Review #3

Completely rewiring the idea of how to succeed, Scott Adam’s How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big introduces the new game plan to succeed at life. In it Adams discusses the problem with classical beliefs regarding success. For example, being goal-oriented is incredibly powerful, but is easily eclipsed through orienting one’s self through systemic approaches to problem-solving. This is a common strategy employed by EMT professionals. Another core perception is the importance of psychology, and this rings a bell in understanding the importance of maintaining cognizance of your appearance. For example, when others disagree with you and you see them as being completely wrong, they see you the same way, and understanding that is how you can navigate the waters of discourse.

Smith’s revolution of success strategizing follows through with many of the themes we have been learning in class, and I believe what makes many of his innovations so innovative is how simple they are: they’re not obvious because of how obvious they are. Staring you right in the face, these ideas are effective means of novel entrepreneurship. I connected with the system ideology mostly because of my experience with emergency medicine, and the Gainesville Fire Chief’s focus on systemic thinking being the difference between saved lives and lost ones.

An idea for a workshop I would use in class based on what I learned from this book would be to split the class up into two groups based on student’s views of a dichotomous issue and then place them into smaller groups composed of half of each side. Then have them debate while being recorded on camera, followed by them seeing talking about how the other half looked, only to see that they appeared the same way.

The most surprising thing I read in the book was the idea of appearance, because that example is so breathtaking that it hits you in the face.

Exit Strategy

While Enginuity's initial offerings are pretty straightforward, I believe that it has the potential to be as disruptive as Amazon has. What do fashion, makeup, social media, and gyms have in common? They bolster our body image, and services that provide social value to consumers capture a special dimension of the market that evades typical classification.

With my own plans venturing into International Policy, I plan on leaving Enginuity after I develop it's base enough and find someone capable of leading it forward. I want to ensure that Enginuity and Tangency are able to work together and pave the way forward for nonprofit hybrid structure organizations, providing a foothold for socioeconomic innovation.

When I make my exit I will remain on the board of directors of the company, alongside being on the board of Tangency, and ensure that the direction the organization takes remains true to my vision. I expect that may take between five and eight years. With this in mind, most of my planning around Tangency and Enginuity have been about long term plans. I've focused on making use of opportunities that will help in the long run rather than looking for fast development.

Failure

Moving into the summer semester I attempted to handle learning a new language as well as refreshing an old one while taking 12 credits and taking a course outside of UF. While I have been able to manage, It was definitely a difficult task and has been a stressful endeavor all the way through. I have a history of biting off more than I can chew and then just surviving, but this straw has left me with nothing to grip to, and I’ve decided that it would be more effective to focus my time. Focusing on fewer projects would allow me to give them more attention and I could finish them faster and move on to new topics more quickly.

I don't believe failure is bad, in fact, I welcome it. I am reminded of a story where a tree falls between two campers and destroys their tent, leaving one fuming about how unlucky it was and the other raving about how lucky they were to survive. No one is lucky, we make our own luck by maintaining perspectives that take a situation and analyze it for the worthwhile parts. You can learn from failure in this sense, and in a way, your biggest failures can be your luckiest moments.

This is the mindset I have held for a while, and it has led to me taking risks that sometimes don't pan out, but when you have payoffs worth risking the losses, I figure taking those losses is just part of the game. 

What's next

Existing Market:

We will use incentives to fund the projects, and sort of like crowdfunding projects where backers get social capital in terms of their social karma on social media and also discounts on items they can use for themselves or to further increase their social karma. Below is a list of incentives and projects that the people I spoke with seem interested in seeing:

Incentives:

100 Points Join Private Facebook Group

25 Its Share on Facebook

10pts/$1 on store

25 its follow on instagram

250 Create your own ambassador instagram account

200 Points Birthday

100 points share facebook video

500 points complete ambassador challenge

100 its leave product review

150 its video testimonial

50 its photos of your creations

250 points refer a friend. 

