Raconter une histoire

An important takeaway from the class for me will be the importance of your speeach as an entrepreneur. It is a fact that entrepreneurs will tell their story again and again and again for a very long period of time - from the idea draft until the company is being built, maybe even "To infinite ... and Beyond!" . Thus it is crucial that the speech, the presentation is well known, accurate and adaptable.

The entrepreneur will have to move, adapt and play with his speech a lot during the first phases of his idea : feedback and inputs from pervious presentations will have to be incorporated pretty fast if he/she wants to be ready for the next presentation.
It is also essential to settle the problem and its solution pretty fast in the speech, and make sure people will understand and remember it. What is better than a story to pitch a problem? It is exactly the point, define a simple and short story that will make the point better than a thousand words.

When we tried to apply that to Uni-Nails - our idea of creating a nail parlor on campus at UOttawa - we were searching for that simple short story that would set the tone of our presentation. We remembered that when Bayan first presented her idea it came from a need that she felt, so we decided to use her own story. And the impact was great!!

Unfortunately, for the final presentation neither Bayan nor me will be there, so it will be only the three guys. We thought about dressing one of them as a girl ... maybe not! But the story is the important point of our idea... We decided to make a video to capture the story:

For this video, what was important was to capture the story : a graduate student at uOttawa is tired of having ugly nail and would really appreciate the convenience of a nail parlor on campus. We decided to try 2 video options, a more "classic" one made with an online tool and a "fun" one made by ourselves. I am only showing you one of them : The beauty of uOttawa wants UniNails.

 

Making a video is not that difficult once you have the speech :

- 2h of watching the beauty & the beast in order to select the appropriate moments,

- 1h of background sound selection - I went for a nice Bali song typical in spas so that the public knows we are offering a peacefull moment

- 30min for recording the voice - being fluent in english is already difficult but when you know you are recorded it is not getting any easier... However, I did it!, yeaaahh!

Some important tips : be sure to include hilarious passage so that even your team is having fun watching it!

 

Let's enjoy it:



Observer le monde à travers nos yeux d’enfants

Observation is a very important skill for innovators. Before explaining the skill I want to make sure you all understand the different between seeing and observing. If you are reading this thinking it is stupid because you already know the difference, good for you, but there are many people who don’t know the difference and that is the element at the basis of innovators’skill. Seeing just means that a panel of form, colors and movements that come to you without you searching for it. You are passive when you see. Observing on the other hand, is actively examining, exploring and looking for things. Observing is not necessarily through your eyes, you can use the entire range of your senses… And you are most welcome to use all your sense since they will give you larger insights on things or job to do.

You might know how important it is for a chef to use every sense when he cook as well make his clients use all their senses when eating. Well it is the same kind of experience that innovators go through every time of every day in their life: the wide range of their senses enhances their observation capabilities.

Obersvation enable innovators :

·         see daily life problems : like Mr Tata’s observation of the unsafety use of scooter to transport a 4 person family under the rain in India gave him the idea of a cheap safe car for Indian middle class

·         comprehend the process of the customer : Tata had to provide financial and insurance services as well as a driving school on the spot if they wanted clients to buy the Tata Nano

·         meet solutions adapted to different issues that can be used : Mr Cook’s observation of the ease of use of interface that look like real life

·         Understand better the customer needs : The MET school focus on the social needs of its students to better develop their skills and increase their learning’s.

I can imagine your disappointment right now since I had the same feeling after reading the chapter 4 of “The Innovator’s DNA”: There is no way for me to become that good at observing. Happily, for me and for you, I didn’t stop my reading in the middle of the chapter but read it until the end… where the authors give us tips to develop our observing skills.

Schedule regular observation excursions.

Observe real people in real-life situations.

Understand what people like and hate.

Search for things that make life easier or not.

Treat companies like a case, what do they do and how.

Change environment (country, museum, activity…)

Fix 10min/day to observe something intensively.

Take notes about your key observations on a notepad, and review them later.

Now, let’s try all that and come back!
Claire-Marine

Questionner _ Interroger _ Ecouter

The disruptive innovator is someone who doesn’t stop to the need or gap in the market that he/she felt. The true innovator would not stop questioning. “Keep on being curious” was something I heard a lot as a young kid in school, but after a while teacher get bored or bothered with questions and tell you how inappropriate it is. Well, Innovators never stopped, they keep on with queries and it deserve them well since it allow them identify the best approach or solution to a problem for their (specific) customers.

With the intent to validate our business model and to know our clients better, we went to the university center with our small questionnaire and started interaction with women nearby. We had questions that were very specific and turned toward the direct validation of our model. The results were not exactly the ones we hoped for:

Among the 50 participants, we reached 48 undergraduates and 2 employee, who told us 59% of them never go to nail parlors and 38% go no more than twice a year, leaving 4% between 5 and 6 times a year. Although the ‘formal’ result is good, with 23/50 saying they would go to a nail parlor on campus, most of those yes were attached with condition like “I would go as a treat for my birthday” or “ if it is very cheap I would go once or twice during school time”. Thanks to those interviews we understood that undergraduates who do their nails do it themselves and are not ready to spend on something they can do at home. “I have a student loan that could almost buy me a house why would I spend money doing something that I do myself at home?” was a very powerfull statement from a student.

However, the talk also permitted us to identified a few need felt by the students: esthetic and hair salon was shared by 2 women, study rooms was also pointed out by 2 different students and  sleeping room and stress relief services were quite popular since spontaneously mentioned by 4 students.

