In this post i would like to talk about my Bachelor Degree Project in Politecnico of Milan since it was similar to the simulation we made in this course and then, it gave me the possibility to feel prepared before this course started. I would like in this way to make a comparison between the two, underlying what are the lessons i learned from both of them.

In Milan the platform was different and the simulation was called “Business Game”. This game lasted four months ( from March to June ) and i had to write two reports as a final degree thesis plus a presentation of our strategy in July. Differently from the simulation of this course, we had been divided in groups of three people and there weren’t constraints about gender, culture, nationality and so on. Therefore, my group was composed from three Italian students. In my opinion, this limited a lot our knowledge and open-mindedness. Indeed, is proved that diverse teams are smarter because they are characterized by different ways of thinking and behaving that allow them to make better decision. Probably our results would be even better but anyway, we worked really hard to reach good results.

Another difference was that in the “Business Game” we had to sell different kind of furnitures to wholesalers and retailers and there was the possibility to choose which of the two markets to enter. There were five competitors and then, the objective was exactly the same: make the company grow and win the competition.

Some aspects of the “Business game” were more challenging than the simulation. As examples, we had to forecast the demand for the next period both with qualitative and quantitative methods and calculate all the costs and the accounting metrics, with the help of programs like Microsoft Excel, in order to figure out if our business was sustainable.

On the other hand, even if we didn’t have to calculate and much information were already available because the time was limited, the “Marketplace Secondlife” simulation included more features. These like the possibility to design advertisements and define the salary of the employees. Furthermore, the “Marketplace Secondlife” platform was, generally, better designed.

To sum up, i learnt a lot from both these experiences because they gave me the possibility to face the business world and to understand how is difficult to manage a company in an intensive competitive market. Moreover, I decided to write about my experience back in Italy in order to encourage both business and engineering students to pick the possibility to run this simulations more than one times. This because, even if i had experience, each platform and market ecosystem is different and, in the complex and uncertain business world, you can never learn enough but is true that the more experience you have, the more you can achieve the success.

I hope you will enjoy this post and feel free to write me if you want to know more about the “Business Game”.

As a part of the course Business Development Lab my team had to present on the topic customer segment. Hence I went through a lot of materials and videos and would like to share some of the key points I learnt.

Customer Archetype

• Understanding and defining your customers in detail
• Profile for the customer – age, gender, location, role, how they buy, who will buy etc.
• User of the product may not always be the buyer of the product.
• Identify how your product is going to help your customer and where it fits in their life.

Working with customers

• Constant interaction with customers.
• Customer discovery – test the problem and get better understanding of the problem you are trying to fix.
• Customer validation – test the solution by creating demo, website/apps.
• Start selling the product
• Improve the product and add more features

This week end, I saw the movie “Zootopia” (don’t make fun of me 😉 ). It is the story of a rabbit, Judy, who comes from countryside. Her parents are farmer. In their world, people are divided in two main groups : preys and predators. Long time ago predators were used to killed preys but now they leave almost in harmony. The dream of Judy is to become a policewoman. However, in her world, preys never became policeman, policeman is reserved to predators who are strong.  Finally Judy succeed in entering in the police school, she was the first prey to enter in this school. At the beginning, Judy was not able to do all the exercise because she was not enough strong. But Judy didn’t loose courage and work twice more than others and she succeed in becoming the first prey policeman and even the major of her promotion. At this point Judy thought that she succeed in realizing her dream. Unfortunately it was not completely true. Indeed, she was allocated in the biggest city called Zootopia but, when she arrived, her director didn’t handle her as others because she was a prey and not a predator.  Hence, she was not allocated at an affair as the others but at the parking. Therefore, she decided that she will do this mission better than expected to prove her director that she is competent. Unfortunately it was not enough for his director who keep on treating her in a bad way. However, with strength, courage and a lot of nerve, Judy finally succeed in finding the solution to the biggest affair of disappearance of the city. Even if sometimes she was totally discouraged she finally succeed in becoming a real and respected policewoman.

The first lesson of this movie is that, the social environment where we come from doesn’t have any importance. It is not because your parents are not engineer or doctor or whatever else that you can not become one if you want. The most important point is to believe in yourself and don’t let others discourage you by saying that it’s not possible for you because of your social environment.

