The Lean Entrepreneur. Vlaskovits Patrick

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ decades into the computer revolution, four decades since the invention of the microprocessor, and two decades into the rise of the modern Internet, all of the technology required to transform industries through software finally works and can be widely delivered at global scale.5

      Indeed, software is ubiquitous – it’s in your car, phone, stereo, camera, and TV. Software is critical to any modern business. Customer management, logistics, resource planning, inventory control, human resources, accounting, factory automation – all are made up of software, software, software. The same is true of the consumer experience: We buy books, watch movies, listen to music, and play games created or distributed by software companies: Amazon, Netflix, Pandora, Apple, Zynga.

      The line between software companies and traditional-product companies is blurring to the point of making the distinction irrelevant.

      Innovative software coupled with new electronics has resulted in new ways for computers and people to interact (human–computer interaction or HCI), resulting in what investor Brad Feld of the Foundry Group calls “instrumenting human beings.” We are at the very infancy of HCI and its natural progression toward a “symbiotic human–computer future.”6

      The open-source software movement, which helped lower development costs and drove innovation in the personal computer world, is now emerging in the computer networking industry led largely by Google’s G-Scale Network and the use of the OpenFlow protocol.

      Have we mentioned hardware? And materials science? Massively disruptive technologies, such as 3D printing, are enabling the first wave of mass customization that will threaten manufacturing-based economies. Movements are well underway to open-source hardware-development technologies and create hardware components that can be used across different companies, even in different industries.

      “For the last hundred years and definitely for the last thirty years, manufacturing has ostensibly been treated as a solved problem,” says David ten Have, CEO and founder of Ponoko, a web-based platform for digital fabrication. “The reality is that it is just a plateau that we’ve been sitting on, and some technologies and some social forces have come into play that have caused us to push off the plateau.”7

      DIGITAL FABRICATION:

      Process that combines 3D modeling and additive manufacturing technology to produce models, prototypes, and, most significantly, functional products.

      Digital fabrication is giving small businesses the ability to manage inventories like Fortune 100 companies. Suddenly, experimentation with new products and disruptive innovation is not so risky.

      This also matches up with the trend toward people making products to solve problems in their own communities. Businesses are moving away from producing for the masses, and toward more local, niche markets.

      The culture of open-source software – which permits users free use of code under specific conditions – is another death knell for the big-business-protecting patent system. (Not that this will be a quick death.)

      Current digital-fabrication technologies are at the state of one of the first fully assembled personal computer circuit boards, the Apple I, developed in 1976, estimates David ten Have. If true, this means that 3D printing, open-source hardware, and other digital-fabrication technologies will have a massive impact on our economy.

      CONNECTIVITY

      Internet, mobile devices, laptops, tablets; PDAs, GPS, 3G, 4G, IM, SMS, GPS; LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – you get the picture. We’re plugged in and connected, and, as some like to say, hyper-ly so.

      Venture capitalist Mike Maples Jr. says:

      You’re going to have billions of nodes connected to millions of clouds and you’re not going to think of it as one Internet anymore, but you’re going to have all kinds of different clouds and data feeds and screens and interfaces that don’t even have screens talking to each other, sometimes overtly and sometimes behind the scenes.8

      Today, technology innovation is finally about the individual product user. Disintermediation, or the removal of the middleman that sometimes lives between problem and solution, has disrupted multiple industries, putting creative people in direct contact with consumers. For instance, musicians can sell directly to their fans, authors to their readers, and filmmakers to their viewers. While large entertainment studios, for instance, once dominated their respective industries by curating content producers and owning distribution channels, the Internet has brought democracy to these endeavors, increasing competition, driving down prices, and increasing consumer choice. The days of cable companies forcing consumers to buy schlocky reality shows to get the content they truly want are coming to an end.

      THE VALUE-CREATION ECONOMY

      We are in a value-creation economy. The businesses that continuously create the most value within a market win. This is true for big, established businesses, as well as startups.

      There are two sides to the coin when it comes to value-creation. On one side is customer empowerment, and on the other is employee empowerment.

      The nature of being hyperconnected means businesses can have access to their customers 24/7, no matter where they live. This has an important implication, which is that it’s easier than ever to be attuned to your customers, and that means businesses are in an excellent position to truly understand their consumers.

      In the value-creation economy, customers are empowered by:

      ● Having a product experience that exceeds their needs.

      ● Having a relationship with the company in which the company treats them respectfully.

      ● Having a voice in the product.

      With power in the hands of the consumer, the value-creation economy is defined by eliminating barriers between those who build a product and those who experience it. To accomplish this, employees must be empowered to:

      ● Be close to the customer.

      ● Discover new value.

      ● Create value in the moment.

      Rather than being sequestered inside office buildings and leaving customer interaction solely to salespeople and customer support, all employees should seek to deeply understand their customers. It should become standard practice for anyone engaging with a customer to be in a learning mode. Software engineers need to go to the source and understand the context of the problem for which they’re engineering a solution. Customer service should be empathetic. Salespeople should be consultative. Even personnel in back-office support functions like human resources, legal and compliance, and information technology should seek to deeply understand the needs of their customers, who happen to be colleagues at their place of work.

      This is even true for doctors!

      Good physicians know that understanding their patients deeply helps them diagnose illnesses. Family history, nutrition, exercise, stress, and other daily routines and quality-of-life conditions have an important impact on health. That being said, specialists can lose sight of the impact that medical procedures and pharmaceuticals might have on quality of life and other factors that impact long-term health. So relying solely on the science of disease, medicine, and cures, it’s possible to lose focus on the idea that analyzing the quality СКАЧАТЬ