Projects:

Donation of Class Marine Kit

Plant a Tree

Donation of an Irrigation Classroom kit

donation of a clean up kit

Donation of a Recycling Bin

donation of a algae classroom kit

Donation of water treatment education kit

New Markets:

After learning about IT companies from friends that work in IT pacements, I have figured that once we break into the existing market niche, we will scale and expand into a B2B market where we use the business model of many new IT companies who train individuals and then find job placements for them, only this program would involve placing students in jobs that provide a great deal of social capital. Many of them will be placed internally and will work on projects that integrate green solutions for businesses and cities looking to institute green infrastructure projects.

I believe that the overall layout of the timeline will be able to support the growth and expansion of Enginuity, and that both its core and future operations fit within the mission and spirit of the company. Innovation is key, and at the heart of innovation lies ingenuity.

Some of the biggest ways in which I can contribute to the development of Enginuity is my ability to use multidisciplinary methodologies to address business problems. Having a background in the basics of many fields allows me to think about problems in contexts that extend beyond the regimes of these problems in isolation.

Putting it all together

Enginuity is an attempt at tapping into the world’s most precious, renewable resrouce: our potential. The United Nations defined a list of Millenium Goals, missions deemed crucial to ensure that all humans have access to their human rights. Many of these goals are being chased by a plethora of organizations at both grassroots and global levels. Enginuity is the concept that the most efficient solution is the most effective, and that is education and empowerment. IT is a firm which leverages STEM education to combat climate change and poverty, supported by the market through the gamification of mission-based tasks.

Opportunity:

Millenials are becoming more aware that they are going to inherit a planet left far more depleted of its resources than what was once thought. As social media becomes an increasingly prominent influence in our lives more and more people are being driven to act based on their expected image outcomes, essentially including public self-image in rational decision making processes. This trend is evident in the American and European regions, and may be present in varying degrees in other regions. Millennials today satisfy this need through posting about causes they support on social media, and participating in activities which have perceived social value – even if the activity is in reality not effective at achieving its intended purpose. With the rise of many for profit institutions which capitalize on this phenomenon, cursory market evaluations seem to put the market size in the tens of billions. This window will remain indefinitely until either the problems with which people may align themselves are gone, or until people stop pandering to their self-image.

Innovation:

Other organizations that attempt to gamify this process rely on two strategies: gift in exchange for service, and ambassadorship. The former relies on individuals purchasing a product with the intent of supporting an organization which either donates to or directly influences public programs, and the latter relies on tiering rewards for participating individuals. Many of the organizations which use these practices are for profit institutions. We intend on augmenting these models to fit into a social-enterprise hybrid partnership between a nonprofit and for profit where the shared resources allow for cost effective program implementation, and the for-profit organizations ability to raise funds with a profit motive allow for easy access to capital flow. The for profit will have incentive to aid the nonprofit because of the shared resources, and the nonprofit will benefit from the same shared access. Strict limits will be placed on how funds are used based on their source of origin, and the point of this partnership is simply to provide a model for how for-profit and nonprofit governance can exist symbiotically. We will provide a similar service to ambassadorship and allow people to participate in activities where they may redeem points for public projects and have their social media likeness be associated with those direct public benefits, and also offer individual discounts in the store which will offer educational supplies as well as mission-oriented supplies, such as zero-waste starter kits, reusable bottles, metal and bamboo straws, clothing, and more. In essence we are leveraging people’s public image to generate value.

Venture Concept:

Competitors involve Creations for a Cause and 4Ocean, two for profit organizations which have used the above practices to develop their markets. However both of these organizations have questionable backgrounds and do not release many of their financial data. Because we will be packaging our items in tiers, provide incentives for long-term involvement, and make our financial data public as per the regulations on 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations, we will have an edge.

Our secret sauce will be our hybrid business model which makes use of gamification to foster brand loyalty. To begin, we will create educational media and partner with schools to offer it to students, and the students will then be able to use those in-class projects to receive personal credits as well as secure project kits for their school. In doing so they will be creating content for our social media platforms. We will then develop the ambassadorship program and make it available to a larger audience once enough content has been captured for social media deployment. Once Enginuity develops into a sustainable operation, I plan on scaling it up to include sustainability solutions projects and develop a program where we support top-ranking students into their college-level STEM studies and then offer them positions with us to bolster their resume before they take on the private sector, or to work with us indefinitely.

