Revelation of Entrepreneurship: what big companies can learn from good startups

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Unlike other artists who specialize only in design, IDEO, the design director of the London office, Tom Hulme, is not only a master of entrepreneurship, but also an angel investor. He likes to start a business, and he believes that the entrepreneurial power of entrepreneurship can contribute to the continued progress of society.

Hulme shares 6 of the traits he has summed up in start-ups in North America and Europe, hoping that mature companies can learn from the business implications of these excellent start-ups and allow the organization to generate SELF-RENEWAL capabilities, but these principles apply to Chinese companies and mature companies.

Trait one: Have a clear goal

Many companies have ambitions in their infancy to help companies make money or create jobs. Aspiring entrepreneurs are looking for investors with a thick business plan, putting them on the table of investors and then looking at my future company. But now investors are increasingly less impressed by a thick business plan, and the best entrepreneurs don't spend their time on business plan writing.

It's not just business plans, it's not the number of registered people on the web, it doesn't matter how many times the business is transformed. Why do you say that? Some companies advertise their services when they don't have clear business ideas and get tens of thousands of registrations on the site, but we have to consider the relationship between these registered people and the core business. If businesses are engaged in the children's clothing business in North America, the registration information of 10,000 single men in Argentina is a sham for businesses.

Similarly, the transformation does not represent the enterprise in the progress, does not represent the enterprise in the real change, the opposite transformation is the enterprise must experience the difficult time. At this time the entrepreneur is very strong, stay focused, experience the difficult process is to hone the courage of the process. The best startups can say no to the income of a target business, because that's what they do for a startup.

Startups often face a shortage of funds. But don't forget that if startups have the right motivation to start a business, they can help you get the right talent. Money is really useful, and if a maker of doughnuts wants to increase production, it may be rewarded with bonuses. But most startups are not the traditional piecework, and people who are willing to join entrepreneurial ventures are often not purely for income. The motivation is to find an incentive that is more important than money. The motivation of Steve Jobs was to make the world's greatest product and to give the customer the best product experience, a motivation that helped him to aggregate a good team and a great company.

So what we should remember is that motivation is sometimes useful, but the real trigger is motivation.

Trait two: Be good at learning in the market side

The UK network microfinance platform Wonga.com is an example of learning in the market. Wonga.com provides people with a small online loan business ranging from 50 pounds to 750 pounds, and operates 24 hours. When people apply for a loan, the system can respond to borrowers within 5 seconds of whether they can get a loan, and 12 minutes later people can get a loan through the bank. When this business is started, the company lends to all applicants, of course, a large part of the money is not returned. But they thought the attempt was a success and helped them learn how to avoid credit risk next. Such learning comes from the thousands of of data that the site generates every day, which helps them form the concept of the business. This is a very useful attempt to explore in practice, and then constantly learn to adjust.

Ideo the business practice of the idea is to encourage customers to publish after learning, do not hesitate repeatedly. This method can be used not only in product function design, but also in brand strategy. For example, Ideo China recently helped to improve the user experience with a mobile phone called pocket shopping. During the project, IDEO provides more than 30 conceptual designs, four or five of which are practical. "Pocket" want to understand the response of each concept first, then decide which is the main push, so let these concepts at the same time test, according to the user's feedback to find the main direction.

Trait three: Speed up the pace of change

Once the way people develop products is linear, get feedback from consumers and then make changes. Interestingly, people now need different products and use products in different ways, such as a Muslim young woman who puts her phone in a turban without needing bluetooth. In the face of increasingly differentiated user groups, if the enterprise again in line with the previous way to develop products will be difficult to keep up with the trend of users. For example, once an extreme credit card user, fearing that he was abusing his quota, froze his credit card in ice to restrain his consumption impulses. Such extreme behavior may reveal new trends and needs.

Linustarvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, in 1990, developed a program with the most basic functions of the operating system based on the Minix system. It's just a hobby, but then Linux is widely used. If Linux uses a straight line of work, it may take decades to be born, but Linux allows engineers to branch out from the source code, if the program is approved to merge into the main line, so that everyone benefit. Multi-threaded parallel development of the contribution to improve the quality of software development and development speed, so that Linux in a few years quickly become a high-quality but not expensive system, but also become the core Android phone software system.

