero no tienes una idea concéntrate en buscar un trabajo y encontrar algo que realmente te apasione, comenta."Muchos emprendedores piensan que el éxito es conseguir inversión y realmente el objetivo es construir algo que la gente quiera".

Paul Graham

"Muchos emprendedores piensan que el éxito es conseguir inversión y realmente el objetivo es construir algo que la gente quiera". Paul Graham | Fuente: maestrosdelweb

La única forma de crecer rápido es hacer algo que la gente ame.

Confía en tus instintos para decidir la gente con la que trabajarás y las relaciones de una startup. Trabaja con gente que respetes y te agrade genuinamente, añade finalmente.

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Startup: conoce los secretos de los más exitosos - top5partners.com

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Reconocidos expertos en el arte de crear una startup revelan sus secretos para todas aquellas personas que están pensando poner en marcha un negocio propio. Si estás pensando en crear una startup, probablemente tengas muchas dudas sobre cómo comenzar.

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Conceptos Básicos de Básicos de Startups | Glosario Startupeable

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Una startup es una empresa diseñada para crecer rápido. Por ende, tiene dos características principales: Atiende un mercado...

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Tiempo estimado de lectura: 1 min

¿Qué es Lean Startup?

El Lean Startup es la aplicación del método científico de manera rigurosa al proceso de llevar una idea al mercado. La metodología se enfoca en construir el producto, medir la respuesta de los consumidores, y aprender para decidir si continuar el desarrollo del producto o pivotar. Este ciclo es conocido como el feedback loop.

Ventajas de Lean Startup

Velocidad: Reducen el tiempo de lanzamiento de cualquier nuevo producto o funcionalidad. Para ello, es clave acostumbrar al equipo a lanzar (en lugar de productos finales) en ciclos cortos de 2 a 3 semanas y haber implementado metodologías ágiles.

Valor: El producto tiene mucha más validez porque ahora se construye, a partir de los insights del usuario y no solo de las decisiones de los fundadores. Para ello, es necesario que el equipo tenga una cultura de medición a todo nivel, con la capacidad tecnológica y técnica para medir lo necesario.

Riesgo: Al estar constantemente evaluando los aprendizajes del mercado, se reduce la posibilidad de invertir excesivos recursos en un producto o funcionalidad sin fit de mercado.

Por ejemplo, Dropbox es una startup que cuenta con más de 500 millones de usuarios y es conocida por haber utilizado efectivamente Lean Startup. La idea comenzó con un video explicativo del (futuro) producto de 3 minutos.
Revisa Lean Startup: Guía Paso a Paso para aplicar esta metodología en tu startup. Artículos Relacionados ¿Qué es una Startup?: Guía Introductoria (2021)
Este MVP permitió, con una inversión reducida de tiempo y dinero, probar si había demanda para el producto y obtener feedback de los clientes para utilizarlo en el desarrollo de la versión completa del producto.

¿Cómo aplicar Lean Startup en tu empresa?

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Tiempo estimado de lectura: 1 min El Lean Startup es la aplicación del método científico de manera rigurosa al proceso de llevar una idea al mercado. La metodología se enfoca en construir el producto, medir la respuesta de los consumidores, y aprender para decidir si continuar el desarrollo del producto o pivotar.

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So it's time for that first sales call. After chasing a prospective customer for weeks, you finally have an appointment. Depending upon how that lead has come into your funnel, there are different discovery call tactics you need to adopt.

"While discovery is a tactic that we spend a lot of time teaching young sales reps, I believe that even some of our veteran sales reps could be reminded of it again. Sometimes when we have been doing this for a long time, there's a tendency to skip over very important considerations for building rapport and trust," says George Leith, chief customer officer at Vendasta.

Let's start from the beginning. What is a discovery call and what are the sure-shot tactics to ace it?

