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The Map of Innovation
This is the general idea that suffuses Kevin O'Connor's new book The Map of Innovation: Creating Something Out of Nothing. O'Connor might not be a household name, but he's started several businesses that have achieved recent notoriety: Flexplay, which makes DVDs that become unusable after a certain period of time, and DoubleClick, which needs no further introduction. This book synthesizes his experiences in conceiving a business idea, soliciting funding, and getting it off the ground. While we may dispute the utility of his business ideas, they have been largely successful. That means that he might have something valuable to say.
I've read a lot of books on entrepreneurship in my quest for self-employment. They're usually divided into two groups: those written prior to the Internet or only cursorily treat its affects and those created during the dot-com frenzy. The former are marginally useful since they offer some guidance on entrepreneurship even though their lack of technical considerations mitigates this usefulness. The latter are completely useless since they typically engage in strident hyperbole and grandiose pronouncements.
The Map of Innovation is different since it was written well after the dot-com hype had subsided. Even though the author built his major business, DoubleClick, during the IPO land grab, the book is remarkably free of the thinking that permeated that period. O'Connor's focus is to get a business started on fundamental principles like profitability, great employees, and broad vision. And that's exactly what a business book should target. If it seems obvious, O'Connor recognizes this: "I find that the best business books are obvious. But that isn't surprising. The fundamentals of what you have to do are so obvious that they almost always get overlooked."
The book is divided into four parts with an appendix containing DoubleClick's business plan: 1) coming up with ideas, 2) developing the best idea, 3) getting funding, and 4) hiring great staff. These, unsurprisingly, are the steps that he believes are vital to founding a successful company. Of these, I think that his idea generation chapter is the weakest one of the bunch. This isn't terribly important, though, since most people reading his book will probably have a few business ideas of their own or can come up with them readily.
My favorite part is dedicated to developing the best idea. It covers how determine the viability of your idea (how to vet it thoroughly) and how to present that idea in a business plan that will attract attention. O'Connor helpfully includes a basic outline for a business plan and then covers each item in considerable detail. I've read many books on constructing a business plan, yet I found his explanation to be the clearest and most straightforward one I've encountered.
The chapter on obtaining funding for your idea presents a series of solicitations starting with family and friends and ending with venture capital. O'Connor brushes off the problems with venture capitalists like dilution of ownership and the common occurrence of founder expulsion. He does offer some sage advice about how much money to seek and how that money should be spent. In light of his entrepreneurial history, it is unsurprising that he suggests such funding sources. His relations with venture capitalists were positive and he willingly withdrew from the corporate limelight.
Overall, the book is an excellent primer for anyone interested in creating a technology-oriented startup. It won't provide all of the information necessary for the would-be entrepreneur, but it's a good start. O'Connor tries to suggest that it would also be useful for new projects in an existing corporation but I don't buy it. The advice just doesn't apply as well. The only weak spot of the book is his Brainstorming Prioritization Technique, which is obviously a pet theory of his that he couldn't bear to pare down. It amounts to brainstorming and then picking only three to six items from the brainstorm. It is painfully obvious and an altogether common idea generation method and luckily is quickly read. The advice about venture capitalism is easily tempered by also checking out Arnold Kling's Under the Radar: Starting Your Net Business Without Venture Capital or Philip Greenspun's experience with venture capitalists.
"To be successful in the business world today, you absolutely have to incorporate some sort of technology."
Well, not necessarily to the level most would have you believe. While the exception may prove the rule, this savings and loan gets by on the bare minimum and succeeds in a highly competitive business. In short, it's the business process that matters most, not the technology behind it.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
I didn't notice that they had left.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
"The Map of Innovation: Creating Something Out of Nothing."
God School : Lesson One
I sure hope you've all read the textbook for the year, as your first homework assignment is to create something from nothing, and then watch in histeria as the inhabitants of your 'something' try to explain your actions as "The Big Bang".
