The Appleseed Comic Con draws comic artists from all around the region to Fort Wayne each year.  But what makes me smile each year is the amazing number of highly talented comic artists from right here in Fort Wayne.  It’s always good to see so many local artists (or in some cases those who studied here and have roots here) creating so many great products.  See you next year!

You can browse through all of the Comic Con artists at http://appleseedcon.com/2013-guest-creators/.   Before you do, enjoy a few pics of some (not all. sorry) of the Fort Wayne artists.

• What they love.
• What they hate.
• What they wish for.

You’ve compared yourself to competitors.  You know what works and what doesn’t.

• The various product features that provide best in class value.
• Where your product lags behind in value.
• Where your product is ahead in value.
• The opportunities for creating value that NO ONE provides at all.

You have a great set of insights that can guide you as you create ideas for a new breakthrough product.  Time to go to work!

Identify the Right Challenges

You first want to identify the top 10 to 15 challenges – the areas where ideas will make the most impact.

• Where you lag the farthest behind competitors.
• The product interactions customers value most highly.
• The big gaps that no one in the market provides.
• The industry holy grails that no one thinks possible.
• The short list of “Aha – NOW I see what they want!” ideas you gathered while organizing your market data.

You do have to “fix things” or catch up to competitors where you are so clearly behind that it works to your detriment.  But, your biggest gains will come from addressing the areas of customer value that your competitors don’t even know about.  When your solution appears on the market, it can look like magic to them since they don’t understand the base value being fulfilled by your solution.

Craft Effective Brainstorming Questions

There is science (and maybe some art) to getting good ideation results.  Follow this question formula.

• Design a [element of the product] that fulfills [one or more of the contributors to value you have discovered].
• Example – Design a [user interface] that [provides the experienced user some detailed control].

Or this formula.

• Design a [element of the product] that fulfills [one or more of the contributors to value you have discovered] without diminishing [some other contributor(s) to value].
• Example – Design a [user interface] that [provides the experienced user some detailed control] but [is still easy enough for a raw beginner to understand].

To make an effective question, always ask the brainstormers to design some TANGIBLE element or feature of the product.  And, always direct them to some specific set of CUSTOMER VALUES to fulfill.

Address a Variety of Produce Elements, Values, and Degrees of Difficulty

First, at the end of your ideation session you will want to have amassed hundreds of ideas for a variety of product elements – to compile into ideal product concepts.  To give your team a good inventory of ideas to compile, select a group of challenge questions that cover a range of tangible product elements.

Second, it may go without saying, but you don’t want your ideation questions to focus on just a few challenges.  Try to cover the most important challenges – across a range of customer values or customer interactions.

Third, you will want a range of difficulty. You’ll need some fairly easy questions – defined as ones where you are sure participants can come up with LOTS of ideas – to get the sessions started on the right foot or to pick up a sleepy session.  And, you will also want some questions that stretch your participants to go past their limits.  Once they have been primed with the simpler questions – so they are used to pumping out ideas a mile a minute – you can tackle the hard challenges.

• holy grail issues
• contradictions that look mutually exclusive
• complicated issues where multiple customer values and interactions intersect

Write Your Ideation Session Prep

When you present the question at your ideation or brainstorming session, you can’t count on your participants having a deep understanding of the customer values or challenges you discovered in your upfront research.  Even if you sent them a primer to read ahead of time, don’t count on them to have read it (or to remember it).

Instead, create a brief handout or presentation that refreshes their memory about the issues.  It always helps to verbally highlight the interaction values and issues before you start the brainstorming for each question – and let them ask questions.  A one-page simple handout is helpful for them to use during actual brainstorming so they don’t have to keep all of the issues in their heads.

Ready

Once you have 1) effective questions 2)) across a variety of elements, values, and difficulty, and 3) background prep, you are ready for ideation.

Subsequent posts in this series will describe more about other innovation steps.

For more detail, Innovation Rules and Tools is a practical handbook that describes a complete set of innovation steps that you can use to make innovation happen on demand in your company.  For each step, it describes a set of general rules or keys to success along with multiple tools you can apply from day one.  It is available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com.

UPDATE: Knowledge Base is now FREE!  We have turned off the paywall – didn’t feel right to us – and you can now “pay with a tweet” to support Knowledge Base at no cost to you – or donate to support Knowledge Base financially. Oh, and we are up to 221 articles.  Enjoy!

Yesterday Founders launched a new product called Knowledge Base.