We will become the Amazon of NGO work. Technological solutions to the UN Millenium Goals require an abundance of minds to work creatively on multidisciplinary approaches to social science to engineer contextualized responses to the world’s most pressing problems in the twenty first century. By using social capital to create human capital, we will be able to effectively translate concepts into financial capital returns which can be invested in growth. Unlike many for profit companies, the hybrid business model is extremely well suited to growth focus rather than profit because the operations of the nonprofit are already one hundred percent reinvested into the organization, and with the non-mission-critical aspects being taken up by the for-profit there is room for both profit and growth, and because much of the assets are intangible, the for-profit sub-entity does not need to sacrifice much in order to bolster the mission of the organization. 

Resources:

Nonprofit:
Resources are not taxed so long as they fall within the mission of the organization, there is goodwill amongst community members wanting to support the mission, and there is an additional financing option.

Personal Funds:
I plan on putting my personal funds into this program because I believe it will be successful. There is no difference between my funding and another person's funding.

My experience in adobe:
With my experience in adobe, I will be able to help make many of the projects come to life, something that is a rare skill and costly to hire.

My STEM background:
I am able to approach the development of materials from a multidisciplinary perspective, providing the most efficient and effective form of education to students.

Location:
Being based in Miami we have a large home market with a sizeable portion of our target demographic, something many other cities do not offer.

Social Media:
With a focus on social media, we will be able to tap into lucrative opportunities: instagram and snapchat.

Human resources:
By incentifying people through the gamification of our products and services, we will have a market that will be loyal to our brand vs similar competitors.

Social capital: because our cause is quite amiable and very photogenic, we will be able to capitalize on peoples' emotion better than competing educational companies.

Existing hard assets:
With an asset base consisting of some video equipment, hiking equipment, and lab supplies, we will be able to get started working on videos very fast. These are wholly purchasable and nonrare qualities.

Timing:
The timing of this development is crucial because it is at a point where concern for climate change and economic inequality are reaching all-time highs in the United States.

I believe gamification is our best resource because it will be the most difficult to develop, and with our headstart will help us create a loyal following and recognizable brand name.

Inbound Marketing: Click Me, I'm Exciting!

Brian Halligan’s “Inbound Marketing” is a piece on transforming the way you see marketing. It is a four-part marketing epic which begins by denouncing the classical ideas associated with marketing and then proceeds to reconstruct our understanding within the context of a new marketing era. His ideas are situated around the shift from a site being a place to convey information as a professional expert towards being more of a centralized hub for the audience. In part II he discusses the basics of developing the resources which customers are attracted to: content. Content can be in the form of entertainment or in the form of function. Blogging, social media, and the development of tools for consumers are some of the key points he states as critical to the acquisition of an audience. You need to provide value. In part III he takes us from acquiring an audience to acquiring customers, the conversion process, essentially. Finally, he discusses how to reshape the decision-making mindset in order to acclimate oneself to this new marketing environment.

Similarly to how we are using our blogs to create content and are aiming at making this content a final product for an audience rather than just for a class assignment, I believe his ideas are about thinking of everything in terms of the value it creates. If he was teaching this class, I think he would do it the same way

Probably the most important exercise that can be taken from the book to be used in the classroom would be to think of different ways to make an ordinary piece of content exciting. How do you create value is the question that assignment would answer, and it would actually be interesting to see if every student had the same prompt how they would turn it into something which creates value.

I think the biggest surprise, or at least the most interesting one to me, was the idea that companies should be building tools for their customers. Why would you make something free, don’t you want to make money off of it? But by making it free you essentially create relationships and build your brand identity, and with that you also create an environment where they can discuss questions and then be lead to more personalized solutions. 

Growing My Circle

Nick Brunk: Auquculture Expert, Focus on Algae Research

Nicholas Brunk is a UCLA graduate in aquaculture who lives in Miami, Florida and is a neighbor of mine. I recently donated a complete marine tank setup to his research to aid in his production of algae. I gave him my elevator pitch, and he immediately asked me what my plan was to bring it to life. So I told him that I was considering the fact that producing cheap education isn’t cheap, and that the best way to teach is to show, not tell. So we started brainstorming what kinds of projects would make this plan viable, and through the conversation an idea evolved: a full sustainable technology research firm. The core business would be sustainable solutions, but the differentiation would be the integration of an educational outlet which would not only help grow the STEM pipeline which would feed employees and innovation, but would also allow for a diverse array of employees. Most firms that Brunk has worked with employ people for core operations and outsource most nonessential tasks such as IT and marketing. Even though I approached him as a favor to help me with my idea, he said he is looking for a project he can get behind and is interested in seeing how this idea pans out in the UF Business Idea competition. He is willing to work with me on it, and should the plan be successful, would be willing to develop the business alongside me. His connections and expertise are an invaluable resource to me.