The second lesson was that it is not because people think you are not able to do something because you are too fragile or not enough competent for instance, that you can’t do it. If you are sure that you want to do it, you can do it. You have to believe in yourself and work harder to show that  you are able to do it. So don’t let others discourage you.

I also learnt that a victory is not enough, unfortunately you still have to prove others that you are competent even if you have already prove them you are competent (ex: to be graduated) , it’s a continuous process. You always have to fight to succeed in realizing your dream. I think it’s important for an entrepreneur to understand this because it is not because your venture is a success at the beginning that it’s all done, you have to take care of it and always work to keep it alive.

The last lesson learnt was that sometimes you need to use a lot of nerve to show that you can do it whatever others said. I think that is a good point for an entrepreneur. Indeed an entrepreneur has to show that he has enough ambition and is ready to do lots of things to succeed in doing it. An entrepreneur has also to be ready to take some risk to succeed because victory need risk.

I hope this post will  have tempted you to see Zootopia and you will find it interesting.

As a part of this course we had to form teams and participate in an online venture simulation game. Before sharing my experience with the game I would like to explain it a bit.

There are two parallel worlds in the game, each having six teams. The teams in one world compete with each other. Also we were asked to form a team having some amount of diversity (gender and geographic). I think this was really nice as it ensured that we interacted and worked with different people and not just stick with our friends.

There were a total of seven quarters (with the last one being the final presentation). With each quarter we were able to broaden our venture i.e include more brands, more products, have more and more sales offices, increase the sales force, include R&D and improvise our products. One thing that my team sort of struggled throughout was designing good ads and where exactly to place these ads. Each quarter we tried to improve it and hence made a lot of modifications.

Some of the things I liked about the simulation was that it allowed us to review our product and the competitors brand every quarter. This helped us in great deal to learn from our mistakes and  improve. Also it gave a sort of insight into how everything works starting from the geographic location we wanted to launch the product, to the kind of sales we wanted or the R&D we wanted to invest in.

The review of the simulation
The whole simulation have already been finished by now. By the end of quarter 7 our team has become the most successful team of the group one. The total performance is nearly three times compared to the team that ranked number 2 and also the average. And we also own the most of the wealth. Although we all want to win but we never expected we can achieve such high score. But considering all the efforts we made then everything is reasonable.

At first we don’t know how the system works. At the very beginning we don’t have so much money to ask many questions from our teacher, so we can only read the introduction word by word to figure out how it works. From the data we can see that we made a lot of mistakes and we are just average at the beginning. But as the time goes we gradually clear about what to do. And our strategy is to using a conservative method and avoid risks because we realized that there won’t be big differences on the product between different groups because the limitation. So setting a proper price is quite important. Although we know there might be possibility that if we raise the price they will still buy our computer, but we took it seriously and very cautious at raising the price. To reach the best price we did a lot of experiment. For example we often raise the price a little and see how the data changes after this quarter, and sometimes we reduce the discount to replace the raising of the price.

Another thing is that we had a very good team work. Every period we will do our own part and then work together to discuss the whole strategy. When working on individual part we often discuss with each other if the parts are related. So that make our work effective and efficient.

The most useful thing the system provide us is the data from other groups. By analyzing the data from other group we can easily avoid some fatal mistakes. At the beginning of each quarter we will check which team was doing good last quarter and what did they change compared to former quarters. If one product is quite successful we will check the difference between their product and sales strategy and ours, then we will make some changes from the conclusion.

By doing the simulation we all have a better understanding of how the market works. If it is a startup then we should be prepared to every possible changes in the market. Sometimes we thought we did the right thing but didn’t receive positive result, and sometimes we thought we could have done more but it turns out to be quite successful. It can only be more complex and risky when running a start-up by ourselves so the simulation really helped us to experience the feeling and help us realize how cruel the real market is.

Few weeks ago Jingjing invited us to join in a hackthon event called Create Squared. After checking it on Facebook, all the member in our HCID project group agree that it is quite interesting and meaningful. So we ordered our seats in this event.

