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למה יזמות חשובה כל כך? מוזמנים לקרוא את הסקירה המלאה

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למה יזמות ממש חשובה לעתיד שלכם? עוד סקירה בנושא...

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Innovation types

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סוגי חדשנות - משימה 3

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איך להגיע לבעיה?

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The start of the year is a great time to gear up to start a business. But, of course, you first need to figure out a winning concept. "You have to come up with a lot of ideas to be successful," says Stephen Key, cofounder of the website inventright.com based in Glenbrook, Nev., and author of One Simple Idea for Startups and Entrepreneurs: Live Your Dreams and Create Your Own Profitable Company, (McGraw-Hill, 2012).

Key, who has licensed more than 20 products in the last 25 years, says he generates ideas by finding different ways to engage his mind, from walking the aisles of stores to brainstorming about holes in the marketplace.

Here are eight techniques from Key and other experts that could help get your creative juices flowing:

Ask yourself, "What's next?"
Successful business ideas are often ahead of the curve. Think about trends and technologies on the horizon and how you might move into those areas, says Sergio Monsalve, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital group. He suggests, for example, thinking about innovations related to the living room and home entertainment systems now that companies like Apple are developing new television technologies. "What can that mean in terms of new ways to live in your house and be entertained?" he says.
Related: How to Turn a Worthless Business Idea into a Million-Dollar Startup
Do something about what bugs you.
When Colin Barceloux was in college, he thought textbooks cost far too much. In 2007, two years after graduating, he decided to take action and founded Bookrenter.com, a San Mateo, Calif.-based business that offers textbook rentals at about a 60 percent discount. What began as a one-man operation created out of frustration now has 1.5 million users and 200 employees. "You just have to look at what frustrates you," he says. "There's your business idea right there."

Look for new niches.
Your business idea doesn't have to reinvent the wheel. Take a look at what some of the big players in an industry are missing and figure out if you can fill the gaps, Key says. In 2003, for instance, he started the company Hot Picks, now based in San Jose, Calif., after realizing the major brands in the guitar pick industry weren't offering collectible novelty picks. Key designed a skull-shaped pick that filled an empty niche and was sold in 1,000 stores, including Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven. "The big guys leave a tremendous amount of opportunity on the table," he says.

Apply your skills to an entirely new field.
Think about your skills and whether they might be useful in a new area, suggests Bill Fischer, professor ofinnovation management ?at IMD?, the top-rated Swiss business school, and co-author of The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen (Jossey-Bass, 2011). Consider, for example, JMC Soundboard, a Switzerland-based company that builds high-end loudspeakers. Jeanmichel Capt invented the speaker by applying his experience building guitars as a luthier, using the same resonance spruce to create a loudspeaker that produces a high-quality sound and looks like a sleek wood panel. There's also Providence, R.I.-based Dear Kate, a company founded by Julie Sygiel, who used her training in chemical engineering to create a stain-resistant, leak-proof underwear material that active women can use without worrying about menstrual leakage during a workout.
Related: Zipcar Timeline: From Business Idea to IPO to $500 Million Buyout
Find a category lacking recent innovations.
When coming up with ideas, Key likes to identify markets that haven't had many recent innovations. For example, when he realized there were few new developments in the product information label business, he created Spinformation, a label consisting of two layers-a top layer that rotates with open panels through which you can see, and a bottom label that you can read by spinning the top layer over it. Companies needing to fit more information about a medication, for example, could use the extra label space for the details.

Make a cheaper version of an existing product.
Companies often get their start by offering customers an existing product at a lower price. Take Warby Parker, an eyeglasses company launched in 2010 by four business school friends. The New York-based business sells prescription glasses, which are typically priced at $300 or more, for $95. Since its launch, it has grown to 100 employees.
Related Video: Warby Parker and Inspired Vision
Talk to shoppers.
To come up with an idea that meets people's needs, there's no better way than by talking to shoppers. If you are interested in mountain bikes, hang out in the aisles of sports and bike shops and ask customers what they wish they could find in the marketplace. If you're interested in developing an e-commerce business, consider sending an online survey to potential customers to learn about their needs and interests.

Play the mix and match game.
Walk up and down the aisles of a drug, hardware or toy store combining two products across the aisle from each other into one, Key says. That should spark quite a few ideas, but be prepared for most of them to be bad. "You will come up with all these horrible ideas, and every once in a while you will find some brilliant idea out there," he says.

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The start of the year is a great time to gear up to start a business. But, of course, you first need to figure out a winning concept.

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איך לחפש מידע באופן אפקטיבי? מוזמנים להשתמש עבור שיעורי הבית לשיעור 3

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Almost anything that you could ever need to know is available on the World Wide Web. The trick is knowing how to find it. By learning to use search engines effectively, utilizing web resources (like databases, review sites, and RSS feeds),...

