Smart Idea
Smart Idea is an entrepreneurial creativity approach that triggers your commitment to develop a business concept that attracts an enthusiastic customer base, shows you how to build safely a valuable business that you can be proud of, and convinces you that you can do it.
Smart Idea is a work in progress research project I work on with Malcolm Ross. It starts off with an intensive workshop session in which partcipants are challenged to build a viable, highly valuable (to some end-user) and easily testable business model.
It is a low-risk process if starting a business or new project.
We are currently in the process of writing up two publications about the project. More info soon.
A Bit of Background
Smart Idea is an entrepreneurial creativity technique that aims to help start-ups (or any new business idea) apply User Centred Design principles in a ‘quick and dirty’ way to create, improve or build confidence in business models.
Smart Idea was originally developed by Malcolm H. Ross in (and around) 1999 as a business idea generator in a “Dotcom Era” incubator. The incubator did not work (predictably in hindsight), partly because the Smart Idea process (then using a different name) was so good at showing how many of the dotcom-style businesses being proposed would not work. If this seems like a strange thing to consider as being a “feather in Smart Idea’s cap” then just think back to how many supposedly smart VCs and entrepreneurs behaved during that period.
Today Smart Idea is a more robust process that has been successfully used by several start-up (and not-so-start-up) companies. It takes the form of a half- to 2-day workshop (depending on how much time you have and how argumentative your are).
Smart Idea Principles (and why it works)
The difference between User Centred Design (UCD) and more 'traditional' product design is that, rather than asking "Is this product/service that I invented useful?", in UCD we ask "What do we need to understand about people to find out what to design for them?"
In practice, the real difference is that doing the latter tends to satisfy a deeply held customer need thus making the product or service compelling and much, much easier to sell because the value tends to be self-evident.
Although User Centred Design originates from the spheres of product, interaction and interface design, there is, we think, absolutely no reason why the principles should not be applied successfully to the creation of business models. Particularly at the early or start-up stages of a company where it is both much easier to be agile and make strategic changes as well as being the point in a company's life where making the right decisions is a life and death thing.
However, the one flaw with doing user centred design properly is that it takes time, effort, resources and money. While the rewards can be substantial, it is not every start-up that has the capacity to engage a team of researchers and designers to do this.
Smart Idea is UCD for start-ups were budget, time and resources are very low.
A Smart Idea Workshop
Smart Idea works best in a workshop format with five to eight participants. Any less and you probably won’t have enough diversity; any more and you risk never-ending discussion.
The objective of a Smart Idea workshop is to direct your thinking towards creating a compelling business model by finding an area of a target end-user’s life that is strongly unsatisfied… and hypothesising ways of satisfying it. This is how we think of business models:
You, the entrepreneur, produce or deliver a story that makes a user happier. This increased happiness is valuable to some customer who will pay you a premium to continue delivering that story.
A Smart Idea workshop takes you through 4 steps that help you articulate what each of those circles should be:
- First we get to know a target end-user
- Second, we discover that user’s unsatisfactions and hypothesise ways of making him or her happier
- Third, we design ways (stories) of making that user happier
- Fourth, we find the biggest ‘pool of money’ (customer) in his or her environment to whom this happiness is most valuable (it may also be the user but we like to start by assuming its not).
Together, the four steps will provide you with a working business model that you will typically be able to test very quickly in some sort of mockup or prototyping scenario.