Itai Beaudoin de Roca:

Itai is a director of the Tangency Foundation, the organization I work with. He has handled much of the outreach and marketing for the organization, and is familiar with using google trends and adwords to target the very market I am going after. I approached him asking him how he thought I should prepare a plan to do consumer outreach as to the specific forms of the projects that consumers would be interested in learning though, and how I could go about building a reputation. His advice was clear and concise: Focus on development, and then humanize that development. If my product is something that will truly offer a solution to a problem, then humanizing it will be the key to capturing the image we need and the market share we desire.

Doron Zilbershtein:

My father is a Doctoral Professor overseeing PhD. candidates on their final stretch towards their dissertations. his focus is on business psychology, but he has a background in naval architecture. As a professor he is consistently looking at resources to provide for his students, as well as aiding in the creation of those resources if not developing them himself. While he does not create resources for my target segment, he is familiar with the general process behind creating educational materials, and when I asked him about how to go about developing my ida further, he suggested the radial approach. tarting with the core, work outwards. So create the scaffolding of the course, and with that I can start planning what to do with it afterwards. 

Reflection:

Combining the advice I got from the three people I interviewed, I am left with a direction and a plan of attack. I think once I flesh out the plan some more I will reach out to people a couple of degrees of separation more disjunct. 

Elevator Pitch 2

For this time around, I tried to smoothen out the details and ensure that I focused less on the product and more on the emotion and need for the product. Since people can learn more about it through the website, this will ensure they feel compelled to do so.

Idea Napkin #2

For the past few years I have been a passionate advocate for conservation and STEM education, working on finding ways to educate the public about climate change. I have found through this long experience that it’s imperative we use a multidisciplinary approach towards addressing climate change, and that we leverage efficiencies in doing so. With a substantial portion of the population having disproportionally low access to STEM education, which can help lift one into a higher socioeconomic strata, and disproportionately high climate change exposure, it is imperative that we find a way to address both with the same resources to exploit a leveraged power in addressing them.

To combat this, I am developing a macular STEM course with a free youtube series to engage people at all levels and be used in schools. Low income schools would be able to make use of this in particular because it would be designed to be low cost and use ubiquitous materials. Families would be able to follow along and enjoy fun projects that provide bonding experiences between children, parents, and friends. Because this is a fun opportunity they would enjoy the creation aspect of it, and this would entice many people who lack the creativity or scientific knowledge necessary to develop some of these fun projects.

I appreciate the support from my previous idea napkin, and am working to further incorporate opportunities for individuals from all backgrounds to partake in the project. The novelty of the experience combined with its functionality I believe will provide a market niche of substantial size. Multiple markets also provide the opportunity to provide custom tailored solutions to various schools and programs.

With my focus on International Development and Humanitarian Assistance, my degree in Business Administration, and my experience workin gin the nonprofit sector, I believe I am uniquely capable of harnessing a multidisciplinary approach at developing this program. With my education in the sciences, I have a lot to contribute in terms of the development of the actual program materials, and my history of outreach and sales will help me in reaching out to the public.

Customer Avatar

The prototypical customer of my offering is concerned with education, either for themselves or for their children, ideally for both. Because a larger, representative class can be described through the mutually in exclusive combination of these two traits, my customer avatar will be an early to late twenties individual, with or without children, who wants to introduce STEM education into their house. They enjoy featuring their projects and communicating their education with others. They have a vibrant social media presence, and use their social media to convey their thoughts and feelings towards education.

I share a strong sense of passion for sharing education, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. People that enjoy making things tend to appreciate the skills necessary to make them. Appreciating something kind of makes you into someone who loves to do outreach for it. People that love crossfire are very vocal about it. People that are vegan are vocal. People that are teachers are vocal.