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Validation Board

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How to Use the Validation Board to Test Your Startup Idea

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SCAMPER

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How to Generate Ideas with the SCAMPER Technique

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MVP

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You don't want to waste your time and money building a product no one will want to use or pay for. So, first get out of the building and talk to your customers.

But there's a world of difference between talk and action. What your customers say, and what they eventually do. Talking, and putting the product in their hands. And yes: asking money for it.

You want them to put their money where their mouth was.

Sure, but what if you do not have a product yet? This is where the minimum viable product comes to play.

A minimum viable product is "that product which has just those features and no more that allows you to ship a product that early adopters see and, at least some of whom resonate with, pay you money for, and start to give you feedback on".

But why minimal? Because your time and money are severely limited. You want the biggest "bang for your buck": maximum learning with minimal effort.

Here are 7 inspirational MVP examples to get you started this week.

#1 Explainer Video

Explainer video is a short video that explains what your product does and why people should buy it. Often a simple, 90 seconds animation. Using an explainer video as a minimum viable product has served Dropbox very well.

Dropbox is a fast growing company with funding in excess of $250 million, ~80 employees, 50 million users, and $240 million in revenue. Drew Houston, the founder and CEO, has turned down an offer from Steve Jobs to buy their company.

But how did they begin?

They started with an explainer video - a 3m screencast published on Hacker news. The screencast was enough to give the early adopters a hint of the product experience. And enough to get many smart people to give them "the same feedback as if putting a product in their hand", says Drew on sllconf 2010.

New version of the video had the waiting list (of emails) jump from 5000 to whopping 75000 in one single day.

The explainer video served them that well that it is almost the only thing still featured on their landing page.

#2 A Landing Page

A landing page is a web page where visitors "land" after clicking a link from an ad, e-mail or another type of a campaign.

The job of a landing page is to quickly communicate the value of your offering, diffuse objections, and call the visitor to action.

Landing pages are where the excrement hits the fan. Based upon your interviews, surveys, and your product development you build a landing page.

Wait a minute, isn't a landing page a marketing instrument?

Sure it is. But it is also an MVP. The landing page validates your value proposition, product-solution fit, sales argumentation and can even validate your pricing.

And all that in an environment of brutal and merciless honesty: anonymous Internet browsing.

Here is what to do:

Craft your landing page

Set up a Google AdWord campaign and drive traffic to your new landing page. Even here you can let the AdWord engine rotate different messages and test what works best on your prospects

Set up Google Analytics. The most important thing to measure is conversions - percent of visitors that sign up (or perform another desired action)

Set up a chat to make it easy for the visitors to raise questions

Set up a service like Qualaroo to survey your visitors

#3 Wizard of Oz MVP

A "Wizard of Oz" MVP is when you put up a front that looks like a real working product, but you manually carry out product functions. It's also known as "Flinstoning".

Zappos shoes is the biggest online shoe retailer, with annual sales exceding $1 billion. In his Lean Startup book, Eric Ries describes how the founder started with a Wizard of Oz product.

The founder didn't start by stocking up big amounts of shoes and investing in an e-commerce backend. Instead, he went to local shoe shops. He would asked the owner's permission to take photos of shoes and put them online. Once the orders started flown in, he went to the shop, bought the pair that was ordered, shipped it, handled payments, returns... all of it himself, and by hand.

This was not a scalable business.

But it was an experiment designed focused on answering one question: is there already sufficient demand for a superior online shopping experience for shoes? And it allowed the founder to validate most of his assumptions with a very little investment.

#4 Concierge MVP

Instead of providing a product, you start with a manual service. But not just any service! The service should consist of exactly the same steps people would go through with your product.

Food on the table provides easy weekly recipe and grocery lists based on sales at your store. They need lots of stuff to make this work. A list of stores and groceries, weekly updates on sales, recipes, algorithms to match your preference to recipes to promotions...

It's a lot.

But the founders did not start by building all these assets. Again, from Riese's book, we learn what happened.

Before building anything, the two founders went to their local shop in Austin. They interviewed shoppers until they found one that was interested in their service.

She got a concierge treatment.

The CEO visited her every week. He came with a shopping list and selected recipes, carefully chosen based on (a) her preferences and (b) promotions in the local store. The list was updated on the spot based on her desires and feedback. Most importantly, the CEO would pick a check of $9.95 for this service.

This was no way to get rich.

But each week, they would learn more about what it takes to make their product a success. They kept adding more customers to their weekly visits, until they couldn't handle the load any more.

Only then they started coding.

One week they start sending lists and recipes via e-mail. A next one they wrote a piece of software to parse promotional store lists. Eventually, they started taking payments online.

