Friday, November 29, 2019

Make 2015 the Year Your Company Fails Better

Make 2015 the Year Your Company Fails BetterMake 2015 the Year Your Company Fails BetterMake 2015 the Year Your Company Fails Better Sastry and Kara Penn, authors of FAIL BETTER Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner(HBR Press, 2014)No matter how forward-looking or agile companies aim to be, workplaces dont look on failure kindly. Yet anyone who wants to innovate knows that theres a risk that things wont go as planned.Heres the silver lining when things go off track this can be a good thing, if youre prepared to harness the benefits. Managers, teams and companies can plan for, and even craft, a better kind of failure.In our book, Fail Better, we explain how to enable small-scale and affordable failures that are linked to broader goals and designed to reveal key insights quickly.The six tips below will help make failure work for you.Elevate the humble project. No need to wait for a eureka flash of brilliance or a fall-from-the sky insight. You can use your current work as your sandb ox for experimentation.Think about every effort to create a novel product, result, or service as a project. Your projects are the vehicle for innovation and progress. In the end, only if projects succeed will you, your team, and your company do well in a changing market.Cultivate a mindset that sees projects as crucibles for improvement, learning, and new ideas, and you can design smart mistakes into your everyday work.Know your limits. Along with your personal tolerance for mistakes, its important to know within your company whats riding on the success of your project.By doing this, youll know how much messing up your project can afford and to assess how much your client, boss, or organization values insights gleaned through failure.Look at all three arenas at the outset of your next project to define the boundaries for your own trial-and-error experiments, and determine if you need to win over others to erleichterung your approach.Map out the thinking behind your project plan to generate productive surprises. Yes, you need to do work planning, but were talking about going further. Start by identifying the problem youre trying to solve, the outcomes you desire, and the actions you think will get you there.Make the linkages between cause and effect a little more explicit, so that when your teamencounters something unexpected while carrying out the project, you can pounce on it, figure out what it might mean, and adjust next steps as a result.Scale back on grandiose one-shot efforts. Iterate instead. Plan your work in repeatable chunks that you can try out early and then revamp, iterate, and improve upon everything.Nothing beats a real-world test Prioritize actions that will yield the most useful information first the type of information which challenges a core assumption, tests a prominent concept, or represents a proposed solution to the problem at hand.Kayak.com is a great example of this practice. The website presents two versions of their home page ever y week, determining which version performed better the information is then used to design the next round.If you have scope to try again, making tweaks along the way, youll be more open to finding opportunities for improvement.Be kind but discerning. No one is born with an ability to talk about failure in the moment. Talking about failures in a professionally appropriate way may take practice.Focus on demonstrating compassion, both to yourself and others, in the face of disappointing results, enabling team members to both learn and perform, and communicating with honesty and without shaming.Even if you aim to tolerate and embrace failures, not every mistake is beneficial. Failures arising from lack of attention, insufficient effort, or disregard for the data must be weeded out from the rest, otherwise you run the risk of encouraging poor performance.Figure out three things to take away from every project (and share them). Its easy at the end of a project to rush on to the next thin g, but the seeds of future failures are often sown in this critical wrap-up moment.Carve out time to extract and share actionable lessons. It need not be complicated. Try just three steps to help identify and documentOne thing you did you should not do again in future projectsOne new thing you tried that is worth doing againSomething new you learned about the world that others in your company could use to inform and improve their work.If every employee committed to this single activity, imagine the resulting cumulative learningMany a corporate hero tells a story of failures that paved the way to eventual success. Inspiring as they are, such stories dont tell you how to actually create the conditions for and capture the benefits of productive failures. These six tips will equip you to begin failing better.The best part? You dont need anyones permission or even any extra investment just the sandbox of your own work and the practical methods weve outlined here.Start today and make 201 5 the year in which you, your team, and your company fail better.We then invite you to share your insights by visiting our website at FailBetterbyDesign.comAuthor BiosAnjali Sastry is senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and lecturer in the department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research investigates global health delivery and management, applying systems thinking and practical, business-based approaches in low-resource settings.Kara Penn is cofounder and principal consultant at Mission Spark, where she works on the front lines of practical management to implement new approaches in complex settings. She has led award-winning community collaboratives designed, managed and evaluated multi-year social change initiatives and guided more than sity NGOs, social enterprises, corporations and foundations.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

