Innovation Room

“As Washington maneuvers on skilled immigration reform, the United States is losing its near-monopoly on entrepreneurship by forcing its educated Indian and Chinese immigrants to return home.” - Eric Schurenberg

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“By 1977, as Jobs and Wozniak were frenzied, taking orders for the Apple I and looking for venture capital as they developed the Apple II, the men brought on investor Mike Markkula into the business. In addition to injecting $250,000 into the company and becoming a third partner, Markkula penned “The Apple Marketing Philosophy,” a three-point call to action that has served the company well. It can also be an example for other startup businesses.” - Jason Fell

Markkula’s three point call of action “Apple Marketing Philosophy”:

1. Empathy
2. Focus
3. Impute

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1. Not thinking through the practicalities of executing an idea.
2. Thinking of the investment process as money only.
3. Overlooking the chemistry of the team. 
4. Having a bad or non-existent employee ownership scheme.
5. Not having a business plan.
6. Lacking knowledge about revenue and cost streams.  
7. Having founders who are not well-rounded. 
8. Simply copying an idea that works abroad.
9. Not thinking big enough. 

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1. Experts are clueless.
2. Customers cannot tell you what they need. (Check out my Malcolm Gladwell post!)
3. Jump to the next curve.
4. The biggest challenges beget best work.
5. Design counts.
6. You can’t go wrong with big graphics and big fonts
7. Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence.
8. “Value” is different from “price”.
9. A players hire A+ players.
10. Real CEOs demo.
11. Real CEOs ship.
12. Marketing boils down to providing unique value.

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“I was worth over $1,000,000 when I was 23, and over $10,000,000 when I was 24, and over $100,000,000 when I was 25, and it wasn’t that important because I never did it for the money.” - Steve Jobs

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“The facts are sobering: the majority of small businesses fail within five years of starting up. While there are many reasons that businesses fail, including some that have nothing to do with an owner’s skills, it’s also possible that many of those same businesses collapsed simply because they couldn’t get enough customers to buy their product or service. In other words, the owners founded their business on a strategy of “build it and they will come” where, unfortunately, the customers never came. In fact, a recent study undertaken by the Blackbox seed accelerator found that many tech start-ups failed because they focused more on their product than on their potential customers.” - Darren Dahl 

Taken from Darren Dahl’s article, these are some of the questions Victor Kwegyir (business consultant, business motivational speaker and author) suggests to begin with:

• Is this product or service I have in mind going to satisfy a market need?
• Who are my potential customers, and where can they be found?
• What competition is out there? Is it direct or indirect, local, national, or international?
• How distinct is my product from what is being offered by the competition?
• Can the product stand the test of changing trends or take advantage of it before it dies out?
• Does the law of the land allow for such a business to be established?
• At what prices are consumers prepared to buy my product, and can I make any profit at any stage?

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