My IE iMBA experience

To answer this question, throughout this week I will be working with my Startup Team to come up with a series of Innovative solutions to Urban Farming. In the past two days, we have conducted Consumer Analysis to identify a set of Insights and then used them to form design challenges, which have been used to brainstorm a set of potentially transformative solutions.

It's quite interesting to see how business people (or people that do MBAs) have been conditioned to have a technology/company driven mindset. When they are faced with the customer-centric perspective there is a mind tilt. I'm quite interested to see how (and if it happens at all) the transformation in the mindset.

One simple concept that many have some trouble to understand, but it's very important to capture this customer-centric view, is the one of the Job-to-be-done, used by the famous Harvard Teacher Clayton Christensen. 

I have extracted this text from Peter's Diamandis "Abundance Inside" newsletter. The last one talked about deconstructing Elon's Musk mental model.

This is a great mental model for create transformative projects and I shall adopt it in the start-up lab (and latter). 

And you? What do you think about the First Principles Thinking? Leave a comment.

First Principles Thinking

First principles thinking is a mode of inquiry stolen from physics designed to relentlessly pursue the foundations of any given problem from fundamental truths.  

Elon has deployed this thinking strategy to give himself an unfair advantage when developing new batteries, a key component for both Tesla and SolarCity.  

Here is Elon describing first principles thinking in this 2012 interview with Kevin Rose:

“I think it is important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [When reasoning by analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done or it is like what other people are doing — slight iterations on a theme.

First principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, “What are we sure is true?” … and then reason up from there.

Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”

With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”

It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a sealed can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”

It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”

Before the Start-up lab starts IE sets a series of events to help the participants to build their teams. Yesterday we had one of these events, that happened in an old tapestry factory in Madrid.

Central to the event was the objective to form the teams of each start-up. We have three initial groups: idea founders with no complete teams, co-founders with no teams and the last, complete teams.

It was essentially a network event where you could pitch your idea to other participants and try to find people that could be interested, so you can start talking to them and see if they match your team style and needed skills.

During the event we were presented to a new behavioural model to identify styles of entrepreneurship. Developed by one of the IE teachers, **Joseph Pistrui **, it organizes people in 4 styles that help identify your level of openness to new possibilities and your level of comfort in dealing with the unknown. The four styles are **exponential**, **playful**, **incremental**,  and the ** focused**.

An ideal team should know how to use this styles, as each step of a project is better served by one or other entrepreneur. Also, understanding the different types of openness and comfort about the unknown is a important to manage expectations of your team in each step on the way.

I stumbled upon a great podcast called "Master of Scale" which is done by the  Co-founder of Linkedin Reid Hoffman. And since I'm in a learning mode, instead of watching Netflix I decided to select one of the chapters to listen while I was organizing my house - Sunday errands... 

The first chapter I selected to listen was about the "Infinite Learner". The title caught my attention as I'm always interested in methods of concepts that can help me improve the way I study and learn. And I couldn't be more right about selecting it. 

And this podcast presents a concept that is very relevant to the startup lab that I will start in March. It talks about the concept of the Infinite Learner, or learning, a kind of constant state of mind that leads to innovative ideas and positive transformation. To be an Infinite Learner is to be always in a state of ignorance so that you can learn from scratch.

It's better, and easier, to innovate when you start from scratch when you need to find new solutions that don't exist. It's more challenging and so you need to try new ways to solve something - as opposed to a state when you already know how to solve things. And in this attempt to find new ways to tackle problems is that you find opportunities and ways to innovate. There is a question that drives this process: "Is there a better way?". You keep repeating this and it leads you in a quest for challenging the existent answers to old problems. 

This is the kind of mentality that I look for in my MBA and this start-up lab. Start from scratch, think new ways of solving new and old problems.

The start-up has already started. In this initial phase I need to pitch my idea to the other students, so I can father people interested in what I'm proposing and form a Team. 

Finding good people to work in your team is never easy. As an idea sponsor I believe a key aspect of the success of an Startup is finding a good team. And then motivate them to work with you.