Product Planning A Key to Entrepreneurial Success

Product Planning A Key to Entrepreneurial Success Product Planning A Key to Entrepreneurial Success Entrepreneurs strike out on their own for many reasons. Some are realizing their dream of independence at a time in their life where social and/or financial circumstances allow. Others may join the start-up ranks because they are frustrated with their current work situation. In either case, entrepreneurs typically bring to the table what they believe to be a killer product or application and one that will enable them to reap the emotional and financial rewards of commercial success.So Why Do So Many Fail?Entrepreneurs are typically resource-limited and cash-strapped, causing them to cut important corners in product planning and development. While they may be truly gifted product designers, most dont understand or possess the geschftsleben savvy that will translate their idea into commercial success. Most importantly, many times entrepreneurs, driven by pride or ego, dont know when to p ull the plug on a product idea. Even armed with undeniable facts, they feel like they can overcome the obvious negative factors and succeed against all odds.How can they avoid this trap? Long before the engineers open up their favorite design tool, they need to develop a product-planning strategy. Comprehensive product planning is essentialit encompasses market analysis and justification, competitive product analysis, pricing analysis, manufacturability, and ROI. With a thorough and objective analysis in these critical areas, the entrepreneur can develop a value proposition for the new product and decide early on whether the product has a commercial future. If the stars are aligned, then that information will be the crux of the business plan that will gain the attention of investors. If the data just doesnt add up, then they have the information needed to step back and make a no-go decision before a lot of money is poured into a loser.Lets take a closer look at some of the product-p lanning essentials.Market Analysis and JustificationWhat problem does the product solve and how big is the problem? Here, entrepreneurs need to gather information about the kompetenz users of the product and size of the potential market. Does the product replace an existing solution or is it a new way to solve an existing problem? What are the trends in the market? All of these factors need to be carefully analyzed before proceeding to product development.Competitive Product AnalysisIf there truly is a perceived need for the product in identified markets, the next step is to develop a competitive product analysis that will provide the data necessary to pinpoint competitive marketing positioning and create a value proposition for the product. Here, its necessary to drill down into competitive product specifications and compare them to the new product, identify key points of differentiation, and analyze the value of the competitive points to the user.Pricing AnalysisThe next step is t o understand the value to the end users of the new or differentiated competitive product features. How much will they be willing to pay for these perceived benefits? What price will the market bear? Can a definitive ROI be quantitated for the end user?Manufacturing AnalysisAt this stage, the entrepreneur has established the market need, perceived value, and market price for the product. Now it is critical to determine how much it will cost to design, manufacture, and distribute the product can the product be manufactured and sold at the anticipated market price for the expected profit? And at what quantities?Making the Go/No-Go DecisionBy now, the entrepreneur has the information necessary to determine whether the product can be a viable commercial success. And if the answer is yes, a firm value proposition is in hand, which will be the foundation for a strong business strategy and execution plan. If value proposition is weak, than the entrepreneur can stop the effort and save a lot of money and agony moving forward before any further investment in resources, materials, and time are made.While there are many more factors to address in launching a commercially successful product, initial and comprehensive product planning is critical to success.Tom Ricci is the owner of Ricci Communications.Comprehensive product planning is essentialit encompasses market analysis and justification, competitive product analysis, pricing analysis, manufacturability, and ROI.

Thursday, November 21, 2019

Autonomous Vehicles with Depth Perception, Part 2

Autonomous Vehicles with Depth Perception, Part 2 Autonomous Vehicles with Depth Perception, Part 2 Autonomous Vehicles with Depth Perception, Part 2In Part 1, researchers were able to develop a 4D camera that will give self-driving cars the panoramic vision so critically needed for smooth and safe driving. Here they innovate the solution to an even more challenging problem depth perception.To add depth perception and refocusing capabilities, researchers used a technology called light field photography, which had been previously developed at Stanford. The technique captures the two-axis direction of the light hitting the lens and combines it with the 2D image to give depth to the image.138-degree light field panoramas (top) and a depth estimate of the second panorama (bottom). renommee Stanford Computational Imaging Lab/UCSD Photonic Systems Integration LaboratoryOne of the things you realize when you work with an omnidirectional camera is that its impossible to focus in every direct ion at once. Something is always close to the camera, while other things are far away, University of San Diego electrical engineering professor Joseph Ford says. Light field imaging allows the captured video to be refocused during replay, as well as single-aperture depth mapping of the scene. behauptung capabilities open up all kinds of applications in VR and robotics.Inside the camera is a set of lenslet arrays. Each of these has hundreds of thousands of micro-scale lenses, and together they transform the main, spherical lens into a light-field camera, says Donald Dansereau, a Stanford University postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering.The 4D camera is good at improving close-up images, he adds.Something like a compound eye, this kind of camera understands light in terms of directionlike a normal camerabut also position, where the rays are in space, he says. With many different perspectives on the 3D world, this camera inherently captures 3D shape and higher-order effects lik e transparent and reflective surfaces.These capabilities help robots navigate across landscapes semi-obscured by rain, snow, or fog and through crowded areas. Needless to say, thats a boon to self-driving vehicles driving around pedestrians and other cars while on a snowy day, Wetstein says.This could enable various types of artificially intelligent technology to understand how far away objects are, whether theyre moving and what theyre made of, he adds.The camera is now at the proof-of-concept stage and researchers have plans to create two compact prototypes to test on a robot, Dansereau says.One of these is for panoramic capture, much like the first prototype, he adds. The second camera has disconnected fields of view and is designed as a low-cost method to track a robots motion in a broad range of conditions.Future autonomous vehicle passengers are likely thanking the researchers in advance.Jean Thilmany is an independent writer. For Further Discussion One of the things you reali ze when you work with an omnidirectional camera is that its impossible to focus in every direction at once.Prof. Joseph Ford, University of San Diego