So, you know how the internet is stuffed with some really great information about doing a startup, but how it is tough to find.  You often have to fight your way through an avalanche of news stories, the latest editorial gossip and hype, and today’s trending meme just to find it, right?

Well, we decided that it should be easy to find great startup advice.  So we have curated over 200 articles so far – PLENTY more to come.  We categorized them, and we tagged them so they can be found easily (you can search for a word or phrase, too).

And then we decided that because startup people value their time, we would summarize each article.  We write the 1-3 “genius ideas” we found in each article and a “tl;dr” section with a brief paragraph or some bullet points summarizing the article.  Of course, we respect the original authors – we don’t cut and paste, we link out to the original article, and our titles include the author’s name.

So, right now, for example, Knowledge Base includes 69 articles about creating your Product, 60 about Marketing, 52 about Funding – among many others.  Doing an SaaS venture and curious about the metrics to watch?  There are 7 articles for just that.  Managing a launch?  5 articles.  Hiring key employees?  5 articles on hiring process.

I’d say it goes on and on, but it doesn’t – it stops at 203 articles – today.  By the time you read this, there will no doubt be plenty more.  We add new articles each week.

In addition to a great civic architectural concept – which would dovetail quite nicely with my friend Kelly Lynch’s vision for Headwaters Junction – Eric presented an almost larger-than-life vision for downtown Fort Wayne.

Even more interesting to me was to hear Eric talk, in the midst of all this, about a concept that sounded awfully familiar.  Eric said that he envisions downtown Fort Wayne as a “marketplace of ideas”.  In our age, as he put it, “A city is more than a marketplace of goods.  It can now be a marketplace of ideas.  It is the true measure of a great city.”  Toward that end, he design of Headwaters 2.0 would bring people together and foster “that magical thing that occurs in a city – accidental encounters.”

When he said that, I immediately thought of Nick Arnett, who had introduced me to the concept of placemaking some time ago.  He had explained placemaking in much the same way – purposefully designing the physical assets of a place (typically downtown Fort Wayne in our discussions) in a way that structurally encourages chance encounters among creative people – to foster innovation and city vibrancy.  Hearing Eric say the same thing made me love the Headwaters 2.0 plan even more.

I also thought of my own business, Founders, where we are building an entrepreneurial community with the same goal in mind.  We are purposefully bringing entrepreneurs, creatives, and independents together in our coworking space – and happily watching as they combine forces to bring new things to life.  By the way, Founders is located within a stone’s throw of the southwest border of the proposed Headwaters 2.0.  We could easily go hang out there on a cool summer evening.  We could recharge our batteries with a walk along the riverfront.  I could ride my bike on the trails and River Greenway through Headwaters 2.0 to about two blocks from Founders.  Sweet!

So, to those who are reading this, I say throw your support behind Headwaters 2.0 and help create that “Marketplace of Ideas” – and a very cool park – here in downtown Fort Wayne!

I enjoyed talking about Founders and my innovation book - and answering your questions – even the “interesting” ones like, “If you could have a superpower, what would it be?”

As Alex puts it in a post titled “A Contrarian Thesis on Startups for the Rest of Us” …

“Before gambling on whether an idea will work or not, start with market research (yes, it sounds like it’s straight out of a 1950′s B School class) and find out what is valuable to this market.  Remember, the more valuable your product or service is (and the bigger the pain point it helps solve), the more you’re able to charge (e.g. more revenue for you and we’re all capitalists, not communists, right?).”

The innovation process I describe in my book Innovation Rules and Tools starts with a step called Discovering Value.  The whole idea is to learn what the various customer segments and stakeholders in the market think is valuable – before you create and deploy your product / service / business model solution.  Like Alex, I think it is just common sense.  Why would I create a solution that is designed to make money until I know what people value (another way of saying pain point)?

Learn What the Market Values by Studying What People Do

The best technique for gaining market understanding is the good old fashioned one-on-one interview – combined with observation.  There is nothing quite like talking with someone (i.e. asking open ended questions and doing a LOT of listening and note taking) for an hour or more and doing a deep dive into their perceptions, beliefs, and values about what they do in that market and how they interact with the product you are designing.

When I talk with customers, I listen for the activities they do (or want to do) – from cradle to grave as they work with the product.  When I hear a new activity, I’ll have them either walk me through it verbally – or beter yet let me observe them doing it.  I learn in depth by asking lots of questions like, “Why did you do that?”, “Why is that important?”, “Tell me more”, “How do you do that”, “Who else is involved”, and more.

