Diversity MBA Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 55) OUTLOOK FOR ENTREPRENEURS complementary products or services. Your goal is to find the customer values of today, then re-evaluate traditional outdated models and their old values. Are you after a market that is small enough that larger competitors aren’t already going after it, and big enough so that if you’re successful, you can reach critical mass and profitability? Once you’re on to something, you can start paddling in the open waters. So how can you start thinking like a great innovator? First, you must be versed on what are the latest innovations. The success elite are lifelong learners. Talk to your customers or potential markets and ask what they want. Consumer-centric innovation may be the most powerful way to raise a company’s innovation success rate because you’re producing exactly what your customer wants. Get fresh eyes Think big, start small Most entrepreneurs never think outside the box If you’re going to change the world, you cannot because they’re trapped under their own self-created do it with boring products or services. In the Art of glass ceiling. The busy daily grind with its built-in the Start, Guy Kawasaki suggests, “Your goal is to stress pollutes their natural catalyze passion…the only creativity. Take the time to reresult that should offend (and evaluate your goals with some scare) you is lack of interest.” fresh perspectives. He also recommends you not Start by switching roles. This doing it alone. Most successful is a good way to learn and companies are started and understand what’s out there or become successful with at in there. If you’re a manager, least two “soul-mates.” become an employee. If you’re Your positioning and mesthe product manager, become saging should be simple, elethe product. Change your pergant, and deep. It must be easy spective. This bit of role-playenough that your grandmother ing can allow you to find new would understand it, and innovative ways to look at the intuitive enough for a fifth same problem, and find a grader to figure out. If your solution you never thought business model cannot be existed before. described in less than 10 Stuck with a creative words, start over until it can. block? Try beginning your Move swiftly day with Starbucks in one Busyness doesn’t create hand and a pen in the other. business. Don’t spend all your Peter Nguyen Build a daily routine braintime trying to find the perfect storming new ideas first thing each morning to get business model and the perfect your creative mojo going. Before the hectic day big idea. Marketing guru Seth Godin, discusses this starts is when you’re most creative and your mind in his book, The Big Moo: Stop trying to be perfect, is less cluttered and strained. and start being remarkable. Your initial goal isn’t for Swim in the blue ocean perfection. It just needs to be attractive to a large In the groundbreaking book Blue Ocean Strategy, group of people. authors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne say that Most businesspeople would suggest that you must a major focus should be on creating competitor-free understand your market and product very well, then market space. Unlike “red oceans,” which are well go as fast as you can. Make as many mistakes early explored and crowded, “blue oceans” represent opporon and react quickly. This will be your best way to be tunity for highly profitable growth. able to compete with the business giants. Take Cirque du Soleil, for example. It took an old The revolution of forward-thinking innovators has just circus model, which catered toward middle-class famistarted. The race to build creative, innovative companies lies, and created a phenomena focused entirely on an will be decided by who will choose to start and who will upper class Broadway-type audience. Cirque du Soleil finish strong. Perhaps one day, more companies will be eliminated the cotton candy and expensive circus anileaving a legacy after all. ■ mals. Instead, it rented high-class venues and crafted a themed storyline underlining its astounding acrobats and performers. It was able to reconstruct the Peter Nguyen is a marketing consultant and entrepremarket boundaries for an aged circus industry and has neur based in St. Petersburg, FL. since entertained over 70 million people. Start looking across time, alternative industries, or 55 M arch 2008 Top 5 0 Co m p ani e s
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