Bootstrapper.com - Confessions of Serial Entrepreneurs

I have a long running fascination with IDEO, the design consultancy behind many of the world’s most inspiring and functional products/services.  As a business junkie, I consume lots of literature on the processes used by companies to innovate.  If you share my interests, I suggest “Design Thinking” by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, and the recently appointed head of the Stanford Design School.  My creative license, analysis, and interpretation of his work appears below:

1. The role of design has evolved.  It is not or at least should not be an aftethought to conception of a new product or solution.  Failure to adhere to this rule creates GM vehicles like the Pontiac Aztek.  Indeed, designers should be intimately involved with the creation of the solution and not merely the boxing/packaging/marketing.

2. Frequent prototyping is critical.  Whether you write legal briefs or design boxer briefs, it behooves you to “learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the idea and to identify new directions that further prototypes might take.”

3. You can reduce costs, increase revenues, and do a better job of pleasing your customers if you pay attention to process innovations.  I would credit much of Target’s success to improving the experience of shopping.  Paying attention to the procedure, whether formal or informal, used by your customers and your employees can give you much insight into how to improve experience.

4. Speaking of performance, experience, and innovation, you might do well by looking to how other industries have solved the problems you are trying to solve.  A Professor of mine, Bernard Black, has referenced the airline industry as a model for how to reduce physician error and consequently the costs of our medical care system.  In order to look effectively to other industries, you’ll have to take a more abstract view of the problem you are trying to solve.

5. Creative genius can be boiled down to “hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery process and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing, and refinement.”

Those are the first FIVE , for the next SIX take aways, please click here ….  Rich, if I broke a rule, let me know

In my parent’s living room, the sound of keys being pressed is incessant, never-ending you might think. As a practicing attorney, even when I’m home I have research that I’m doing or various legal documents that I am writing.  However, the around the clock noise really comes from my brother, who is seventeen and applying to college.

Applying to college after you’ve already been is infinitely less stressful than when you’re doing it the first time around. However, the questions are certainly tougher. Or maybe they only seem tougher.  Over the past few weeks as I’ve helped my brother decide how to go about answering these questions, I’ve been given the unique opportunity to reflect. I won’t take you down memory lane but I will tell you that the questions colleges are asking are the same ones you should be asking as an entrepreneur. Here’s a few that you might want to consider answering for yourself or for the rest of us who read and write on this blog…

1. A list of books you have read in the past twelve months
2. Please tell us about how you have spent the last two summers
3. Describe a trait or characteristic that has been passed along to your family. Tell us why you like or dislike this aspect of yourself.
4. “We might say that we were looking for global schemas, symmetries, universal and unchanging laws-and what we discovered is the mutable, the ephemral, the complex.” Support or challenge Nobel Prize winner Illya Prigogine’s assertion.
5. Identify and discuss a person who has helped shape culture and thought. You may select someone from any field: literature, the arts, science, politics, history, athletics, business, education, etc.
6. Reflect on an environmental scene that is important to you, paying close attention to the relation between what you are seeing and why it is meaningful for you.

It struck me that after we stop applying to college(s) , we stop asking these types of questions. Might we also be closeting ourselves from new ways of doing? To put it another way, if you believe in the value of interdisciplinary learning and thought, what disciplines beyond your industry and your business have you spent time thinking about lately?