How To Put Idea To Implementation

WPI Venture Forum is a really extraordinary activity for our School of Business students. The topic of this Venture Form is “An idea, what’s next?” The main speech is provided by Prof. Sturtevant from MIT, who is a co-founder at project 11. He had many practical experiences turning ideas into realities. I am very impressed by his elaboration of the steps an entrepreneur should take after generating an idea:

i.                     Have hope

ii.                   Turn hope into evidence

iii.                  Build a business model canvas

iv.                 Generate a value flow model, and make a list of assumptions

v.                   Make hypotheses of your plan

vi.                 Test and measure the hypotheses

vii.                Keep track of the hard questions

The most impressive part of his keynote is the hypotheses part – he spent quarter of his time on this section. Prof. Sturtevant took four companies as examples; they are PACT, Zagster, and Fashion Project. He illustrated how those companies made hypotheses for their business plan and assumptions as well as the way they tested the hypotheses. Those real cases are really helpful for further understanding of how to turn a business idea into real.

Following the lecture, there was a case illustration presented by InfoBionic. It is a newly founded medical device company. Moreover, the medical device manufactured by this company also related to IT field – they also develop information technology, but focus on healthcare. InfoBionic invent three main products for patients to monitor their arrhythmia through using could technology. This characteristic makes the company complicated and hard to identify the value proposition at first place. However, the bright side is that the gap that InfoBionic filled is innovative and unprecedented.

Those keynote and case illustration remind me of one of the courses I took last year, which was called ETR500. We used the text book “Entrepreneurship for Scientists and Engineers”. This course elaborated how to successfully start up a business for entrepreneurs, especially in technology field. From what I have heard and read, applying for a patent is one of the most important steps during doing a new business. Also, someone asked how to do the initial research for a new business, and one of the guest speakers mentioned that networking is very important – since it can bring you to a larger audience once you know some people. In my point of view, the events such as WPI Venture Forum are great ways for us to networking and know more business people.

Impact of Internet for Economic Value and Social Value

“Economic Value of the Advertising-Supported Internet Ecosystem” is a very detailed report that is too long for me to read, especially in the electronic format, so that it almost cost me a day to read through it. After reading this report, I was astonished by how great impact the internet has to the ecosystem of business. This is a report very deeply analyzed the economic even social changes that were brought by internet. Also, the study provides some insights for the future trend of internet. There are huge amounts of data in this report which is gathered from U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Those data is so comprehensive to include all industries and businesses related to the internet.

Internet is a very profound science, which is supported by many elements. In order to connect to the internet, hardware such as servers, routers, broadband and computer is essential. Apart from the hardware, software also plays an important role. Moreover, the purpose of internet should be seriously considered; otherwise, no one will use the internet. I am very impressed by the CREC (Center for Research in Electronic Commerce) Model of the Internet Ecosystem. The whole study is organized throughout the four layers in that model – internet infrastructure layer, internet applications layer, internet intermediary layer, and internet commerce layer. The authors collected hundreds of data to dig inside those four layers. From my understanding, infrastructure here refers to the hardware while the application is all about the software. Similarly, intermediary means consumer support, and commerce here is close to the consumer services.

During reading the study, there are two things that were out of my expectations. The first thing is that although each layer of internet ecosystem creates thousands of jobs and generates millions of revenues, it still benefits people more from the minor layers below those four layers. The companies grew fastest is not the ones like Facebook or Twitter, but the ones that support for those famous firms. This finding is beyond my imagination, because all I can think of is that the internet must drive the usage of the high-profile brands, however, I have not concerned those behind the leading companies.

Another thing about internet that surprised me from the data that provided by this report is that the number of employment for infrastructure is far more than the application in 2011, which is totally opposite to the situation in 2007. As the report suggested in chapter 4, the estimation of the employment is conservative, and a large part of them are part-time workers, or even under-employed. There are few large companies like Microsoft and Symantec Corporation. Compared with application, because there are more branches under infrastructure, companies involved in different fields in hardware (including internet access, cable providers, and mobile networks, etc.) appear to be a lot more than the software companies. Hence, the number of employment is increasing dramatically recent years.

Through the facts and data in this study, it is not hard to see that internet is a so powerful technology that creates thousands of jobs and huge amount of revenues. There are so many benefits for using internet – i) the cost is low, ii) it is easy to do the business with people around the world, iii) it enhances creativity and entrepreneurship, iv) it is a perfect way for social activity, v) it drives the usage of mobile and tablets. The most important part is, while internet increases the economic value of business, it also stimulates the social value for people. Meanwhile, social value again drives the economic value. I believe the future of internet ecosystem will not be only limited on computer, tablets, or mobile phones – I even heard about the “internet of things”.

 

Reference: John Deighton & Leora D. Kornfeld, Economic Value of the Advertising-Supported Internet Ecosystem

http://www.iab.net/media/file/iab_Report_September-24-2012_4clr_v1.pdf

The Usage of QR Code – Practical Life and Marketing Application

I have to admit that I am not aware of the popularity of QR code after I read the article. I have heard about the QR code about couple of years ago when I was in China. Many products now are using QR code together with barcode. However, when I go shopping, I still scan the barcode more often than QR code. This makes me wonder why QR code is different from barcode. Thus, I looked up the difference between QR code and barcode on Google. The QR code is the short form for quick response code, which can be read faster and contains larger storage capacity than the barcode. Also, because barcode is a single dimensional code, it only can be scanned on a particular reader (the one we often see in the supermarket). On the contrary, since QR code is a 2-demensional digital image, it can be easily read by any camera-equipped smartphone. There is another sort of code called RFID (radio frequency identification), which is more common in B2B than B2C.

Customer side:

Due to the ease of use, QR code is more close to our practical life than the barcode – we can use it by ourselves. The QR code I used most recently is on WeChat – I have a foreign friend whose name is hard to spell, thus, I asked him to show his QR code, which is much easier for me to add him on my list. Also, I remember last month when I decided to go to Canada for my summer holiday, I bought the e-tickets for my flight, which had a unique QR code on my confirm letter. Every time I can the QR code, I can get my fight number and my e-ticket on the kiosk fast and easily – I do not need to wait in a long queue just for the purpose of obtaining my tickets. Although I may not notice, there are a lot of such examples in my daily life.

As Dave mentioned in his article “QR Code Statistics,” the percentage of scanning QR code at home is the highest. Together with the percentage of the location of QR cade, and the demographic information, it shows that most of male customers whose age is between 18 and 34 prefer to scan the QR code at home in a printed magazine or newspaper, or on the product packaging. Those suggest that the customers nowadays tend to use and read QR code for personal use, especially for the product information.

Company side:

The numbers and percentages of QR code users in “QR Code Statistics” not only display the characteristics of the customers, but also expose the opportunities for business people. QR code is particularly great for marketing – both for generating brand awareness, and reinforcing or retaining the existing customers. For example, a company can print the QR code on the leaflets or brochures and market that if customers scan the QR code on that paper, they will gain a coupon for the company’s product. It is more convenient and faster for customers to do so, because they do not need to type and search the company’s information manually anymore.

In sum, QR code as a kind of emerging technology is more close to the end consumers than barcode or RFID. Because of its ease of use, it will be more widely used in the future. After all, user experience is all about simplicity.
 

Reference: Dave Chaffey, QR Code Statistics

http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/qr-code-marketing/qr-codes-location-demographic-statistics/