The thing that inspires us is that time and money can be a limiting factor in any company's product development, and that companies need to find fast-growing solutions.

Google is acutely aware of this and Google Maps has opened its API and is now being used on 350,000 web sites for people to contribute together, a parallel revolution.

Trait four: Pay attention to the choice value facing the future

If you say option to a businessman, they will understand from a financial point of view that this is a stock market option. But here, option refers to the ability to do things in the future. An important place to have a lot of option is data. Many companies know that there are plenty of opportunities in the data, in order to obtain data from consumers, they tend to provide free downloads on the Internet, and from this large number of downloads they can learn about the behavior of consumers, discover the useful knowledge of the future business and how to design future business models from the data.

Wal-Mart used weather and sales data to find that a certain strawberry pie was 7 times times more than usual before the hurricane hit. For ordinary supermarkets, if one day sales suddenly increase people will be confused, but Wal-Mart can find that because the news issued a hurricane warning, people will think that the hurricane stay longer time and do a good job in advance supplies reserve. These correlations are found through the accumulated data, and once the correlation between hurricane warning and sales is established, Wal-Mart can flexibly dispatch shelves and product resources.

Trait five: Be good at controlling the factors

What should the phone be like? From the first generation of Motorola mobile phone modeling began, the follow-up of the mobile phone design basic continuation of this style, button modeling to become a mobile phone standard identification symbol, and this standard has become the future of mobile phone design constraints, to prevent the further development of mobile phone design. The appearance of Iphone,ipad, like a blank canvas, broke the awareness of mobile phones and computer appearances.

Therefore, the designer's job is to study the "constraints", because the "constraints" in the system will prevent evolution. But good startups should not just think about how I get rid of those "constraints", but also what "constraints" to add. Image sharing site Instagram break the mindset of people, all the pictures are square. Because the founder's study found that square images make the interface simpler, people look prettier and easier to assemble pictures. Then the site made two technical updates, reduced some of the features, let the picture upload speed from four seconds to a few milliseconds. This is the intellectual use of "constraints" and create business effects.

Trait VI: Truly involve consumers

In the past, the design and development of products, and even use are determined by manufacturers, but now consumers are also free to participate. A rubber patented product called Sugru fully demonstrates the creativity of the user. Its uniqueness is that it can be molded by hand, self adhesive, just like sculpture clay for ease of use. Once molded, it can be used safely in a variety of extreme environments. As for how to use it, Sugru left the creative space to consumers.

Consumers have their own limiting factors: time and money. Smart start-ups will involve consumers in the community and not alone in their own efforts to solve the problem. Oddly enough, some big companies dislike consumer involvement, an important sign of corporate failure.

A notable example is the stark contrast between Microsoft's own great encyclopedia Encarta and Wikipedia, a large encyclopedia of people. Encarta is fully developed by Microsoft's own team, sold in CD-ROM format, contains more than 30,000 articles, updated monthly, expensive. Wikipedia does not have as much money as Microsoft, only to allow netizens to participate as free contributors, these 1 billion-hour content from global contributors to become the world's largest open encyclopedia, and Wikipedia's success is almost Encarta. Thus, a person, a company's wisdom is limited, enterprises should learn to use the power of the community, in which we can inspire each other to create more content and solutions, enterprises in the development of products to help the community to find a variety of reasons for participation.

Similarly, the OpenIDEO platform built by Ideo also absorbs successful experiences involving consumers. OpenIDEO focus on the resources of the whole society to challenge different topics. If an idea makes you touch, you can be involved in working with others to enrich, after all, a person's power is no way to change the world.

Before we finish reading this article, is it possible for us to think about these six questions, and if you can find out a different answer at this point, believe you are already on the way to a good entrepreneur or a good business change person.

1 What are your goals?

2 What can you put on the market to learn?

3 How to speed up the pace of change?

4 What options can you create?

5 How to manage the constraints?

6 How to help consumers create?

Text/Chanlina Source: "Business School"