Organize Your Market Knowledge by Activity

I like to organize the data I find about a market by the customer’s or stakeholder’s activities.   My colleague Ron Sears at the Design Consortium (I worked with Ron as a protege for 6 years) leads the discussion of his Product Value Matrix innovation process with this …

“The value anyone receives from a product must, by definition, stem from that person’s interactions with the product. If you don’t use, touch or interact with a product in some way, it has no value to you at all.”

If you create a thorough description of each activity (or, as Ron would put it, interaction) for each customer segment or stakeholder group and keep it up to date, you possess a comprehensive guide to value in your market.  I call this “The Book”.  For each activity, it can tell you not only what people want to accomplish, but also what they like, hate, and wish for.

Compare Your Competitors, Yourself, and Your New Concepts

You can use The Book to rate your competitors across each activity, noting what the winner does to achieve success and what the loser does to lose.  Knowing  which competitors do a great (or poor) job with an activity already, how they do it, and why it works (or doesn’t) gives you even more market insight.

You can also use The Book to rate your current product (if you have one) and your new concepts.  This ranking gives you an objective view of where you are behind or ahead.

Even better yet, The Book and ratings will pinpoint for you those activities where no one does a good job today.  These are areas where innovation can have the biggest impact, the areas where your competitors (and even you, so far) don’t seem to understand what it takes to be wonderful.

You are now at the point that Alex described where you are able to tell if a venture idea is wonderful or terrible – or what  I describe makes you ready to start ideation and create a brand new venture idea that is wonderful!

Subsequent posts in this series will describe more about other innovation steps.

For more detail, Innovation Rules and Tools is a practical handbook that describes a complete set of innovation steps that you can use to make innovation happen on demand in your company.  For each step, it describes a set of general rules or keys to success along with multiple tools you can apply from day one.  It is available in paperback and Kindle from amazon.com.

Innovation Rules and Tools, my handbook for how to make innovation happen in your company, is now available at Amazon.com for the Kindle!

So, you can …

1. Be learning how to apply hands-on innovation in a matter of minutes.
2. Acquire Innovation Rules and Tools for only $7.97.
3. Carry Innovation Rules and Tools with you electronically as a handy reference.

Why wait?  Go grab your copy now!

p.s. for you print purists, you can still purchase the paerback edition here.

“Optimism.”

That short answer, by Sondra Webber, went on to say, “Studies show optimistic people are more successful, and happier, because they believe in themselves and more or less make it happen.”  That answer just happened to hit home for me that day, as I was thinking about the own life and my own entrepreneurial activity.

Pessimists Miss Opportunities

I realized that pessimists lose in three ways.

1. Pessimists dismiss opportunities when they see them because they don’t believe the opportunities are attainable.
2. They don’t see opportunities because they don’t believe that it is even worth looking.
3. When we take a step in a new direction, the vista is different.  Pessimists don’t ever see positive new vistas that are built on the results of positive actions and thoughts.  Worse yet, they see new negative vistas built from the results of their negative direction.

The implications for optimists are the reverse.

Optimists See Opportunities

Optimists are open to opportunities.  They will try something.  Perhaps, as Sondra says, because they believe in themselves.  But perhaps, I think, because they believe in the opportunity, whatever it is.  I see that all of the time in my entrepreneurial friends here at Founders.  We’ll be talking about something, anything.  An idea will pop up.  Somebody will say, “Awesome, what a great idea!”  Someone else will say, “We’ve just gotta do that!”  And then maybe a couple of people will head to a whiteboard or the front windows with some dry erase markers.  Pretty soon domain names are being purchased and code is being written.

Optimists Create Opportunities

Believing that something can be done, and then starting to do it, is enormously powerful.  Starting work on an opportunity puts you in a position where you might see even better opportunities.  As I’ve recently retooled some of my own professional services, the product that I started creating has changed based on ideas I never even imagined until after I started developing the idea.  Had I pessimistically avoided developing the initial idea, I would never have seen the other more powerful ideas.  I’m willing to bet that every entrepreneur has experienced this same phenomenon.

That Helps Entrepreneurs Play to Win

It’s simple.

• Because optimism helps you see and take advantage of opportunities, you can’t win without it.
• Because optimism helps you create opportunities along a positive vista, you can’t win big without it.

Cultivating Optimism

Cultivating optimism is not difficult (yeah, I know that sounds sorta optimistic itself).