A discovery call is the first conversation between a salesperson and customer. It's an opportunity to get to know each other and understand a prospect's business better. A salesperson is looking to determine whether or not they can provide a needed value or benefit. A discovery call - over phone or face to face - will dictate the trajectory of a buyer-seller relationship. It could either be a deal-maker or deal-breaker. It can torpedo an opportunity if you are in a hurry or make even small but critical mistakes. However, it could also help seal the deal if you do the right things.

In this podcast, Leith underlines the four stages to ace a discovery call.

Adopt the mindset of a student

The first and foremost thing required for a successful discovery call is adopting the mindset of a student. "When I talk about being a student, it means being inquisitive, eager to learn. You are not pontificating. Being a student also means asking questions," Leith says.

What's important is to keep this attitude throughout the relationship with a prospective customer. Discovery at the beginning shows whether there is a fit and dictates the way forward. However, more often than not, sales professionals think of a discovery call as a static stage, and can't wait to get down to making their pitch. Not having that discovery mindset means missing out on upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

"Some of the biggest customers that I deal with today became large customers well into our relationship. They started out with us for a certain reason. We built rapport with the client first and proved that we were able to deliver the products or services (they needed). Then, because we had that constant mindset of being a student and (willingness to) understanding the needs of the customer, we were able to layer in much larger purchases, subscriptions or products because we kept that mindset of always looking for new opportunities."
George Leith
Chief Customer Officer, Vendasta

Also, it is pertinent to keep in mind that the buyer's journey dictates the use of a discovery strategy to understand the reasons why a buyer has come to you. They may be dealing with active or latent problems, looking to develop a solution to a particular problem, or simply evaluating new strategies. It is important to keep in mind that they may have considered alternative options, and are stacking you up against competitors.

For this reason, it's important for sales professionals to be well researched. You don't want to be asking questions during the call where answers could have been found with a simple Google search. This is where the mindset of a student becomes crucial. Diligent pre-call research gives you insight into your prospective client's business and the role and responsibilities of the individual you would be calling from that company. This prepares you for situational questions, and moving into further exploration.
Conquer Local Academy: Courses for everything about selling digital solutions to local businesses
Two kinds of pain: How to deal with them

Now that you have done research you should have an idea whether the prospect has active or latent pain. Active pain usually identifies itself in the inbound customer journey, explains Leith. "If they have active pain, they would go online and do a bunch of research to find you. In the case of active pain, it's the customer who reaches out to you. It's inbound."

In the case of an inbound lead, the buyer states his active pain upfront. Your job is to understand that problem and explain how you can solve it. So be patient, and listen.

Jeb Blount, CEO of Sales Gravy and bestselling author of Fanatical Prospecting and Sales EQ, explains, "In sales, we always think about closing, and that it's the sexy part of being in sales. The truth is that the sexy part of sales is discovery. It is the part where you are listening to your prospects. When you sit down with that C-Suite and you need to turn your mouth off and your ears on."

On the other hand, latent pain can be identified as outbound, where you reach out and show a client that you actually understand their pain point. In this case, it's important to understand the persona of the customer - the very person you are going to interact with. Different personas have different types of pain. For instance, the head of marketing deals with different problems than the sales or IT head of a company. The trick is to present your track record of solving all of those issues.

For an outbound lead, you need to earn the right to help a prospect with their pain. Here again the trick is to be patient - ask simple questions and allow the customer to speak.

"It starts with emotional self-awareness, because that which you're not aware of, you cannot change and you're bound to repeat. Emotional self-awareness leads to emotion management, which leads to the execution of asking consistently good questions," says Colleen Stanley, president of Salesleadership Inc and author of the book Emotional Intelligence For Sales Success.

Anita Nielsen, the author of the sales enablement book Beat the Bots and founder of LDK Advisory, says it's a mistake to pitch your product any sooner than 45 minutes if you are in an early meeting with a prospect. "Sales is high pressure and salespeople are taught to "get to the ink," so they end up rushing the discovery process - and that's a mistake. You're leaving a lot of valuable information behind that you could have turned into additional sales opportunities," she adds.

