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