Only after validating the basic product with customers of their initial store, they started adding stores, first in their region, to eventually grow into a nationwide business.

#5 Piecemeal MVP

This strategy is a blend between the "Wizard of Oz" and "Concierge" approaches. Again, you emulate the steps people would go through using your product - as you envision it.

But instead of delivering them manually, you emulate them using existing tools.

BJ Fogg, a professor from Stanford, has been studying human behavior for more than 18 years. And he has discovered a very simple way to help anyone install a new habit. All it takes is to pick 3 really tiny habits and stick to them for a week.

It is so simple, it took BJ a couple of hours to create a bare bones minimum viable product:

Sign up form was a Google Docs form

The instructions were described in a Google Docs document (which BJ was still editing as I was reading it)

An email reminder was sent manually every day. You had to reply, and write "y" if you've done your tiny habit, and another "y" if you wanted to go on the next day.

You'd then get a reply back with an encouragement.

I was one of the first users and I loved it. Along with a couple of thousands of others (3500 as of this writing).

He has obviously discovered a problem worth solving, and validated a very simple solution.

And what's really cool is that all these steps can easily be automated.

#6 Raise Funds from Customers

This is a special case of "sell it before you build it". The basic idea is simple: launch a crowdfunding campaign on platforms such as Kickstarter, IndieGoGo and RocketHub. Not only will you validate if customers want to buy your product, but you will also raise money.

And the benefits do not stop there. What you win in a successful crowdfunding campaign is a tribe of early adopters and raving fans. In this ReadWriteWeb article, Scott Steinberg advises to "embrace them and stay in constant contact. Not only are they likely to help you spread the word, but many times they'll also offer to contribute to your business in other ways".

Of course, crowdfunding will not work for just any type of product. Most products seem to have a strong consumer focus, and a value that is easy to communicate. Just have a look at the Kickstarter's 10 Biggest Success Stories.

#7. A Single Featured MVP

Emre Sokullu in a Tech Crunch post points out that some of the most successful applications started out with a simple feature: Google and Dropbox.

In fact, these two remain relatively the same as when they launched.

It is quite remarkable if you start to read the "about us" sections of successful applications. Many relate that their first mistake was to make too many features.

You can't be everything to everybody.

In their Signal To Noise blog 37 Signals points out the value of simplicity:

The key is to restate any hard problem that requires a lot of software into a simple problem that requires much less. You may not be solving exactly the same problem but that's alright. Solving 80% of the original problem for 20% of the effort is a major win. The original problem is almost never so bad that it's worth five times the effort to solve it.

This is the value of the single featured MVP. Chances are that if you cannot find that one killer feature that can stand on its own - at least in with early users - adding more features will not make the product a must have.

Conclusion

The 20 second summary of this lesson is: don't burn your money on a product no one will want to use. Get creative and think hard about what is the minimum thing you can do now to make sure that doesn't happen:

Select one MVP strategy you think would work for you

Create a simple plan to execute on it (remember the "minimal" in MVP)

But which one do you choose? It all depends upon your purpose for creating the MVP. Are you testing the appeal of an idea for a specific type of user? Do you want to learn which are the killer features? Do you need to generate revenue?

It comes down to tackling the biggest risk you have right now.

And then the next one. Ideally, this is the way you will go to market, one small experiment after another.

A minimum viable product is therefore not a product. It is a minimum viable go to market step.

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The Ultimate Guide to Minimum Viable Products - Scale XL

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You don't want to waste your time and money building a product no one will want to use or pay for. So, first get out of the building and talk to your customers. But there's a world of difference between talk and action. What your customers say, and what they eventually do.

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Group IQ

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Do we really need to solve this problem?

7 statements:

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שיעור 9 - לעבודת כיתה

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שיעור 9 - לעבודת כיתה

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Put five, eight, 12 or more people together in a room, and it's a crapshoot as to how well they'll function as a team. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes.

It's a lot like dining out with a bunch of friends. Where to go? Italian? Vegetarian? Steakhouse? Each person has their own appetite, which can make creating a "shared-interest" extremely challenging.

Shared-interest is the lifeblood of teams, and only the most successful companies know how to foster it. But how?

That's exactly what Google wanted to learn in 2012, when it embarked on a quest to discover how to build the "perfect team." The experiment, led by Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google's People Analytics division, was called "Project Aristotle."

The key characteristics of 'enhanced teams'

After years of analyzing data and interviews from more than 180 teams across the company, Google found that the kinds of people (a.k.a. the individual personalities) in a team are not so relevant.

"We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The 'who' part of the equation didn't seem to matter," Dubey said in an interview with The New York Times.

