I asked yesterday for a more graphical and intuitive way to plan out costs for products and projects. The reason lies in an essay I co-authored several years ago with Jeremy Fein, co-founder of this blog. I forget the exact title of the thing, but its premise was that good entrepreneurial teams are composed of both brains & brawn (Asterix and Obelix, in other words). It has since become my philosophy towards entrepreneurship and building teams.

Good ideas also reside in intersections between different modes of thinking. I don’t know who made up the idea of the ‘execution multiplier for ideas‘ (Derek Sivers posted it on his blog once), but an idea is worth little without someone carrying it out. Similarly, in Neil Fiore’s book “The Now Habit” (the ONLY self-help book I would ever recommend to people) he writes about the source of good ideas, which often come when you least expect it: on your breaks, your holidays, anywhere which is not work-related.

While productivity is a great thing and crucial to executing ideas, idea-generation itself is actually not very compatible with the productive mind. But it’s not impossible to combine the two either.

Let’s look at a sample workflow from problem to idea generation to product (product meaning the outcome of idea generation, which has to lead somewhere):

1. You have a problem (duh… no really, don’t come up with an idea if it doesn’t solve a problem!)
2. You discuss it with people to try to figure out it’s parameters —what is the true gist of the problem?

This is a good time to get stuck. Where do you go from here? Do you go the left-brained route — the super-rational approach that would e.g. benefit from some number crunching in Excel? Or do you take a right-brained approach — the artistic approach of drawing out the problem further on a white board or an outliner?

It of course depends on the complexity of the problem, but it isn’t time yet to go super-rational all of a sudden. It breaks you out of creative solution mode and gets you into execution mode, which is really brain-dead “getting things done” mode. Before you get things done, you have to define “things” much further.

The next step in my process would be:
3. draw out several solutions, preferably in a group, and discuss them and the logic behind it. Is it an elegant solution to the problem? Does it solve it or does it complicate it? What scenarios are there and what are its parameters?

As soon as you come to scenarios, we come into process mode. And this is where a more left-brained approach of calculating resource-allocation (people, time, money) absolutely makes sense. In my last post, I was hoping that someone would have a good way of making this more compatible with step 3, I am still waiting for someone to come up with a good solution, however.

4. calculate it out. What are the costs associated with each solution, what are the benefits of each solution?

Costs vs. benefits could also be called expenses vs. income on a financial projection for a startup. Solid resource allocation is ultimately the lifeblood of a company, however in an early stage it is also the language to use when looking for funding for your company.

I don’t want to be too rigid about this; I’ve struggled with the process of “problem -> idea generation -> execution -> product” in the past and think that it’s an area that benefits from several approaches and also leads to more-than-several pseudo-suggestions on how to approach this.

Rather, I thought to expand a little on yesterday’s post and clarify why I really do want a more visual Excel (for lack of a better term). If you want to combine right- and left-brained perspectives, a white board alone won’t do it and Excel alone won’t do it. I want software that does both.

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A lot more multi-part blog posts on Tech IT Easy; finally some continuity again, which is nice for both you and me! So, today was the ceremony for stage 1 of the New Venture business-plan competition, the submission of the idea, of which a prize of €500 was to be won by 10 contestants. As I expected, for several reasons, I wasn’t among those 10, though the race isn’t over yet! The next submission is February 26th 2009, the feasibility-study, for which I may compete with my own idea or change it (to another, if needed). The feasibility of an idea entails technological and business aspects, and there’s still a lot to be worked out on both ends. I’m letting you know for completely selfish ends—it would be nice to see a familiar face, if only on the other side of the court. Of course, one team-member must be residing in the Netherlands!

So how was today? I wasn’t really top-fit as it feels like I’m doing a 101 things and am a little overwhelmed, i.e. stressed out. So I didn’t come with high expectations, mostly to check out the competition and perhaps meet some people. The event was presented by Roland Koopman, a Dutch TV-presentor, and the awards were handed out by Pim Batist, founder of SellaBand.

Two “insider”-stories were presented, one was SellaBand and other was Taniq, a rubber-company, for lack of a better word—the company makes it so that rubber hoses and similar are more stable, while using less materials and no metal. You should check out the film their site, it’s very well-made. Most important insight from Taniq: the importance of coaches/mentors, which appear to be abundant if you take part in the competition, for bouncing off ideas & solving problems. But also on the hiring process—when the three young founders decided to look for some “grey haired” commercial talent, they found out, the hard way, that big-company sales-talent is not the same as small-company talent. In the end, if you can’t sell your own products as an entrepreneur, you’re probably in trouble!

The best example of this was perhaps Pim Betist; what a magnetic personality! SellaBand is a crowdfunding mechanism for bands, who, instead of walking to a record-company (for whatever reason), can place themselves on the site, after which fans can vote—with their wallets!—for the band they like. And with that a music-cd, etc. can be produced… He came up with the idea in 2001, residing in New York. Then, for reasons unexplained, he decided to take on a 3-year job at Shell, until he finally quit that job, sold his car, moved into some (illegally) free housing and focussed all his energy on working out the idea. He recruited a guy from Sony BMG as co-founder, by posing as a student wanting to write a thesis and holding several meetings with the company under that subterfuge—a side-note: recruiting people from Sony should never be hard, these guys, from my experience, are all chronically made unhappy by the politics in that company. I’m a little more into music over rubber, as you can tell, but that’s maybe also because the presentation was excellent. Not that Taniq didn’t have a nice movie either, definitely to be watched on their site!

So what about the winners? If there was a definite theme to the evening, apart from innovation, it was that pretty much all of the prize-winnars had a sustainable idea. It wasn’t necessary green, but more efficient, more ethical, more social, etc. What I remembered was:

• a one-handed fire-extinguisher for handicapped people
• a crowd-funded electrical cart for people in third world countries
• a way to make fuel consumption more efficient in cars
• a sensor that measures how people sleep

On the off-chance that you are planning to take part in round 2 (send me a mail, if interested), that should give you a hint of where to direct some energy at! Looking at the credit crisis now, it should perhaps not be a surprise that attention is being drawn towards both efficiency, but also more sustainable ways of doing things—that is, incidentally, one the conditions that will probably be imposed on the car-companies, if they receive financial aid: to become more green.

That’s it from me on this subject! It’s not too far a leap for me to write a feasibility study, but I’ll only know for certain if I’ll take part a few months from now. So, let’s hope for a part 3, 4, and beyond!

Have a nice weekend!
Vincent

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