Set the boundaries and stages

It's important to set boundaries for the relationship with the customer. For instance, if the prospective client wants you to wait for a long time at a scheduled appointment or reschedules it multiple times, you have the right to be firm. "Show them that your time is as valuable as theirs. That's a really important piece. Nobody likes desperation, especially when you're on a discovery call. You don't want to look like 'Oh God, I really need this deal to hit my quota.' It's just not going to work," Leith says.

Next, set the stages for that relationship. Don't try to rush in things at one go, and don't walk away from it either because you don't want to look too desperate. Work out an upfront contract with the new lead. An upfront contract at the early part of the conversation sets the stage for a successful interrogation of whether or not this thing's going to work.

Leith lays out a dummy script that a sales professional may want to use once he has the prospect on the line and going through the discovery. "I want to take 45 minutes of your time. And by the end of the call, we're going to figure out if there's a need for us to move forward. We may just part ways, or decide that we want to move to the next step. This means further discussion of how we can have a great relationship. I don't want to put my reputation on the line if there's not a proper fit." Of course, you need to customize it as per your requirement, but you get the idea.

Hook the customer, get them talking

The easiest way to get a customer talking is to tell a story that triggers a prospect's "hot button" - a story articulating how you solved the problem of somebody who looks exactly like the prospect. And, if you don't have that story, find one inside your organization and use it until you have your own.

"It's a really important piece and this is where you set the hook," Leith says.

The other trick is to sharpen your questions so that you get the specific answers you are looking for during the call. Ask the right leading questions and then start to dig deeper. And don't forget to ask simple follow up questions. Every salesperson knows that the key to effective discovery is to ask simple follow-up questions, but they often skip that during the call.

Stanley suggests writing down good curiosity questions during the pre-call research phase, which will help you resist the urge to present your product too soon. "If you have a prospect saying all the right things, you might skip over all of these great questions you need to ask and start product dumping. Or if they're a challenging prospect, you might get nervous and move to a product dump rather than asking effective redirect questions," she says.

Leith lists out simple questions:

Can you help me understand what you meant by that?

Can we dig into that a little bit deeper?

Can you walk me through what a customer experiences when they walk into your business?

Can you tell me about some of the biggest challenges that you're having in your marketing?

If they said something and you didn't quite understand it, it's okay to ask them to repeat that or ask more questions. Remember, you are a student at the discovery stage?

Close it right, don't burn your leads

If you have done all the right things so far, chances are there is a possibility for a working relationship. Now, how to go from here?

"Validate the buyer. You want to set the next steps and expectations. This is all a part of that contract piece where you say 'as we move down the funnel...' or 'here's how I've found that it works best. And I need to have another call next week with that person that you brought up earlier that's responsible for this'," Leith says.

Then talk about what the second call might look like. You need to specify what time frame you are looking at; how long could it be; who you would like to bring from your team and expect your prospect to bring from his or her end; if you would want to give a product demo and hence need screen-sharing. Give as much detail as possible. The bottomline is, prepare the prospect well for Stage 2.

There may still be times when you just couldn't dig deep enough into your discovery on one call, but you believe it's still a good prospect. Leith assures that's just fine. "It's okay to say to the prospect, 'You said some very interesting things. I've taken really good notes. I want to go back to my team and do some research to come back to see if we're going to be able to move to the next stage where we can propose a solution to this challenge that you're having'," he says.

Great conversations are key to successful discovery calls. So, treat the call more like a conversation instead of an interrogation or a product pitch.

And lastly, it's okay to be nervous. But if you prepare well, you can reduce much of the anxiety. And it starts with following these tactics George Leith lays down.

For more on how to be an effective sales professional, you can log into Conquer Local podcasts and listen to the master sales series.

