Entrepreneurship
Lean Validation for Social Impact + Design Entrepreneurs
There’s something social impact founders and design entrepreneurs have in common – a shared allergy/yuck factor when asked to make business models. We try to dispel that myth – business modeling as an iterative act of emergent and divergent discovery, pattern association, and everything fun. Business Model Validation Parsons New School from Jennifer van der Meer
Read MoreNYU ITP Business 101.1 Innovation + Entrepreneurship
NYU ITP Fall Semester This course is about understanding the levers that drive business, and learning how to turn them into your favor. You will learn through experience and work in teams to develop a concept from the generation of an idea to launch or market test. Warning: the course involves a field work commitment of 5-6 hours per team per week. Much of the work of business model innovation Read More
Admit it, No One Likes Failure
But there is Joy in Trying In Silicon Valley, failure is “accepted, even encouraged.” Not according to my sample size of Uber drivers. I’m in San Francisco today, where Uber drivers are the new bartenders, and represent potential bellweather for what’s really going on in the Bay Area. From a sample size of 4 Uber drivers, representing an average of 200 rides each, I learned that the primary themes discussed Read More
Finding Your Customer Pain Points: How Far Do You Go
One of the first jobs in unlocking a business model is to define a customer segment, and figure out customer “pain points.” You know you’ve struck gold when you uncover a “hair on fire” problem that is so tremendously painful the customer will work with your earliest version of the product just to douse the flames. The belief about pain points is reinforced by investors, incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurship curricula Read More
Why Growth? Pitchfest Workshops at New Inc.
What’s more fun than working with a bunch of world changing tech founders who see themselves as future unicorns? Working with artist entrepreneurs at New Inc. In module 1 of a Pitchfest Workshop series, we covered why you might want to grow big, and have huge scale, as an exercise in imagining your impact. We are here: Module 1: Why Growth Module 2: Storyline (and business model help) Module 3: Pitch Read More
The Promises and Perils of the Hollywood Style Pitch
How can organizations quickly and effectively gain support for new business ideas? Hollywood wheeler-dealers are famous for pitching new movies to studios with a formula that combines two successful old movies. Robert Altman’s 1992 comedy The Player fictionalized pitchmen who proposed such fantastic ideas as “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman” and “Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate.” Technology companies are also prone to ridiculous-sounding analogies when touting their potential. A recent Read More
Google’s Dominant-Logic Problem
Google’s Dominant-Logic Problem Google has announced that it will become Alphabet, a conglomerate—that old-fangled complex corporate structure popular in the 1970s. Could the conglomerate structure, as Google is defining Alphabet, represent the boldest and most innovative move yet within the entire class of super-tech companies? Google is not the first company to confront the dominant-logic problem, which can cause successful companies to self-destruct, but it is doing so in Read More