It was a cold Friday.  After finishing a Lab at main campus we walk there in the cold wind. Unfortunately we arrive there too early and have to wait an hour to go inside. After a long time we finally go inside the Norrsken and meet other guys. It is quite impressive that there are a lot of people spending a long time to come here from other parts of Sweden. After a simple dinner there is a quick brainstorming part and we gethered in teams randomly to do brainstorming based on two clues they gave us. After ten minutes’ discussing our team decide to use my idea of giving credits to those who protect the environment, and they can use the credits to apply for loan or renting houses or have more allowance in credit cards. Although I am not so good at pitching but as a challenge to myself, I went up to stage and do a 1 min pitching about this idea to everyone. After that there is a voting part to decide which idea should be kept. Unfortunately they forget to put my idea on the wall and it was too late when I notice them the fact. In the end I joined a teams called “crime map”.

Our team leader is a Swedish government officer so he has a strong connection with the gov. We have a Polish girl called Kata who is quite a fan in entpreneurship and a economy student from CTH called Flip. Another team member who helped me a lot is an exchange student from Singapore called Fengwei. That night we do a lot of brainstorming until 1:00 then we came back for a sleep.

The second day is the most important day. And we have a lot of work to do. But the bad thing is there are some conflicts in our team about this idea. Because the information about the safty state in different area is not that easy to get access and there maybe negetive effect of marking one place as “dangerous”. In the end they are persuaded to use my idea and show all the feelings using word cloud and doing a recommondation system like Tripadvicer. To evaluate the market protencial we did a lot of research and discussed a lot. Then we divided into two parts to finish the task. I am in charge of prototype and they in charge of business model canvas.

After two days hard working we finally made out our final prototype. Although we didn’t get any reward because the unsatisfying presentation, we still learned a lot during this time.

Recently I saw the video ‘The Death of Business Model’ by Terrence Brown. In this post I would discuss some of the highlights and the things that I learnt from the video.

There are numerous definitions of a what is a business model and a lot of them were discussed in the video. From all of them my view on business model is that it helps one to decide what is the value the business will offer, who will it offer this value to, how it will reach those and finally finances (profit, cost of selling etc). To explain this in more detail we have business model canvas which has 9 components. In my opinion all are important but the one to start with is ‘value proposition’. This is because the most defining aspect of a business is what exactly is the value that we can offer. Whether is to attract customers or investors the most important thing is to know exactly the specifics of the value that is offered.

Lean startup movement consists of three components – business model canvas, customer development and agile engineering. One of the most grave mistake to make is to assume that your potential customer segment is going to live your product and readily pay for your product without actually talking to your potential customers. Hence it is very important to actually talk and discuss with your customer and to design your customer archetype on some solid testing rather than assumptions made. Next agile engineering consists of a lot of action items. I believe here is when you start doing some actual work. An MVP (Minimal Viable product) is designed and deployed, customers can be asked to test the demo/beta and give constructive feedback. Multiple design decisions are actually tested and based on the results they could be destroyed/modified. Also most of the time there would be some or the other changes that will need to happen to your business model, value etc and you will pivot. It is important to understand that all of these are tools and should be just used as a tool. It does not mean that if one can design a good one page business model canvas that their business will be successful (business is not equal to business model canvas).

Like all sports based movies Eddie the Eagle was very inspirational. The story of a man that achieved his dreams by overcoming all the odds and obstacles on his way. However it took me sometime to realize what could be the entrepreneurial lessons that I could learn from this movie?

Firstly the most important lesson to be learnt is that in spite of what people think you can and cannot do and irrespective of what obstacles one face, you must work towards your goal. Rather than focusing on what others think and discouraging yourself, one must only and only focus on your dreams and how you can achieve it. This is a sort of golden rule and should apply to all aspects of our life.

Another important thing I derived from the movie was how well-defined his goal was. He did not have like a hundred things on mind or a vague idea of what he wants to achieve. He knew exactly what he wanted – ‘taking part in the Olympics game’, the goal was well-defined, short and he was able to work towards it. I believe this is a very important rule while building your company – getting specifics. If you don’t have a good idea about what the pain is and how your product can solve it, the customer segment, how marketing should be done, finances it is very difficult to establish your company in the market.

In my opinion a good mentor can really help you grow and achieve much more similar to how Eddie’s mentor helps him achieve his goal. Likewise I believe it is important to have good mentors in your life, having good entrepreneurial knowledge who prevent you from making grave mistakes and help you follow the right path.