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Si hay algo más importante que la tecnología, el precio o el diseño de tu producto y/o servicio es cómo validar su demanda, es decir, qué hacer para validar tu idea de negocio. En caso de estar iniciando una nueva idea empresarial seguro que esta afirmación te sorprenderá un poco. Para que te quedes más tranquilo, en este post te vamos a explicar por qué es tan relevante el proceso de validación de tu negocio, las metodologías que puedes usar o los conceptos que son necesarios que aprendas para iniciarte en este proceso.

¿Qué quiere decir validar una idea de negocio?

Validar una idea de negocio no es más que conocer todos los pros y contras de tu producto y/o servicio para que tenga éxito en el mercado. Hablamos de comprobar que nuestra hipótesis sobre la que basamos nuestra estrategia de negocio es cierta y viable.

El fin es lograr confirmar tu idea de negocio como un nuevo elemento que juegue un papel relevante en el mercado. Algunas de las metodologías más usadas que se basan en el conocimiento del cliente para desarrollar un producto y/o servicio con éxito son el Customer Development y Lean Startup.

Pasos a seguir para validar ideas de negocio

No existe una fórmula única a seguir para todos los proyectos. Cada modelo de negocio es un mundo y lo que funciona en uno puede que no funcione en otro. No obstante, existen una serie de conceptos más o menos estandarizados que puedes aplicar en tu idea de negocio.

* Recopila toda la información posible:

Puedes usar el modelo DAFO. Vigila la competencia y haz conclusiones de tu propuesta de valor con el fin de destacar los aspectos que menos te gusten o que no aporten nada.

A la hora de completar toda la información posible recuerda que es necesario 'salir de la oficina' y hablar con tus posibles clientes.

* Ofrece una pequeña píldora informativa de tu producto y/o servicio:

Puedes crear una web sencilla (landing page) que explique el problema o la solución que quieres exponer con el fin de invitar a los usuarios a inscribirse cuando se lance el producto. También es conveniente realizar formularios o pequeñas entrevistas a tus nuevos suscriptores para ir confirmando, descartando o modificando aspectos de tu idea de negocio.

* Aplica el concepto del mínimo producto viable (MVP):

Otro paso que tendrás que implementar es la aplicación del concepto del mínimo producto viable (MVP). Se trata de una pequeña versión en desarrollo de tu producto que te permite recabar datos sobre su lanzamiento y uso de los usuarios mediante una serie de métricas. Básicamente es conversar con tus primeros clientes y comprobar, dependiendo de sus acciones, su tu propuesta satisface sus necesidades o soluciona sus problemas.

Antes de enviar tu MVP debes considerar que el público al que te diriges es el denominado early adopters, es decir, personas que saben que van a probar un producto y/o servicio en fase de evolución. Cuando este perfil haya testeado tu idea, será el momento de darle un giro y centrarte en el gran mercado.

Lean Canvas para validar ideas de negocios

El Lean Canvas es una metodología muy sencilla que te simplificará todo el proceso de validación de tu idea de negocio. Se trata de un esquema que trata de responder 4 preguntas claves: quién, cómo, qué y cuánto.

Éste a su vez se desglosa en 9 preguntas o apartados que detallan un poco más tu situación: segmento del clientes; problema; proposición única de valor; solución; canales; flujos de ingresos; estructura de costes; métricas y ventaja diferencial.

A continuación, vamos a desglosar brevemente la importancia de cada apartado:

Describe el papel que realizará nuestro cliente como usuario (para quién está diseñado el producto-, consumidor -aquel que toma la decisión de compra- o comprador -el que ejecuta la decisión de compra-. En la mayoría de los casos las tres figuras recaen sobre el mismo sujeto, sin embargo, en algunas ocasiones los roles están separados. Un ejemplo sería una aplicación educativa de pago dirigida a menores. En este caso el usuario será el niño al que dirigiremos nuestra idea pero el comprador será el padre. Por este motivo tendremos que aportarle a nuestro comprador una serie de argumentos razonables que le convenzan para que realice el desembolso económico y un contenido de calidad diferente dirigido al usuario.

