The Triple Crown

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For everybody who missed today’s lecture. It was held by entrepreneur, teacher, author (and I am sure more 🙂 ) Gregg Vanourek. First of all, it was a great lecture and the style of presenting was very inspiring and made you really pay attention.

The first part of the lecture dealt with “entrepreneurship” and “start-ups” in general which was followed by a case study. Groups of 4-6 students had to decide what a start-up should do when confronted with the problem that an investor is about to sign a contract for a huge investment when at the last minute the CEO decides that the revenue model of the start-up has to be changed. The options were:

  1. to tell the truth and put the survival of the Company in jeopardy
  2. to tell the investor later after the new model has proved to produce results
  3. to not tell him/her at all and hope that it will remain a secret and the investor will not care as long as results are produced.

Surprisingly enough most groups came up with the same answer, opting for alternative 1 because they did not want to hurt the reputation of the firm, were sure the investor would find out, which would be followed by legal punishments and/or  argued that since the investor decided to invest in a start-up he/she would know the difficulties involved and therefore understand the necessary change.

Afterwards we were given a framework to tackle such difficult questions that revolve around leadership. In his book Gregg Vanourek introduces the principle of the Triple Crown, which, actually, is a horse race metaphor for the most elusive trophy in the world. According to the principle all businesses or decisions should strive to fulfill the criteria of being efficient, ethical, and enduring. Additionally we were provided with 5 principles of leadership being: Head & Heart, The Colors, Steel and Velvet, Steward, Alignment.

According to the framework the previous business decision was simple, since the one characteristic that comes before all others when there arises a problem of trade-off between the three criteria is that your decisions have to be ethical, thus only allowing for telling the truth to the investor. However there seems to be , like for so many business decisions, no absolutely correct answer to that problem. What do you think about that situation?

Returning to the book about the Triple Crown I will definetely read it as soon as I am put into a situation that requires leadership qualities, since I have never taken any courses related to the subject.

At the end I would like to invite everybody to post thoughts, additions or different views on today’s lecture and leadership in general.

#L.Boldin  #Dreamgineering

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Social entrepreneurship Forum (Stockhom)

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For those who intrested in social enterperinship, I strongly recommed this Social entrepreneurship Forum, a proud partner to Start-up Day, to you.

Offical site: http://se-forum.se/
They hold SE Outreach Accelerator in Stockhom and Nairobi, Innovation Labs and other intresting events frequently. Mostly, people are free to attend, and be a member is just 100SEK.
There are lots of defintion of Social entrepreneur, and my own understanding is, they are people  who want to start a business mainly aim to solving social issue instead of earning money.

Even if you are not intrested in what is social entrepreneurship, I also recommend you to learn basic Corporation Social Responsibility in order to be a good entreprener.

One more: Ashoka https://www.ashoka.org/ (the largest SE supporter/platform in the world)

 

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Presentate user experience(by a PowerPoint fan)

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My background: I am a PowerPoint fan from middle school. I like designing the temple on my own according to the theme of the presentation. And my favorite part is animation and always try to make it activate the presentation and add interaction with the audience. In order to make creative PowerPoint each time, I learnt a lot from relevant online forum and discussing with others.

User Experience: After experiencing the Presentate for 20 minutes, I found it to be a simplified online PowerPoint with some well design templates. I do appreciate your venture a lot, but here I just post what I thought could be meaningful to you. And personally I really expect what paid service you will provide latter. Here is my concern to the 5 titles on the Presentate homepage: 捕获 捕获2  

1. The digital handout that works great for anyone, anywhere. Nowadays, there are lots of existing platform to share the slice that can also works great for anyone, anywhere. In addition, they are not only online slides editor, but also can upload and download document which is the function Presentate don’t have. Such as the Slide share http://www.slideshare.net/ Google docs, Onedrive powerpoint etc.

2. Spend less time making presentations,and more time honing your message. How about there are thousands of template online for people to make powerpoint.

3. Research. Ideas. Data. And a little bit of magic.How about if Microsoft upload their template’s design.

4. The best of both worlds The is not hard to view the “note” of the slide as the presenter while the audience see the full screen just by setting the display model

5. Present from any computer It is easy to share things online at present, but we still need the file in our compter or Those are my concern to each point, and I know I didn’t consider combining all the feature together but I believe Microsoft PowerPoint have almost all the function Present has so far. From the design and time consuming part, there are thousands of free well-designed powerpoint template on line for me to choice.

Other concern:

  • How about I don’t want to share the slides to public?
  • How about the place I make presentation cannot reach the internet?
  • I agree with the “four objects”principle, but why there is no “picture”.
  • Once I change the background picture, it no longer fit the words design anymore, even you add the feature to edit the format, colour and size of the words, I don’t know the best and easier way to make it fit this slides if I were a poor designer.

My expectation:

  • vectorgraph from the cloud
  • Animation function
  • Diagram function
  • limited publish
  • Private customized design as a chargeable item
  • As you mentioned “you won’t have to learn any new tricks”,and keep it as simple as possible. I still expect more magic new function that we haven’t experienced on PowerPoint.
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Force Majeure and a new scenario

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During our last exercise with ME2603 we discussed responsibility and profit distribution in a business.

What happens to a business when it is affected by “the will of God”; Force Majeure?

First off, what is the will of God? The best translation I can come up with is something that is out of our control. It is an independent scenario, where no one can be blamed for the consequences. This could be a hurricane, snowstorm, earthquake or some other large, independent and in some sense unpredictable event.

