Author Archives: Fredrik Nordström

One of the most confusing and perhaps learnable terminology that I have learnt during this course is “Lean start up”. My personal association to “Lean” is efficient and low cost from previous courses. However as the article linked below suggests, it is about hypothesis driven development and much more iterative to reach results quickly. Thus instead of following a pre-defined and very thorough list of things to check off, you have an idea of something that might be good and you try to procuring a testable prototype as quickly as possible. Then you learn from that. I believe in several advantages to this:

• Quick customer response
• Realise major apparent flaws in your idea quickly
• Motivates for future development
• Low cash-intensity and thus lower risk
• et.c.

This concept is something that I will take with me from this course in my future entrepreneurial endeavours.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lean-business-model-cultural-differences-short-cavid-nadirov?trk=hp-feed-article-title-like

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?

I wrote a post earlier about how I thought that the idea that Sophie Lööb presented about a refugee linkage platform would be great. I today read this article that made me think about it again.

http://www.dn.se/ekonomi/jobb-karriar/experimentet-natdelningar-ska-ge-jobb-pa-en-manad/

The plattform, Nätverkskollen, allows you to post that you want a job and spread it into your different networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter et.c.). The idea lets you specify your competences in a predefined framework that makes searching easy. Using that concept, you could easily link up refugees that don’t speak Swedish by simply allowing Syrian translation of your input. Thoughts on that?

Another, perhaps simpler, idea would be to create a Facebook group or LinkedIn group for refugees as to concentrate employers and employees that are relevant to this. Thoughts?

During our video presentation pitch about uniting all tet communication under one unified platform, we got some insightful feedback from the guest lecturer. The feedback was regarding how social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack et.c. are extremely dependant on users using their websites. This is because of several different reasons:

• Selling advertising – can sell it much more expensive/higher volume if there are a lot of users constantly on the site
• Overall valuation – the more people that use the website, the higher the platform is valued

So the point of this feedback was, if you try to redirect traffic from platforms that are dependent on that traffic, you are likely to reach considerable resistance. I totally agree with this and it is something that our group did not think about.

On that note, check out this article about a start up who want to unify news regarding celebrities. They should run in to the same problem.

http://breakit.se/artikel/1500/kompisganget-som-hjalper-dig-att-fa-annu-battre-koll-pa-kandisarna

From the really interesting lecture about space tourism I am sure some of you managed to catch the mention of an extremely efficient shower. Anyways, I did and managed to find this company http://orbital-systems.com founded by a guy from Lund. The company produces amazing technology that reduces wateruse by 80% and energyuse by 90%. A very interesting entrepreneurial approach to lean from the space industry and apply in a completely different business.

We have talked a lot about small and medium sized entrepreneurs. Here is a very interesting article about the big ones. The article depicts the story of Jack Ma, Elon Musk amongst others on their road to success.

https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/09/how-do-leading-entrepreneurs-spot-opportunities/?utm_content=bufferf48d0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

It is interesting to see their path as it is quite a bit longer than smaller and medium sized entrepreneurs.

I have had one constant question during these first 3 lectures/seminars. Namely “What about the entrepreneurs that don’t break new ground? The ones that don’t sell their start up to google for 100 $ million.”

The definition of an entrepreneur is as follows:

“An individual who, rather than working as an employee, runs a small business and assumes all the risk and reward of a given business venture, idea, or good or service offered for sale. The entrepreneur is commonly seen as a business leader and innovator of new ideas and business processes.”

So yes, “commonly an innovator of new ideas”. However according to the broad definition, a barber is also an entrepreneur. Not a very innovative one, but non the less an entrepreneur. Regardless on what you wish to achieve, these “unsexy entrepreneurs” are often discarded in the discussion of entrepreneurship.

A start up here from KTH have realised that you can entrepreneur and innovate within areas which are to the naked eye boring. The start up’s core business idea is to start business in areas where no one is currently innovating and move in with business ideas and methods that will conquer the market. An example of their output so far: http://grasbolaget.se. With this company, they simply sell grass and plant it. That’s it. But with a much more standardised working process and better digital marketing they are in a good position to conquer market shares and make profit. Who would have thought you could entrepreneur in selling grass?

Just something I wanted to throw out there. Anyone want to start selling paint? 😉