The first thing to understand is that cultivating optimism is not the same as reducing pessimism.  It is not setting aside time to identify and study those occasions when you have been pessimistic and vow to get better.  When you work to reduce pessimism, your framework is still pessimism, so although you may change you are still grounded in the world of pessimism.

Instead, try taking some time each day to practice being purely optimistic.  Take ten minutes (or more) and let yourself think optimistic thoughts (force yourself at first, if you have to).  Imagine you will have a successful outcome to some of the key things you are working on in your venture.  Imagine you will have a successful relationship with those people that are habitually hard for you to deal with.  Imagine that your team is really, really motivated, full of great ideas, and just plain primed to kick ass.  Imagine that the city looks sparklingly great early in the morning.  Imagine that you have everything it takes to be uber-successful in your market.  Etc.  Just practice being open, concentrate on how all that feels, smile a lot, and see where it leads.

I predict that two things will happen.

• Your framework will change.  You will begin to think from an optimistic viewpoint, rather than a pessimistic viewpoint.
• Your perception will change.  More and more each day (outside of your 10 minute practice time), you will see positive opportunities that will help you achieve success.

Have fun!

As Karen said, she purposely gives assignments at which many students will likely fail, to stretch them out of their comfort zones.  Earlier, she had asked Zach and his classmates to identify and contact a local CEO and arrange a meeting.  She didn’t expect that too many would actually have the guts to do it.  Zach not only arranged the meeting, but walked out of it with an internship!

We met.  He became a member of NIIC’s (where I worked at the time) first BizWiz student entrepreneur group, and started one of the two first ventures in NIIC’s Student Venture Lab.  In the Student Venture Lab, he was the “business guy” who focused on planning a business venture.  His business plan for Bee Mobile (a text message marketing service) won a local competition.

Zach Zuber in his office in the NIIC Student Venture Lab
after winning a business plan competition (the real reward was some cash).

He was not, admittedly, the technical guy.  He was pretty clearly the opposite of a technical founder.  He couldn’t program or design – so he had to contract with and depend on others to create his online presence.  I’m pretty sure that he drove himself nuts trying to make that happen on the small budget he had available from Student Venture Lab and competition grants.  Shortly thereafter, he moved to Muncie, IN to attend Ball State University and got hooked up with an incubator there.

In Muncie, he launched the Bee Mobile beta, cold called like a boss, and signed up multiple beta customers.  Things were looking good.  But after a month of operation he found out that the customer validation failed.  Customers loved the service – they just didn’t like paying for it!  Ruh-Roh.

So Zach closed Bee Mobile and started looking for something new.  He stayed in touch with us at NIIC, stopping back to the BizWiz meetups and visiting the Fort Wayne startup folks.

At BizWiz making a video blog post of doing cupcakes “manbites” with Ray Angel, Presenting at a Student Venture Lab Funders Luncheon,
With Scott BonAmi & Graham Bredemeyer of Sassi Systems and me to hear Steve Blank.

Along the way, he hooked up with a group of mainly NIIC student entrepreneurs who went down to Indianapolis and won the Spring 2011 Indy Startup Weekend with a venture called GrabaChat (chat roulette without the penises).

The GrabaChat team after winning the Indy Startup Weekend

Zach had the opportunity to meet Zack Klein when Zach came to speak at the TechFest event in 2011 (where Zuber was helping me out at the NIIC Student Venture Lab table).  Being the <sarcasm> shy, reserved sort of guy that he is </sarcasm>, Zuber took the opportunity to cold-pitch Klein about GrabaChat (and got some valuable feedback).

Zach Klein and Zach Zuber at TechFest

As with many Startup Weekend ventures, the group did not persist, but Zach took a pivot of the concept forward with brand new intellectual property (I saw the new concept – it was sweet), paired with a technical cofounder.  Zach eventually put GrabaChat aside when the technical cofounder decided to leave town and get a J.O.B.   He went off to Bloomington to intern with Sproutbox, spent some time around Indianapolis interning with BizProps, and then one day …

I heard something completely new from Zach.  He was going to become a developer!

He was going to Chicago to learn Ruby on Rails in the Starter League‘s 11-week web development crash course.  He would be living and breathing code for three months.

We’d had discussions about learning coding over the 4+ years since we met – practically every time that he needed to hire someone to develop something for him.  Zach had heard me say more than once that if you take 2 years to study and practice (on your own), you can become very proficient with a language.  In fact, he had been dabbling with customizing the PHP of some WordPress templates, had done some online PHP, HTML, and CSS tutorials, and had mocked up a few websites with HTML and CSS.