If you want steady employment, read the book, because if you aren't a CEO or upper management you're expendable.
What, is that Free trade with California?
Those BASTARDS!
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
and DoubleClick, which needs no further introduction.
Is that so... I'm guessing online marketing and a quick google search suggests I'm right, but I've never heard of the company before. Has the company been guilty of some pretty dodgy acts in the past, or have they simply being annoying and intrusive to that point that most people know who they are?
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Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. -- AE
Yes, indeed, everything is different today. Technology is revolutionary stuff! Gee whiz! Just imagine what Watt, Edison, and the Wright Brothers could have done--if only they had known about technology.
It never even occurred to those pioneers that they needed to 1) come up with ideas, 2) develop the best ideas, 3) get funding, and 4) hire great staff.
And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology--don't forget the Massachusetts Institute of Technology! Now, I ask you, what would it be without technology?
Technology suffereth long, and is kind; technology envieth not; technology vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Technology never faileth. Now there abideth invention, innovation, and technology, these three; but the greatest of these is technology.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I've read a lot of books on entrepreneurship in my quest for self-employment.
What I've found with entrepreneurial types is that they aren't readers. They are somewhat fast and loose with the organizational skills, combined with a pathological dislike of working for a boss. This dislike either leads to a total train wreck or a functioning business. All this venture vulture stuff sounds too pie in the sky. Everyone is not going to be blazing in new market spaces with totally innovative products. Good old sole proprietorship in service/support/consulting can work without Venture capitalists. A book with a much smaller scope that I've found useful is Guerrilla Marketing. Has nothing to do with the computer biz. I think a dream of selling your ideas/product to a VC is great, but is not a starting point.
...it sounds like another internet shyster, who experiences oxygen debt from all the hot air, and starts believing their own hype.
You need creative people with ideas. There are two basic ways to sell a product.
1) Create a need and a product that satisfies it.
2) Solve an existing problem in a new/better way than before.
Buying computers solves neither.
Technology is only an advantage if it either lowers your cost of doing business or makes your people more productive. This might seem obvious, but for some unfathomable reason the basic wisdom of this tends to get ignored.
My company and my fiance's company are on different ends of the spectrum here. My company spends truly awsome amounts of money on technology development efforts, many of which (lately) come to absolutely nothing. Of those that actually make it into use, many won't recoup the money we spent developing them. This is a Bad Thing, especially since eventually upper management might realize we're a huge money pit and shitcan the lot of us.
My girlfriend's company, OTOH, won't spend money on tech to save their lives, even when it means they're losing money. For instance, they have a hard limit on their email inbox of about 500 megs. This is a problem since they're a publications company and pass around large files, so each person ends up spending about two hours a week managing their email -- they bill out at $135/hour, so just in her 20 person office (and there are several other offices scattered around) that's $280k lost each year in the interests of saving the couple grand a new disk array would cost.
The trouble, as far as I can tell, is that my division is run by a geek who is stuck on having the latest-and-greatest and her company is run by a short-sighted beancounter. Both are equally destructive to the bottom line in the end -- the geek can't say no to things that sound cool (tell me if this reminds you of anyone) and the beancounter can't see beyond the invoices on his desk.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Well, if you are running a front yard lemonade stand, then no. If you plan on doing business then you would want cash registers, even better, ones that interfaced to a database somewhere to help with tracking and inventory... Sure you could run a business with no technology, but what he is stating is that computer programs (read: financial and office suites) save lost time in writing ledgers, manual calculations or running to kinkos to make a fliers and other business propaganda. So you do not necessarily (sp?) need to have a rack mount server and a web presence, it would still be a good idea to have a pc with app's pertinent to your business
O'Connor... started several businesses that have achieved recent notoriety: Flexplay, which makes DVDs that become unusable after a certain period of time...
Strange, this seems more like creating nothing out of something.
