Hi classmates, Hi Serdar,

Before flying to Finland and while waiting for my laundry lol, a quick (and certainly my last) post on Intopreneur to give a bit of a feedback for our entrepreneurship course. I have also filled out the form Serdar :).

In overall, I am very happy with the course. I am a chemical sciences engineer and I have been working for multinational companies during my internships. I have always tried to observe and analyse what makes a company successful. I am also passionate about innovation and before this course, I have heard a lot about entrepreneurship but I did not really have any knowledge on it.

As it is my last year before graduation, I think that taking ME2603 was a relevant choice and a perfect timing for it. It is really important for me, before graduation and at my age, to understand better how a company starts from the beginning. It helped me a lot understanding how the company grows and works before being a massive worldwide known group.

It could sound a bit weird but I actually love both : start ups and multinational companies. What I like in multinational companies in that people are gathered around company’s common values and their are all acting in the direction of a common goal. I like the “massive” effect i.e. the number of people in the company makes me feel protected and in a force position on the market. At the same time, I was amazed by the passion and how strong could be an entrepreneur! So many new ideas, so many dreams! Entrepreneurs wish for a better world and want to be part of the adventure.

Today, I don’t feel ready to start my own company. I truly feel the pain of our customers/consumers and I am completely convinced that innovation is crucial to the progress of mankind but I don’t feel ready to “sacrifice” all my resources (life, knowledge, money, energy) for a very blurry venture project. I don’t have “the idea” yet : maybe i will never have it but or maybe one day I will feel ready for it/sick of working for someone? The perfect scenario for me would be to find THE company where innovation is a cornerstone and where i can bring my ‘move to the world’s progress’ without being ‘alone’ in the venture : can I call myself an intrapreneur?

Anyway, I have learnt a lot about entrepreneurship and innovation and I truly think that this course is just a start. I was not aware of how many events i could actually attend to network, learn and develop my soft/oral skills! In my professional life, I am quite used to read articles but I have never blogged before this course. I have improved a lot my critical judgement skill. Take home message: ME2603 was just the course introducing me to all the resources offered to me! I need to keep on the good work now and as a future graduated engineer passionate about innovation, being updated of what is going on in the market will be integrated in my daily life!

Coursewise, I really appreciate how hard you tried to make the course diverse Serdar. We had interventions from guests, a venture project, the chance to pitch by ourselves, blogging activities and outside events as well : quite a program! I am not used to those kind of courses as I am a scientist but I actually  find it very fun and would love to follow another one like this! You have always tried to make the course interactive, was always in a good mood and very reactive by email/linkedin/face-to-face when we had questions.

As I mentioned  to you, I’d rather like having a unique platform where we can blog/have access to the documents/information/share everything because I find it a bit confusing but as you told us, Bilda was down. Concerning the instructions for the course and especially the assignments, I read the PDF document at the beginning of the course and it is clear. However, It would also be good to have several reminders in class to have enough time to prepare the assignments and not miss the due date/time in case we are forgetting them among all the assignments we have : always appreciated to have a ‘medium’ notice! I really like working in group for the venture project but I felt frustrated not being able to work a few more weeks on it to present something “better” as the course is only one period. Maybe we can reduce the ambition of it? For example, I did not understand the point of writing the 5-page draft document when we handed it the Venture Project video. It gives quite a lot extra work as we need to be concise and complete enough at the same time in 5 pages while writing a 20 pages report. Those are 2 completely different exercises and I did not see the extra value for the reader.

To finish this really long post, I would like to thank you Serdar for you passion and for being a good teacher. I felt very lucky working with my classmates/smart people from so many different backgrounds!

Hope to catch up with you guys soon 🙂

Celine

Hi everyone, i have had this post as a drift since third lecture when we talked about Innovation.

In some markets innovation and creating a good product is not enough anymore. I have found this article to show http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanielWest/20150908/253040/Good_isnt_good_enough__releasing_an_indie_game_in_2015.php

It in my mind tells that in some markets there are so many alternatives that by just creating a good and innovative product is not enough because you will never get the amount of attention needed to succeed. this is almost comparable to mobile phones today, if a unknown company created a phone similar to Samsung they would never really be successful because the market is already full of other alternatives that one extra would not matter. This is a great discussion material, if you have any thoughts please comment!

As some of you know several others and I were on #STHLMTECH on october 13th. Tim wrote a good summary about the whole event. I just have a few of my own insights to give to you.
A big thing was that AMAZON web service is starting in Sweden just because of the amount of entrepreneurs here. this is interesting because AMAZON is a really big company worldwide.
The main point of the event was about refugees and there were a few of them that aspired to be entrepreneurs that ware on stage.  it is a good discussion to have nowadays because the migration issues are being noticed. In this part of the program they presented an idea of an app for refugees, they called it WELCOME, a place for refugees to create events and social groups. a good idea in the long run.

Another thing that was happening on the event was that I realized how hard it is to compete with other parts of the world, for example how competitive China is. They could copy a product really fast and therefore probably take your market if you are not looking out! the counter things you should create value that not only is on the hardware level. you should create an ecosystem that they would have hard time to copy. And if you are trying to compete with China you should just quit right now, their work ethics greatly exceed ours and many other countries.

