Sustainable Technology Entrepreneurship for Scientists and Engineers

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Sustainable Technology Entrepreneurship for
Scientists and Engineers

• Greg Graff, College of Agricultural sciences

Week 2 IDEA GENERATION ENTREPRENEURS
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Readings for today

• Paul Polak, Out of Poverty, 2008
• Chapter 1 Twelve Steps to Practical Problem
  Solving
• Chapter 2 The Three Great Poverty Eradication
  Myths
• Chapter 3 It All Starts with Making More Money
• Thomas Byers, Technology Ventures, 2010
• Chapter 1 Economic Growth and the Technology
  Entrepreneur

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Being an entrepreneur

• entrepreneur fr. Old French entreprendre to
  undertake
• the organizer of an economic venture one who
  organizes, owns, manages, and assumes the risks
  of a business
• one that organizes, promotes, or manages an
  enterprise or activity of any kind PRACTITIONER,
  PROMOTER
• one who serves as an intermediary MIDDLEMAN,
  GO-BETWEEN

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Being an innovator

• innovation fr. Latin innovatus/innovare,
  renew, modify
• the act or an instance of introducing something
  new
• deviation from established doctrine or practice
• a shoot that arises at or near the apex of the
  stem of a plant

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Some common typologies of technological
innovation

• Product vs. Process
• Radical vs. Incremental
• Technology-Push vs. Demand-Pull

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Traits of the innovative entrepreneur

• Active desire to change the status quo
• Willing to take risks to make such change happen.
• Combine persistence in strategy with flexibility
  in tactics
• Treats failure with respect and uses it as an
  opportunity to learn and try something new
• mistakes are nothing to be ashamed of
• they are expected as a cost of doing business
• if no mistakes, not trying hard enough

Adapted from Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, The
Innovators DNA, Harvard Business Review, 2009
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On A Mission for Change

• Embracing a mission for change makes it much
  easier to take risks and make mistakes
• Innovators rely on their courage to innovate
• active bias against the status quo
• unflinching willingness to take risks
• to transform ideas into powerful impact.

Adapted from Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, The
Innovators DNA, Harvard Business Review, 2009
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The innovation skill set

• Associating
• Questioning
• Observing
• Experimenting
• Networking

From Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, The
Innovators DNA, Harvard Business Review, 2009
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1. Associating

• the ability to successfully connect seemingly
  unrelated questions, problems, or ideas from
  different fields
• Creativity is connecting things. Steve Jobs
• Pierre Omidyar launched eBay in 1996 after
  linking three unconnected dots
• a fascination with creating more efficient
  markets
• his fiancées desire to locate hard-to-find
  collectible Pez dispensers
• the ineffectiveness of local classified ads to
  find such things

From Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, The
Innovators DNA, Harvard Business Review, 2009
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1. Associating

• Thinking of poor people as customers instead of
  recipients of charity radically changes the
  design process.
• -Paul Polak, Out of Poverty, pg 75

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2. Questioning

• The important and difficult job is never to find
  the right answers, it is to find the right
  question.
• -Peter Drucker
• question the unquestionable.
• -Ratan Tata

Adapted from Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, The
Innovators DNA, Harvard Business Review, 2009
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2. Questioning

• simple but critical high-leverage interventions
  can generate significant positive impacts on
  multiple fronts.
• many leaders in development continue to scorn
  the search for relatively simple, low-cost,
  high-leverage solutions to the complex problem of
  poverty.
• I have no doubt that the most important
  low-cost, high-leverage solution to the complex
  issue of poverty is helping poor people increase
  their income.
• -Paul Polak, Out of Poverty, pg 55

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2. Questioning

• Where will the money be?
• i.e. not Where is it now?
• -Paul Pollak, Out of Poverty, pg 80

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3. Observing

• Often the surprises that lead to new business
  ideas come from watching other people work and
  live their normal lives.
• -Scott Cook,
• creator of Quicken financial software
• Toyotas philosophy of genchi genbutsu
• going to the spot and seeing for yourself.

From Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, The
Innovators DNA, Harvard Business Review, 2009
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3. Observing

• Four of Paul Polaks Twelve Steps to Practical
  Problem Solving
• 1. Go to where the action is.
• 2. Talk to the people who have the problem and
  listen to what they say.
• 3. Learn everything you can about the problems
  specific context.
• 6. See and do the obvious
• Each of the last twenty-five years I have
  interviewed at least a hundred of IDEs
  small-acreage customers. All my ideascame from
  what I learned from these small-acreage farmers
• -Paul Polak, Out of Poverty, pg. 23

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4. Experimenting

• I havent failed. Ive simply found 10,000 ways
  that do not work. -Thomas Edison
• Like scientists, innovative entrepreneurs
  actively try out new ideas by creating prototypes
  and launching pilots.
• One of the most powerful experiments in which
  innovators can engage is living and working
  overseas
• research has revealed that the more countries a
  person has lived in, the more likely he or she is
  to leverage that experience to deliver innovative
  products, processes, or businesses.

From Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, The
Innovators DNA, Harvard Business Review, 2009
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4. Experimenting

• Paul Polaks design principles
• MAKE A MULTITUDE OF PROTOTYPES
• using local rural workshops to produce
  prototypes is an advantage because they
  incorporate solutions to constraints
• MAKE CHANGES BASED ON FIELD TESTS
• Immediately try the new technology in at least
  25 farms with different conditions
• ADAPT A TECHNOLOGY IF YOU MOVE IT
• why would anyone consider exporting
  technology without first going through the
  relatively inexpensive process of field-testing
  and adaptation based on experience.
• -Paul Pollak, Out of Poverty, pg 79-80

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5. Networking

• Finding and testing ideas through a network of
  diverse individuals gives innovators a radically
  different perspective
• Innovative entrepreneurs go out of their way to
  meet people with different kinds of ideas and
  perspectives to extend their own knowledge
  domains

From Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen, The
Innovators DNA, Harvard Business Review, 2009
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Networking is the Idea

• Andrew Hargadon argues that innovation is more a
  process of recombination of existing things
  than inventing new ones
• ideas,
• physical technologies,
• people, companies, relationships,
• systems
• Even apparently radical innovations, like the
  invention of the light bulb, are in themselves
  rather more incremental when you carefully
  examine the context of the network within which
  they occurred.
• The radical change arises, rather, in how the
  system around the so-called breakthrough gets
  rearranged.
• This cannot happen without the innovative
  entrepreneur being thoroughly engaged with that
  network.

Andrew Hargadon, How Breakthroughs Happen,
Harvard Business School Press 2003
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• Idea Generation

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Idea

• Plato an archetype or subsistent form
• Aristotle a form-giving cause
• Locke an immediate object of the mind or
  compound of immediate objects
• Hume a representation or construct of memory and
  association
• Kant a transcendent but non-empirical concept of
  reason
• Hegel the complete and final product of reason
• The raw materials of innovation

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Idea generation
IDEAS
INNOVATIONS
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• If an innovation, as a new way of doing things,
  is a potentially workable solution to a problem
  (step 3).
• an idea is a hypothesis about how to solve
  the problem or even simply a way to generate
  hypotheses about how to solve the problem (step
  2).
• Yet prior even to the idea, there must be a
  questioning, a conceptualization and formulation
  of the problem
• even a realization, simply, that the problem
  exists (step 1).

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Step 1. Problem Identification

• What is a problem that, if alleviated, would have
  major impact for humanity?
• An important question is always interesting,
• but an interesting question is not always
  important.
• - Bryan Willson

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Problem Identification

• Dean Kamen 
• http//www.ted.com/talks/dean_kamen_previews_a_new
  _prosthetic_arm.html
• this is very inspiring video!
•  
• Marc Koska, 1.3 million reasons to re-invent the
  syringe
• http//www.ted.com/talks/marc_koska_the_devastatin
  g_toll_of_syringe_reuse.html
• opportunity recognition.  

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2. Idea Generation

• What are all the possible ways we could approach
  solving the identified problem?

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3. Innovation

• Of the most promising ways to approach the
  problem, do we haveor could we createa
  potentially workable solution?