Another important point that we identified through the survey is that the undergraduate population could not be our main target, but the 2 employees questioned were very enthusiastic about the idea. Thus we decided to follow up with our idea but trying to reach more graduate students and employee who potentially have more money and less time available!

The sales Funnel

My personal shopping experience, except for grocery shopping –we all need to eat right?- and dollar-stores – so cheap I can’t resist-, is that for every 5 to 6 stores I visit I will usually buy in 1. Then my wallet and I are pretty much happy with such a fight!

This is the exact sense of the sales funnel we have come to learn about in class: one need to talk to many many many people to just get a few sales. And an entrepreneur similarly to any new business would benefit from learning his/her own specific funnel as quickly as possible. That way the person will approximately know the number of talk he/she will have to do in order to be profitable as fast as possible!

That is something I happy to know, if I ever build my own business I will know ahead how much of a fight against discouragement it is to be an entrepreneur!

Halloween Nails

my home made Halloween nails :

 

UniNail version 1

According to the book, the first discovery skill is Assocating. The authors explain how innovators manage to connect things that were not connected before. Such associations create new ideas that can be great opportunites or not. As far as our UniNail project is concerned, it came from the association of two facts and experiences that :

-Girls and women like their nails to be done

-There is no salon close enough to campus to be really convenient

Thus our idea is to create a nail parlor on the University of Ottawa campus for students. We call the project UniNail! Going through the validation board last Friday we had difficulties defining our customer hypothesis. Do we want to tackle every female student on campus? Or only those who already do their nails? Are we focused on girls already going to nail salons or also those doing their nails at home? Do we offer the service just for female students , if so Undergraduate or Graduate, or we think Employees could be a good target too?

We decided to go for “Woman on campus who get their nails done”. Thus we would target students and employees, avoiding those who don’t care about nails at all. However the question is who many people does it represent? And what percentage of that population would like to use such services as ours?

We then discussed the assumptions in our problem and customer hypothesis and in our business model. We found lots of them but decided that the riskiest one, the one that we would need to validate or invalidate soon is “Many female students are not willing to pay to get their nails done”. We created a questionnaire and decided to go interview some students and employee on campus next Monday. If you are thriving for the results as we are, don’t worry I’ll reveal everything it next week!!

Claire-Marine

Bonne Nouvelle...

For the interest of the class, following the professor’s advice and considering I am a beginner in the field of entrepreneurship I decided to use “The Innovator’s DNA” (Dyer, Gregersen, Christensen ) as a reference book.

There is an excellent news at the beginning of the book : “Innovators can be made and not just born”. The authors use research and studies to illustrate that fact, thus highlighting that “result: roughly 25 percent to 40 percent of what we do innovatively stems from genetics”. Meaning the rest, about 2/3, of the creative skills can be acquired!! Why is that a good news? Well, because it means YOU, ME, ANYONE can become an innovator, and the promise of the first chapter is to explain us how to be such innovators. The plan is to learn about a set of 5 discovery skills that are common to innovators: Associating, Questioning, Observing, Networking and Experimenting!

Don’t be afraid to beak the status quo! That’s easy to say but quite difficult to do. Well some tips given in the book are to feel free to create your own schedule that should include as much as discovery activities as possible and make mistakes to learn faster. Be brave and take risks to allow change to happen is also key in the innovating process. It is all integrated since by being brave, by taking risks, by confronting the status quo you will strengthen the four behavioral discovery skills (questioning, observing, networking and experimenting). Then such behaviors will help you develop your cognitive associational skills that will lead you to more innovative thinking!!

Being an Innovator, and to a certain extent an entrepreneur is a mixed between cognitive competencies and behavioral skills. It is more accessible to us than we could imagine… Who wants to be the next Steve Jobs?

Claire-Marine

Bienvenue

Monday morning, day and night while flying back to Ottawa after nice holidays, I was thinking about the new class to start the next day :  Entrepreuneurship. It sounds good, doesn't it? Yeah, I was finally going to learn how to create an awesome and flawless BUSINESS PLAN!! :-)

 

You can only image my surprise when the professor, at the very begining of the class, said we were NOT going to learn, nor create buisness plans. I was considering dropping the class, but I was already seated I could not leave the classroom. Let's listen...

 

I discovered is that the class would be even more interresting and thriving that business plan: it is about the very begining of a buisness. When you have the awesome idea in your head and you think you can do something with it but you have to test it, to make it evolve, to evaluate, to confront it with reality and customers.

 

The class would be about what a project manager teacher, once regarded with desdain : the "Fluzzy Front End". This uncertain period when one has to cross sword with the customer, the market, the environment. During this period the idea/project/business has to evolve, change, find out its way!

 

 

I learned a lot form the first class, but if I had to pick only one word it would be ITERATION. In french no one would like to be told this word since it is frequently correlated with bad grade - especially in french litterature classes. However in the context of entrepreuneurship it makes perfect sens: the fluzzy period, the idea testing, the customer feedback, the market tasting ...etc force the project/product and buisness model to adapt, evolve and develop. Iteration will happen in a positive way!

 

I am not thinking about dropping the class anymore! It is going to be a lot of work and a lot of learnings. I hope this class to be exicting and I am inviting you to follow my discoveries, learnings and iterations over the next 6 weeks on this blog!

 

Claire-Marine Soury