InnovationCreation

The end of the year is here and I am, like many of you, looking at the cross over to 2009 and 2010. To help you refresh and upgrade, here are my interesting resource picks to help refresh (re-boot?) (upgrade?).

• Marketing Over Coffee. Christopher S. Penn and John Wall provide insight and usable tools for marketing in the connected digital world. Check out the The Twitter Power Guide eBook and an audio Q&A session from a Seth Godin presentation on his book Tribes.
• Chris Brogan. Chris has insight on the community and social media "space". Hire Chris!. Actually, he said you could hire him or read his blog and get the same info for free!
• Read E-Myth. Michael Gerber wrote about being in your business more than 20 years. Great practical reading and coaching for your business.
• Edward Tufte on design. Edward Tufte, well known professor on design, has a series of books and courses that provide insight on design. He also has a very resourceful forum on his web site; check out the recent conversations on election results/data.
• Trends, everyone wants to be on the front of trends. While by no means the best or first, TrendWatching.com has material that can help provide inspiration and tickle your deep thoughts on the coming future. Good tip: Know why you are tracking trends. "Trend spotting can be fun. Makes you feel in the now and in the know. But that alone is not necessarily going to make you or your company more money. The way we see it, in a nutshell, is that tracking consumer trends is one way (and there are many ways!) to gain inspiration, helping you dream up profitable new goods, services and experiences for (and with) your customers. So trend watching should ultimately lead to profitable innovation."
• Check out Springwise for new business ideas. Springwise scans the globe for the most promising business ventures, ideas and concepts that are ready for regional or international adaptation, expansion, partnering, investments or cooperation. They ferociously track more than 400 global offline and online business resources, as well as taking to the streets of world cities, digital cameras at hand.
• Folio...Find out what the world of the print media (magazine and newspaper) is doing. Yes, you will see info on layoffs and sell-offs in the print industry. But you will also see what those companies are trying to do. It was via Folio that I discovered the blog post by Jessica DaSilva, at the time an intern at the The Tampa Tribune. She wrote a post about the Tampa Tribune's shift in strategy and the message to the staff “People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add on to The Tampa Tribune,” editor in chief Janet Coats said. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add on to TBO.”

Have a Happy New Year!

Labels: business, culture, deep thought, design, environment, experience, new media, social media, startup, trends

It is way better to get a "Yes" or a "No" from a client or customer than it is to get a maybe. I personally have been on both sides of this and understand the issue of making a decision and trying to avoid risk.

In my current roll I am helping bring new ways to make information sharable and available via podcasts (SwineCast being an example). This is a "new" way to share stories; "new" in the sense that technology (sharing of content via RSS feeds, time shifted conversations via podcasts) is making it easier to produce a show and share it widely.

So when I heard (I use Audible to listen to books) this bit from Seth Godin's Small is the New Big about getting people to say yes or no, not maybe, I was all behind what he shared. It is better to get a yes or a no than a maybe. Think about those times when you suggested an idea and a "decision" maker said "maybe". Think about those times when you asked someone out and they responded with a "maybe" answer ("I'm busy this week" or "I have a lot of things to do").

Here is the short clip (about 10 min) from Small is the New Big that talks about one of Seth's sales people working to get a senior leader to step forward and make a decision.

So step up, be bold, get out there, make a decision!

Double click Play button below to listen to audio on line.



To download an MP3 version to your desktop, right click on link below and save to your local computer.
Short Seth Godin: "Small is the New Big" audio clip.

Labels: marketing, risk, startup

There is great interest in Indiana on life sciences. Over the last five (or more?) years there have been many local groups formed (Indiana Health Indutries Forum, BioCrossroads, Indiana Biomedical Entrepreneur's Network, Indiana Life Sciences Initiative ) and some VC / grant money (21st Century Fund, Indiana Seed Fund, more...) raised to capitalize on hidden / latent resources and talent within the state's life sciences hot spots.



As part of the next phase in creating life sciences companies in Indiana there are educational resources being applied to help raise awareness and interest in starting companies within the research community. In Indianapolis this means the Indiana University School of Medicine and other schools/departments at IUPUI.



Recently there was a seminar series on IUPUI's campus on starting a life sciences company. Krieg Devault, an Indianapolis law firm, had a panel present information to IUPUI students, staff, and faculty on company legal structures, intellectual property, and venture capital. Good intentions possibly bored to death the audience... Yes, it is important to know about company structure (LLC vs S Corp vs C corp) and intellectual property. But these are dry topics at best and are not really the core of starting a company.



The real core of starting a company is: what is the product, how do I develop it to a product that can sell, who is going to buy it, and how to I find those people interested in buying my product? With out a product idea and an understandting of how to advance that product then corporate structure and patents on research techniques do not a company make.



How to help those really interested? Gather up a few people really interested in taking an idea to market, coach them regularly, give them some cash to get things done, and work through the idea development to product development.



One great model is Y Combinator. Paul Graham formed Y Combinator after selling Viaweb to Yahoo! His goal was to create a whole new, fresh approach to turning ideas into products by investing in small teams with low dollars and bringing great, smart people together for several months in a campus setting to build out multiple ideas. Sure, there was venture capital and legal structures were setup plus intellectual property was created (and protected). But the core of the Y Combinator purpose is to bring people together to percolate and filter out the ideas to usable products.



Can we create idea teams or idea camps that form around possible marketable ideas to prototype, explore, refine, weed out, and advance ideas to real things? What is needed?