Deberemos identificar los problemas de cada segmento de cliente y de los que puede resolver nuestro producto y/o servicio. Este paso nos servirá para desarrollar nuestro argumento de marketing.

* Proposición única de valor (PUV):

Aquí determinaremos los beneficios que aporta al cliente nuestro producto y/o servicio.

Llega el momento de darle forma a nuestra idea de negocio concretando los beneficios que le aportaremos a nuestros clientes.

Se trata de las posibles vías que utilizaremos para dar a conocer nuestra propuesta de valor a cada segmente de clientes identificados previamente.

Concretaremos la forma en la que vamos a obtener ingresos. Algunos ejemplos son pago por uso, freemium, suscripción, financiación, etc.

Son los principales costes en los que vamos a incurrir a la hora de entregar nuestro servicio y/o productos a nuestros clientes.

Tradicionalmente las ventas han sido durante mucho tiempo el indicador clave. No obstante, gracias al modelo Lean Canvas podemos usar otros indicadores que nos mostrarán si estamos desarrollando tu modelo de negocio de forma efectiva. Algunas métricas claves son las visitas a la web, el coste de retención, el coste de conversión, la captación de emails, los seguidores en las redes sociales, el coste de activación, etc.

Aquí vamos a tratar de expresar por qué nuestro cliente elegirá nuestra solución a su problema en lugar de la de la competencia.

Ejemplo de validación de ideas de negocio

Vamos a plantear un ejemplo sobre una situación hipotética de validación de idea de negocio para que el proceso quede aún mucho más claro.

Francisco tiene una gran idea de negocio: vender plantas de frutos online para que las personas mayores que no tienen cerca un vivero creen su propio huerto ecológico en casa. Francisco ha preguntado a su entorno y a todos le parece una buena idea. Incluso a su abuela y a una tía mayor que le comentaron que le interesaría este servicio.

Francisco lo tiene todo en la cabeza pero para validar su idea de negocio comenzará formulando una serie de preguntas claves para recopilar información:

¿Cuántas personas mayores quieren un huerto en su casa pero no tienen un vivero cerca?

¿Estarán dispuestas estas personas a pagar el precio por su servicio?

¿Utilizan las personas mayores su canal de venta?

¿Cuál es mi propuesta de valor?

Con toda la información, Francisco decide plasmarlo en papel usando el modelo Lean Canvas. Con todos los apartados del modelo claros, se lanza a crear un producto mínimo viable para comenzar un breve testeo. Para ello crea una landing page ofreciendo algunas de las plantas de frutos que ha identificado que tienen mayor aceptación e implementa test A/B como parte de su estrategia de negocio. Del mismo modo, cambia algunas ideas previas y ofrece, además, material de jardín para montar un huerto casero. A través de los usuarios que han adquirido su producto empieza a hacer entrevistas y formularios para comprobar qué aspectos debe mejorar o descartar.

Francisco seguirá realizando breves testeos de su producto hasta lograr validar su idea de negocio con el fin de que sea rentable.

Seguir una metodología para lograr validar una idea de negocio es crucial para que la misma no caiga en saco roto. Aunque a priori parezca que son muchos pasos o suene abrumador, cuando se inicia todo el proceso cada elemento se va ajustando de forma natural. Sin un modelo de negocio o una validación de una idea será muy difícil conocer nuestra propuesta de valor para competir en el mercado.

Para que profundices más en estos términos no dudes en apuntarte a la próxima promoción de The Power MBA.

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Cómo validar ideas de negocio paso a paso - ThePower Business School

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Si hay algo más importante que la tecnología, el precio o el diseño de tu producto y/o servicio es cómo validar su demanda, es decir, qué hacer para validar tu idea de negocio. En caso de estar iniciando una nueva idea empresarial seguro que esta afirmación te sorprenderá un poco.