However, with the services provided by the likes of O'Conner I now receive email with pictures from real women who are naked so i can see they are real women down the their spread privates. And these women not only want to meet me, but also want to perform act of unspeakable manipulations on my innocent body. And maybe they will even bring a friend!
I thank god every day for the bountiful fruits technological.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
All about things like cheap ways to get your business noticed: matchbook advertising, etc. always made think about your message.
This is my sig.
you can't have freedom for free
you won't get wise while the sleep is still in your eyes
no matter what your dream might be
Even though I'm in the finance business (and not in the computer technology industry), I feel the whole case for pumping up technology-related economic growth with better management techniques is overstated.
I don't think you can go wrong, business-wise, with a new technological concept that people or business can actually use. "Creating something out of nothing" means adding value, and value comes from utility.
I do feel that the current "can't patent concepts" ideology hampers conceptual innovation, since it's just easier and more profitable to replicate existing technologies' functionalities.
Last time I checked out Linux, X had a Start button. A large thread can be woven on how the Windows GUI concepts come from the Mac, or how that one comes from Xerox Something, but the very thought that they bothered enough to copy minor details of Windows' interface concepts is depressing. Of course, MS has done that quite a few times. In this whole conceptual innovation game, people who have actually changed the world (like the guy who came up with VisiCalc) are more often than not deprived from the immense wealth growth their idea created.
Of course, we don't want to have semi-old concepts remain half-baked while an incessant quest for the new continues. How do we solve this research incentive problem?
Man, I don't have the slightest idea. *sigh*
And I agree with you about the merit of O'Connor's business ventures. However, they've been profitable and generally successful.
I see his book as a helpful aid to thinking. Read about hiring good people or developing a business plan and then think about what I could do differently or better.
The people who are truly successful and innovative probably aren't interested right now in writing books about how they achieved their success. They're too busy to give advice in print. I bet that we'll see a raft of books from such people once they start retiring or settling down. That's what Sam Walton did. In the meantime, I'll take what I can get.
... books for nerds. Reviews that matter.
Is money that tight over there?
-Chris
"Business has changed fundamentally since the dot-com boom even if investing hasn't. To be successful in the business world today, you absolutely have to incorporate some sort of technology."
One of the most common of human fallacies is to overemphasize the events of today (losing the forest for the trees, in some sense). The success of business has always depended upon technology. The current computer/network-based IT is only just the most recent iteration of critical technologies for business.
Ask the buggy-whip producer of old. Did technology change his industry? Heck, he got wiped out when Ford popularized the assembly line, enabling him to produce cost-effective horse-less carriages.
Ask the scribe. Didn't Gutenberg's press put a lot of them out of business (not to mention change drastically the information technology scenario)?
More recently (but pre-dotcom), ask Xerox. When Japanese (and later Chinese) firms figured out reverse engineering and combined it with innovative production processes (e.g. just-in-time inventory, statistical quality control), Xerox went from being the leader to the laggard of the industry.
Examples are abundant. In one of the more humorous articles in the academic economics literature, some authors shed doubt on some sensational estimates other economists found on the productivity gains (as reflected in wages) due to the introduction of the personal computer (Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1997, pp.291-303, available online at www.jstor.org). How did they do it? They used a similar empircial exercise to show how whopping the gain of the *pencil* was!
While it's good to keep the awareness of the role of technology in business high, let's not go overboard.
The heady days of venture capitalists funding any idea with a Web presence and IPOs without business plans are long gone, but entrepreneurship existed prior to the Internet and will continue long past when the net becomes a ubiquitous utility like the telephone.
I hope he's right about entrepreneurship, because the lack of interest by other readers here is depressing to me.
This topic is on the front page, yet has 65 total comments while the story below has 572 and the story above, 491.
Oh, and don't forget the constant bashing of business and capitalism that constantly goes on around here. If entrepreneurship goes on, it will probably be without the most of the slashdot readership.