• Space: idea teams need a space to mess around with their ideas and a place to tinker. Nothing big but it needs to be theirs for a few months.



• Small funds (initially $1,000 to $5,000). Money to help get stupid stuff, things to get ideas moving, prototyping tools, etc. More on money below.



• Coaches to poke and prod. Cheerleaders to encourage. There is always a need for optimists and idealists. And people that are able to bring out the left turn of an idea.



• Carrots to pull people out of their shell of research. Indiana is a conservative state when it comes to "risk" and "taking a chance". Y Combinator lives in communities where starting a company on a whim of an idea is normal. Indiana is not that place so there is a need to intice the hesitant.



• Action and speed. Take idea, prototype it, experiment on product, and get to a decision point (kill or move on) as quick as possible. Not every idea will work and not everyone is cutout to start companies. This needs to be discovered soonest and move on.

Small note on money: Yes, VC money is needed at some point but within a university research environment there is a need for small dollar funding to help move lab research to a possibility of a viable product. Examples include spending small dollars on market research and business plans, product development, mock-ups, prototypes, etc. Not all ideas are suited to being commercial products but there is no need to seek large scale dollars to discover this.

Labels: ideas, innovation, pipeline, startup

So you want to leave Lilly... Here is my list of things to know before doing that.

• Family support is important! This usually means being able to provide basics things like health insurance, money to buy food, making the house payments, etc. It also means helping your family understand why you leaving Lilly, a place you may have been with for many years, is important to you.
• Be honest with your reasons for leaving. The grass is not always greener "out there".
  
• Have several plans in play. If you are leaving with a job already in hand, great! If it means leaving with several startup ideas being developed, great! Don't leave to just quit and get away. Planning helps.
• Be flexible. Things may not pan out. Plan B or C may be needed. Don't stick to a plan if the plan is not working; adjust and move forward.
  
• Who you going to call (think theme from Ghost Busters here)? Nothing you do can be done alone, period. You will need the help of many people. Getting a job, developing an idea, finding resources... They all require some help from someone else. Knowing who to call before you need to call helps. This would also be called "build your network". Some local (central Indiana) networks to join: Women & Hi Tech, IBEN, IHIF, TechPoint, Smaller Indiana. Each of these groups have many smaller sub groups that will certainly have something of interest to you.
• Who you going to call, part 2... Many others have left Lilly and done well. Seek them out to learn their story.
  
• Be persistent. Getting people's attention is always difficult. You need to be persistent and committed.
• Let go of the culture of Lilly as soon as you can. This one is a hard one to do. You need to operate as your own person, not an extension of what you were while at Lilly. The longer you were at Lilly the harder this might be.
  
• When you leave, stay connected to Lilly... Huh??? Yes, many of the connection you made at Lilly while there are still connections to maintain and develop. Lilly may become your customer, may be a source of ideas, or may be a place to work in the future! Lilly even started a group for those that had left Lilly, the Lilly Alumni Network, to help maintain your connection.
  

I used to work for Eli Lilly, first as a contractor then as an employee from January 2000 to March of 2006. Working at Lilly provided lots of exposure on how organizations work, access to many people, and venues to discover and participate in new ideas.

I started at Lilly in the law division, helping support product liability litigation. Over the course of my time at Lilly I was loaned out to the Indiana Information Technology Association (INITA, now part of TechPoint) to lead the careesINsite program, went in to the depths FDA regulation and computer systems validation implementations, and I helped create innovation via the e.Lilly organization.

e.Lilly is where I discovered that I really wanted to pursue ideas that were not core to Lilly's business. I did not consider myself a Lilly lifer (i.e.; I did not plan to retire from Lilly). I knew I wanted to start a company and and the many projects at e.Lilly were input to helping me understand what was involved and what the potentials were.

Here are a sample of several of the companies started at e.Lilly: InnoCentive.com, YourEncore, Scienteur, Coalesix, maaguzi, Chorus, Seriousity, Collaborative Drug Discovery, and Indigo Biosystems. I was also exposed to discussion and project design around information markets (NewsFutures), internal wikis, effects of people networks, application of Wisdom of Crowds, and podcasting.

After about 2.5 years at e.Lilly, Alph Bingham (e.Lilly's VP), announced his retirement and by the fall of 2005 new management was running e.Lilly. The philosophy and approach of e.Lilly changed and I realized that it was no longer the warm, cozy home that I enjoyed. This was the time to launch out and take on some ideas to develop.

I had some contacts, some ideas, and I put in place the steps to leave by March of 2006. My family was supportive of me leaving and starting a company so in March of 2006 I started full time on developing an innovation consulting company. Using what I learned while at e.Lilly, careersINsite, and my five years as a volunteer with the National Center for Creativity (helping kids with creativity, problems solving, and team building), I set out building InnovationCreation. It took perseverance, boldness, luck, and regular practice to get clients. Starting a small business has many hurdles but I felt I was prepared to tackle them.

Along the way I had the opportunity to develop one of the ideas started at e.Lilly as a stand alone company. The idea experimented at e.Lilly was utilizing the internet and iPods to deliver relevant information to swine vets and large swine production farm managers. In mid 2006 I helped form Truffle Media Networks to commercialize the idea. By the end of 2006 I felt that Truffle Media Networks would be better suited to me spending 100% of my time on. So I slowed down the InnovationCreation development and concentrated on Truffle.

Here it is April 2008 and I am still running both companies and both are paying well enough to continue my current path. Share your story or your three key points on leaving Lilly. Let's have lunch or coffee!

Labels: innovation, lilly, startup