As I get closer to a go/no-go decision on a project, I've been thinking about the difference about my vision for the project and the supportive innovations to enable the core innovations The vision combines (in unequal parts) product, core innovation as I imagine it, the application of that core innovation, design, marketing, developer ecosystem, and business development. The core innovation enables everything else, but it's the application of the innovation that makes it meaningful, useful, and in this case, fun. This week we're testing initial approaches to the implementation for our specific application, and that's where we'll develop the enabling innovations, which is basically where the rubber meets the road. The difference is that the enabling innovation happens at the source of real problems only encountered in the making of something, and in a project like this just getting the essence of it right isn't enough; it also has to be safe, the compone
Yesterday I spent some time thinking about the difference between my successful starts and my projects, which I'll call R&D that never makes it to market. The start is the most fun, and it can also be the hardest part, and it's certainly the most important: figure out the market, the opportunity, develop vision, design the product, figure out the sourcing if it's a physical product, figure out best methods and user interface if it's a software product (and both if it's both hardware and software), refine the product, find early customers, test, refine, improve, iterate all of that while you also develop the brand, the marketing language, figure out the best sales approach, sales system, sales language, customer support, etc. During that time you're setting up internal systems of communication, accounting, legal, HR, etc, but mostly you wing it until you have more than a few people. And, of course, you have to figure out how to pay the bills. You can