But, this was different.  This was all-in, invest lots of your time and money, don’t turn back, serious stuff.  The business guy was transforming into a technical guy.

Fast forward to today.  The Starter League is behind him.  Before the week is out Zach will be leaving for Chicago where he has accepted a position as the technical co-founder of BeNoticed, a startup that plans to “Make finding a job easier for people who aren’t ideal candidates on paper, but are indeed skilled at what they do.”  His partner is a business guy.  The tables have turned a full 180 degrees.

Zach Zuber at Founders studying Ruby before leaving for Chicago

This is a fun story to write – and (i hope) to read.  I’d like to get serious for a moment, and point out two admirable startup entrepreneur traits that we can learn from Zach.

First, through four-plus years, he has stuck to his guns, not given up, and persevered through two failed ventures (and plenty more killed ideas).  He kept looking for ventures and venture ideas.  He kept trying ventures and venture ideas.  He stayed active in the startup communities throughout Indiana – and then Chicago.  His willingness to tough it out, close out the ventures that didn’t work, and keep going is probably the same extra something that Karen Gillie saw in Zach when she first introduced me.

Second, if you ask him Zach will probably say it should have happened earlier, that it took him a long time to make the decision, but he made the scary decision to go all in and learn to code – to become the dev that his ventures always needed.  And then he did it!  The main roadblock that his earlier ventures faced is now gone.  Sure, he’s new as a dev, but can you imagine how he’ll grow with his persistent personality?  I can.

Congratulations, Zach, on getting technical!

She highlights, and I particularly like, the working philosophy of artist Chuck Close.

“Inspiration is for amateurs — the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

Isn’t that a great quote?  While you take a moment to think about how it widely applies to a lot more than just the arts, I’m going to zero in just one other area – entrepreneurship.

Work Ethic Wins in Startups

It rings particularly true today in the world of startups and entrepreneurship.  Showing up and getting to work (versus waiting around for that killer app idea to materialize or that 100-page business plan to be funded) is exactly the difference between entrepreneurs who succeed and those who either fail or never take off.

When I say “work ethic wins” in the startup community, I am not simply referring to hard work (although startup entrepreneurs certainly work hard).  What I am referring to is the startup community’s bias toward stepping in and getting started … i.e. building something.  A business plan without a product or at least a prototype is discounted as a useless old school exercise.

Today’s startups are strongly influenced by the customer development / business model development / lean startup techniques of people like Steve Blank, Alexander Osterwalder, Eric Ries, and many others – all of which depend upon building something and then using that to test product / market fit and business model validity.  The bias toward building something gets kicked up a notch in startup incubators like Y-Combinator and TechStars, where from day one the clock is ticking toward a Demo Day deadline.

Work Ethic Enhances Creativity

Chuck Close continued by saying …

“And the belief that things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will — through work — bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ‘art idea.’”

An initial hunch or bit of creativity may get you started, but it is not sufficient for a robust, deeply valuable product (or work of art).  First of all, you (the entrepreneur) simply do not know everything there is to know about the market.  You have to listen to others who use products in different ways than you, have different needs or wants than you, have different experience levels than you, and so forth.  When you hear a entrepreneur who does know it all, be very afraid. The more people in the market with whom you engage, the more you learn – and the more opportunity you’ll find to understand needs both widely and deeply or crash multiple good ideas together.

When I worked with Ron Sears doing innovation consulting, we would spend anywhere from weeks to months of up front research engaging and listening to a cross section of stakeholders to a product or business before starting ideation or design work.  My experience taught me that intense customer / stakeholder engagement always produces the sorts of insights that drive huge value into the product.

Sometimes Less is More

Building will not only uncover possibilities and open doors, but will also help you shut doors.  The best way to see if an idea will fail is to try it.  This is as true for art as it is for entrepreneurship.

For an entrepreneur, continuing to beat the dead horse of a idea that has no market validation is a cardinal sin.  Customer development / lean startup techniques emphasize quickly moving away from concepts that have no validation, and finding what to throw away can be just as creative as finding what to keep.

Overall, Building Wins

Overall, for both artist and entrepreneur, what wins is action.  Building something.  Without building something you cannot either engage the market or see (hear, touch, taste, smell) the art.  You cannot learn how to bridge from one iteration to the next even-better possibility.  You cannot learn what the market doesn’t like – or what artistic elements just don’t work.

So, the lesson of the day comes from Chuck Close, via Maria Popova - just show up and get to work!