Tim forgot to mention a third unannounced pitch. there was supposed to be three pitches on stage but the last group did not come, however someone from the audience came up instead with their idea (great initiative that shows the atmosphere that was!).
This pitcher had an idea about an app that lets you share advertisements on your social account and earn money that way. The investors broke down this idea very hard. however the person had great counter arguments too. The app was going to be called some thing like Payshare or Sharepay.

PS: The drink that they offered was made of green tea and tasted really bad, i guess not every Startup is good in a taste sense 🙂

Hope the exam went well for everyone!

On Tuesday evening I went to an event at Stockholm Maker space. It is a crowdfunded and non-profit organization placed at KTH. It is a place (looks a lot like a lab) where you can become a member (a monthly fee) to explore technology, art and craft. Their aim is to drive innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration. It is a perfect place where you learn and make reality of your idea. For those who already possess an idea, this is a perfect possibility where you can build prototypes together with other people. The pictures shows a 3D printer and an automatic drilling machine cunstructed by some members.

//Nilay

Most of the time when startups are making any product they often focus on doing something new, something innovative. And that is for sure a good thing. But if we just take a step back and analyse the successful companies and what they have done, maby we can use their experience.

Apple, big company. Very popular. Not the best phones, but still making the biggest profit of their cellphones compared to their competitors. There are many reasons why apple have succeeded, but the most important thing they have put a lot of focus on accordingly to me, is that they have created an unnecessary need.

The need of having an iPhone. Totally unnecessary. But still they have put a lot of effort to make it feel like a need for you. They don’t just try to make the best cellphones in the world, they even don’t try to make it the most innovative phone either. Its 2015 and the iPhone is not even waterproof. But they put a lot of energy to make it feel like a need for you, which actually is totally unnecessary.

Right now they have released their apple watch. Very basic watch. If you use it all the time, the battery will die after 4 hours.  Still, people are buying it like smart watches never have been bought before. Because when you have your entire life in your iPhone, many people feel like they need the apple watch for making life easier. Still, totally unnecessary.

That strategy, is something every startup should think about at times. When people feel like they need something, even if its not necessary, they will be a loyal to that product/service. The tricky part is how to make them feel that need.

Two days until the exam, and I’m still a bit confused on what material we should emphasis on while studying. I know Serdar has said we should answer the question handed out a couple of weeks ago and focus on the guest lectures. But as you all know there are only a few guest-lecture-slides up online. Does anyone have any good notes from the guest lectures or any other tips on what to study on? And did anyone take any notes during the class-discussions?

Hi everyone,

Last night Stockholm tech had a meetup with top investors from Dubai, Istanbul and China. They also discussed how Sthlmtech can challenge themselves to come up with innovative solutions to the refugee crisis. There was both open discussions and startup pitches for new ideas on the subject.

I think this is a top initiative of huge importance. I wrote a post earlier on social entrepreneurship and when talking about initiatives to support social problems in the society this is a great one.

I did some research to see what innovations that has been made to support this kind of crisis. Also saw that Fredrik wrote a post on the refugee problem with employment so this can follow up on that discussion. I found this startup who does what Sophie purposed on the elevator pitch but in Switzerland. They connect refugees with employers in the country. Here’s the link: http://capacityzurich.ch/

I also found two other cool initiatives I would like to share.

Three Netherlands-based entrepreneurs have set up an “Airbnb for refugees.”
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/01/berlin-group-behind-airbnb-for-refugees-overwhelmed-by-offers-of-help

This got me thinking of the opportunity of turning successful concepts into entrepreneurial initiatives to solve social problems. One example that can be related to this is LinkedIn but other forums like facebook, Snapshat, Twitter, uber etc. could possibly be used to support the crisis by creating awareness and supporting refugees to channels of help.

The third example I want to lift is this. Lots of people also gathers to create a startup boat.
Link to an article about it: http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/14/european-entrepreneurs-launch-startupboat-to-address-refugee-crisis/
Link to the startup’s webpage: http://startupboat.eu/

http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/14/european-entrepreneurs-launch-startupboat-to-address-refugee-crisis/

Do you know any other startups or projects to support?

Great to see you all there yesterday! Tickets and info was found through this link:  http://www.industrifonden.se/aid

/Linda

In my previous post I wrote about refugees are in dire need of a platform to connect them with employment. What I was saying indirectly was that LinkedIn is not the suitable platform for such solution. Here is another interesting perspective.

LinkedIn’s key offering to its customers is a way of professionally presenting yourself to a professional network. Problem? Limiting factor? Right, the word professional. LinkedIn is extremely suitable for people following a career path pre-defined by big companies. It truly is excellent at condensing experiences and competences into a presentable profile. However where this somewhat has some flaws is for people who aren’t so corporate and career path driven. One main category that falls under this are entrepreneurs. This hit me, and I googled “Top social networks for entrepreneurs” just to see if I was right. And I was. Check out the link.

http://mashable.com/2009/03/12/entrepreneur-networks/#RWT._TrTCaqG

LinkedIn is number 4 on the list. Sure 4 is good. However the way that LinkedIn is being used, according to the list, is through groups and LinkedIn Answers. Neither are key functionality in LinkedIn’s concept.

To summarise. LinkedIn certainly attract the larger market and do it very well. However in the case of entrepreneurs and temporary workers (refugees), they have failed to capture these niche markets.

Thoughts?