Problem, defination, innovation and… an App solution?

28 Nov

So, i have been meeting entrepreneurs and people involved in start up companies in Sydney and a world of possibilities have appeared for me

A major trend that has not run it’s full course is in developing apps, everybody has them on their iPhone, it seems clear if you can develop an app that somehow ties in with one of the seven deadly sins, you could be on to a winner.

Where is the opportiunity?

In the example of Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin says:

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.

But another train of thought for developing that doesn’t sound nasty that i quite like is

Just live your life until you come up against a problem that you can solve and helps others, then develop a business model around the solution.

So, i have ideas, but how do i translate these ideas into a form that can be presented, developed and released?

Why of course, you would define a business model, business plan, develop requirements and so on and so forth for these ideas.

An idea…

So while swimming, i was thinking of this and i remembered a friend of mine that told me of her aspirations many years ago of becoming a Business Analyst in a company we both worked for.

I remember telling her to look at one of the completed projects in the network drive and :

Look at the finished product/project release
Trace the work by the Business Analyst, their names would be on any/all documents they participated on, you could do a simple ‘find’ by name search to retrieve all documents
Look at how the business need was translated into a requirement that was developed/tested and released
By identifying what the Business Analyst did, that’s what you have to do too, you just work backwards from the solution

And this got me thinking of our daily lives, just about everything we see or touch in a city was a problem in

Design
Production
Transportation
Usability
Safety

We’re all coming to recognize design is everywhere—everything we touch has been designed, and every economy is at least partly design-driven and becoming even more so. “A new value is being placed on design as essential to innovation,” says Carol Coletta, director of ArtPlace, “and on the connection between innovation, jobs, and economic growth.” This growing awareness is especially concentrated in cities, where design is being heralded not only as a savior of the economy but as the solution to a multitude of social challenges.Read more: http://www.dwell.com/articles/The-Design-Week-Movement.html#ixzz2DTxQxhi8

And the list goes on, the point is that a solution was found, the endless meetings and sleepless nights resulted in you sitting in the chair you sit in, but what were the requirements for the chair?

Well, your sitting in the chair, so the project must of been a success, it met the requirements, maybe it was innovative too?

Introducing Richard Feynman, a class act

I remember reading when Richard Feynman was trying to figure out an equation, that could not be calculated before the times of computers as we know them, he would start off by guessing the answers and then he would work backwards, he often solved problems this way, he didn’t think he was anything special, he had a different way of thinking, a different approach, and that was the difference and quite often it made all the difference.

A brave new world of apps

So it seems clear, if you want to understand how an app came to be, pick a good one (that helps people solve a problem) and work back towards the time someone had a problem, which became the idea, like for example ‘Drop box’, you can listen to the story through the ‘Stanford university entrepreneur pod cast’ through the ‘Podcast’ app (a fantastic learning app)

In case you don’t know the story of Drop box, the founder had an important presentation, he drove a few hours to this important meeting and he forgot the hard drive that he wanted to present.

This mishap was a personal disaster, the biggest of his life, at the time and he thought, ‘There must be a better way?’, step one in innovation, a question Steve Jobs would spend his Fridays with Craig Rispin asking this question

(Download Craigs ‘How to think like Futurist’ here)

Is there a better way?

And there was a better way to access you files and share your files, and that’s how you have Drop box folks, it’s inspiring that someones personal disaster was converted into a triump that the world could benifit from.

Time to get to work….