An example:

————————————————————————————-

I have purchased a train ticket bound south from SJ (swedish railways) for this christmas. In SJ’s purchasing conditions it is stated that if a train is delayed by 30 min when arriving, then I am eligible for a 50 % refund. If it is over 60 min late, 100 % refund. But this is also dependent of force majeure.

Sadly, someone jumps in front of a train at T-centralen, 5 min before my departure and there is a pile-up; my train can’t leave.

In the end, my train is delayed by 65 min, but SJ claims that I am not eligible for a refund due to the situation being force majeure; they could not have prevented this.

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The scenario presented in the exercise was that a friend of mine took care of my business for a day, there was a storm, everything was destroyed and now I have a business I can’t make any money from. Also, I am probably knee-deep in debt because I have invested in inventory and machines.

This storm was so nasty, that there was nothing that my friend could do to prevent it causing damage to my business. Should he be held responsible for this? Would the outcome have been different if it was I in the store that day and not my friend? I don’t think that it would.

Lets assume that there is a low probability for storms like this, but that I have established my business in an area where this is known to happen. If this was the case, then shouldn’t I have included this in my risk analysis prior to starting my business and prior to setting the price on my orange juice?

It would mean that I already get paid for this low probability risk each time I sell a cup of orange juice, and therefore I shouldn’t hold my friend accountable for the damage that was caused to my business when I was out during the day.

What could be discussed is whether my friend should be held responsible for the damage or not, if he could have prevented it. How about this:

My friend closes the store for the day because I am busy elsewhere. He leaves a window open, by mistake of course, and it rains all night. When I open up the store the next day, I find that my floor is water-damaged and I will need to close the store for the next 2 weeks to get the issue taken care of. The loss of profit is $1000 and the reparation will cost $1500.

Lets assume that the reparation isn’t covered by insurance, because they claim it is my business’ fault (“drulle” in Swedish?). Should I hold my friend responsible and let him pay for 2 weeks lost profits and the costs of reparation? Should he be accountable for the loss of profit, only, or perhaps the reparation?

Please, if you have any thoughts about this, write in the comment section below!

/Ludwig Widén

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IMBATECH, Sthlm Tech Fest and pitching

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Hello world!

IMBATECH is here to conquer the world, move fast and break things! We consist of introverts and extroverts, thinkers and talkers, idea generators and doers, and we are super excited to ignite our entrepreneurial spirits!

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Our first step of this journey was visiting Sthlm Tech Fest – the startup event of the year, hosting new entrepreneurs on the tech arena, CEOs of global success stories as well as investors looking for the next big thing.

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Hundreds of new startups had invested in a booth on this fair, each and every one of them showing a child-like enthusiasm for their product (mostly mobile applications) when getting attention from visitors, no matter whether you were a million dollar investor, a competitor or, just as us, KTH students looking for inspiration.

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We spent most of the day in the presentation hall. Different topics were dealt with during the day – “Future of Games” and “CSR” were among our favorites. For every topic we got to see ~5 startup founders presenting their idea, and afterwards they got feedback on their idea as well as their pitch by a panel consisting of successful and reputable people from the industry. After seeing almost 30 pitches during the day, our favorite pitcher turned out to be Hjalmar Winbladh from Wrapp. Here is some advice, inspired by his nearly flawless pitch:

  • Focus on the problem, the itch, and how your idea will solve this. A popular concept was to focus on a person that would use their application. When Hjalmar presented the Wrapp application, an app which would give you more benefits as a customer, the pitch started with “This is Lisa, and she loves shopping clothes and books”. Afterwards we got to see a sequence of pictures of Lisa shopping. Among other things, we got to see her buying a book at Akademibokhandeln, which generated an offer in her app saying “Do you want to read your book while enjoying a coffee at Espresso House for 50% off?” Seeing Lisa using this app planted the idea in our heads that this would increase our own shopping experiences as well.
  • Compare your idea to success stories. Hjalmar showed us a 2×2 matrix including Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Wrapp, claiming that Wrapp was for your consuming network what the others were for social and professional networks. When he explained this to us in such a comprehensible way, we wanted to invest straight away!

This was a memorable day for us. What we will remember the most was the ambience of this startup sphere, where everyone is inspired by each other and sharing is caring. Hopefully, we will end up here as well in a foreseeable future.

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Old people, Kickstarter and potato salad

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potatosalad

After two hours of idea generation, which have been inspired by Kickstarter and the problems and pains of old people, we discovered that you can almost make any idea profitable if it’s well executed. If this potato salad got 55,492 dollars of pledges on Kickstarter, anything is possible!

/Marina Vitez, Sofia Feychting, Martin Listén, Katarina Allmér and Emma Bednarcik

 

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Key Notion

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You can stop holding your breath, people! Key Notion is here!

We’ve been putting off blogging, since we didn’t want to post something that only the lecturer was interested in reading, since blogging, as opposed to most other assignments, is aimed at the public!

We want to make this interesting and fun for everyone, while we explore the world of entrepreneurship through blogging!

/Emma Bednarcik, Marina Vitez, Martin Listén, Katarina Allmér and Sofia Feychting

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Be a now-ist

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Very interesting talk from Joi Ito about how entrepreneurs should behave in the present industries. Every body should have at look on this one.
This should be a source of inspiration for the projects.

#ME2603 #firstpost #helloeverybody #iambloging

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Team Skapa FTW

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Hi guys,

We are team Skapa, a young and vibrant group of future entrepeneurs and millionaires. The team consists of the following:

Marco Priori  (Italy)
Jiamin Deng (China)
Leon Trang (Sweden)
Martijn Legene (Netherlands)
Daan van Vrede (Netherlands)
We’ll be posting cool stuff on this blog so keep an eye open.
#Skapa
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