Instead, the researchers found that there were five key characteristics of enhanced teams:

1. Psychological safety: Everyone feels safe in taking risks around their team members, and that they won't be embarrassed or punished for doing so.

2. Dependability: Everyone completes quality work on time.

3. Structure and clarity: Everyone knows what their specific expectations are. These expectations must be challenging yet attainable.

4. Meaning: Everyone has a sense of purpose in their work (i.e., financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, etc.).

5. Impact: Everyone sees that the result of their work actually contributes to the organization's overall goals.

Not all researchers agree

While Google's findings may be true to some extent, a large number of scientific studies have caused researchers (outside of Google's lab) to shockingly disagree. They claim the exact opposite - that personality, not just skills, is indeed a significant factor in what makes a team successful.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at Columbia University and author of the book " Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and How to Fix It)," and psychologist Dave Winsborough, former VP at Hogan Assessment Systems, argue personality, in particular, heavily affects the role of an individual within a team.

"Too often, organizations focus merely on the functional role and hope that good team performance somehow follows," Chamorro-Premuzic and Winsborough co-wrote in a Harvard Business Review article. "This is why even the most expensive professional sports teams often fail to perform according to the individual talents of each player: There is no psychological synergy. A more effective approach focuses as much on people's personalities as on their skills."

One study, conducted at Hogan X, adds an alternative lens to Google's findings. Researchers found that individuals within poor-performing teams are generally 100 percent "pragmatic" and have 0 percent "relationship-building" traits.

Left brained vs. right brained personalities

A simple way to look at this is through the "left brain vs. right brain" theory, which goes that everyone has a dominant side of the brain (the right or the left), and it determines their personality, thoughts and behavior.

Right brained people are said to be more intuitive, creative, free-thinking and have the ability to collaborate and connect. They are the relationship-builders, and they are vital to a team's success.

Left brained people, by contrast, are more logical, analytical and objective. Unlike right brained people, who tend to think in visuals, left brains are detail- and fact-oriented, and they prefer to think in words and numbers. They are more pragmatic. While left brain skills and traits may distinguish individual contributors, they are only table stakes (literally, as they can mostly earn you a seat at a team's table).

Why pragmatism is a rarely desired trait

Employees in the medical field might not need a strong degree of creativity (a.k.a. those right brained personalities). But across the board in every business and industry, when teams come together, EQ (emotional intelligence) matters much more than IQ (intelligence quotient).

EQ, which reflects and strengthens a person's right-brain skills, enhances self-awareness and increases humility. It is far more beneficial for the team - regardless of their skill set.

Keep in mind that pragmatism isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to linear thinking. Technical skills are important early on in one's career, but the higher you go, technical expertise is assumed, and you need more right-brain skills to help build meaningful and motivating relationships with others.

Put another way, while the left brain is what gets people hired, the right brain is what helps them advance.

Here's the good news

You don't have to be one or the other. Having both pragmatic and strong relationship-building traits can increase the value you bring to a team. So whether you're left brained or right brained, it's possible to adopt both traits. Here's how:
If you're right brained:

Develop a strategic mindset. Know and understand what drives company to success.

Be known for something. Do you have deep expertise in relevant areas? (i.e., financial acumen, scientific expertise or even highly specialized knowledge such as tax law or M&A accounting). Be proactive in mastering them.

Practice tackling complex problems. This is especially helpful with those tricky interview questions that Google is famous for. Use those linear thinking skills to your advantage by diving deeply into issues.

If you're left brained:

Develop learning agility. Instead of defaulting to the "tried and true" (which pragmatists tend to do), be open to trying varied approaches and new ideas.

Find joy in ambiguity. Practice coping with uncertainty and making decisions without having all the information beforehand.

Put your social leadership skills to the test. When was the last time you motivated influenced others or deeply connected with your teammates? You might come to find that you actually enjoy it.

Teams don't just happen by bringing people together in the same room or connecting them via Skype. When you understand yourself by taking a "good look in the mirror," you can be the change you want to see in both your team and your company.
Gary Burnison is the CEO of Correction: This story was revised to correct that David Winsborough is a former VP at Hogan Assessment Systems. Winsborough is no longer with the company. , a global consulting firm that helps companies select and hire the best talent. His latest book, a New York Times best-seller, "Lose the Resume, Land the Job," shares the kind of straight talk that no one - not a spouse, partner, mentor or anyone else - will tell you. Follow him on LinkedIn .

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7 years ago, Google set out to find what makes the 'perfect' team - and what they found shocked other researchers

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Put five, eight, 12 or more people together in a room, and it's a crapshoot as to how well they'll function as a team. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes. It's a lot like dining out with a bunch of friends. Where to go? Italian? Vegetarian? Steakhouse?

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