Les Acquis: Semaine 3

Looking back on the last seven days I have to sum up that there definitely weren't enough hours in this week. Apart from Friday evening with Antoine, where we kicked back with some glasses of wine but still discussing Tagcrumbs, it was constant running around, organising group meetings, dedicating every free minute to the company and burning off all the extra energy from staring on screens too much during basketball training.

Therefore, just a quick round-up from an excellent lecture on information and knowledge visualization with Amaury de Buchet (information visualization blogger, innovation consultant and visiting professor) this week. The slides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

A good slide showing the effects of the medium with which one acquires knowledge (feet, hands, eyes or ears) on the efficiency of being able to estimate the distance:



This slides tries to explain the importance of design in any innovation process. Instant visualizations of changes to a product and increasingly rapid protoyping (for real world objects) are used to support decision making:

Waiting for THE idea

This is post No. 2 in the weekly series of learnings from the Entrepreneurship class.



One of the great advantages of this major is the effort to bridge disciplines by sharing certain courses between students of management, design and engineering. This is due to the hard work and dedicated collaboration of the project leaders of the three involved universities: Strate Collège Design, École Centrale de Paris and ESCP-EAP. This makes for very animated discussions in classes and projects and provides interesting insights in the various problem solving approaches as well as into the different skills all of the students bring to the table.

Meet people
One of the personal skills I'm trying to work on every day, and that I believe is of utmost importance for every entrepreneur, is the ability to meet people, also known as networking skills. In a conversation I'm trying to listen closely and by asking the right questions to get to know her aspirations and motivations. Those factors almost always show in the professional choices someone made and thus there is no need to deprave the getting to know of an interesting person with palaver on position, achievements and business small-talk. In my opinion what counts is being interested in the person, everything else falls easily into place afterwards.

Some good advice on this topic from the class:

Be special. Be ordinary. (I would add: Be yourself). Extraversion and humility. Take yourself seriously. Do not take yourself seriously.

ESCP-EAP Entrepreneurs
On Wednesday we visited the business incubator Pépinière Paris Soleillet. Incubators are "programs designed to accelerate the successful development of entrepreneurial companies through an array of business support resources and services" (source).



As a couple of entrepreneurs from ESCP-EAP presented their projects to us it was interesting to see the diversity in the ideas behind those companies. Here's a quick overview:

• Classic Rent: renting collector's cars.
• Babelio: a book community.
• Kidioui: inverted auctions (for scooters only at the moment).
• Merci +: very successful company in the home help / cleaner market.
• TURnKEY: consulting company for internationalization and business development needs between France and Turkey.
  
• Facil & Co: a store in Paris focussed on stylish objects for senior citizens. 48, Rue Lecourbe, 15th arrondissement.

Waiting for THE idea
To encourage you to not wait for THE idea and build your business from scratch - entrepreneurship is much broader than that - here's a quote (this time by Steven Rogers of Kellogg School of Management):

A person never has to feel burdened by finding an idea. Sometimes you're just better at taking someone else's idea and developing it.

Overview on the series:

- Introduction
- Week 1. Entrepreneurship: the function of introspection

Entrepreneurship: the function of introspection

The learnings Pt. 1

Alright ... so this is the start of the announced series of weekly posts on the key learnings and ideas from the Entrepreneurship specialisation at ESCP-EAP.

Instead of just looking at the learnings from the coursework I will look at the learnings in a broader context though: taking into consideration also what I felt I learned as a person and entrepreneur, not just in academia. Much of what makes an entrepreneur is based on personal traits, experiences and conversations.

(Entrepreneurial) Motivation
One of the questions everyone, not only aspiring entrepreneurs, should ask themselves on a regular basis is "what is it that motivates me?". For me, motivation results directly from doing what I love or working for being able to do what I love (easy check: does it feel like work most of the time?). Thus only when I found the answer to this question I was able to make basic choices that set the course in the direction towards where I really wanted to be.

This is of course easier said than done. It's a never ending process of introspection, carefully trying to approach my direction by focusing on who I am, challenging the present state of our world as well as earlier choices and often also overcoming fears. Am I prepared? Will I be able to live up to the challenge? Is it a good time? The right project?

We are never taught this. It's difficult as it's very personal and there are millions of ways to reach comprehension. However it would make an excellent addition to curriculae in schools and universities.

Back to the topic: having found my direction it was interesting to discuss the following question in class: what is it that motivates entrepreneurs? The answers could have hardly been more diverse, reaching from being autonomous to changing the world, on to the possibility of making loads of money or simply not working for a boss. For me it was seeing my ideas come to life - as we could only chose one - although it's probably a bit of everything that was said.

Introspection touches on more areas than just motivation when it comes to entrepreneurship. Basic decisions like the type of culture and leadership that is driving your company, what type of venture you are trying to build (for the long or short term for example) and finally also if you try to bootstrap the enterprise or take on outside help (and commitments).



To finish this week's posts off here are some quotes by entrepreneurs and a writer on this topic:

"Failure defeats losers, failure inspires winners"
(Robert T. Kyosaki)

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
(Mark Twain)

"The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer."
(Nolan Bushnell)

"An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he'll quickly learn how to chew it."
(Roy Ash)

The learnings: Hijacking the Blog

As you might know I recently relocated to Paris where I'll be studying for my Masters in Management during the next two semesters. I chose the Entrepreneurship Major as my specialisation, a new and excellent program at ESCP-EAP European School of Management.



In this context I will be hijacking this blog with weekly posts, synthesizing the learnings (= "les acquis" ) of the different courses and projects I've been working during each week.

Not only will this keep this blog alive (having founded a company recently and studying in the meantime costs a lot of time) but I also thought that my readers here might be interested.

For more information on the program:

- ESCP-EAP
- Chair of Entrepreneurship / Chaire de l'Entrepreneuriat
- Entre Createurs (News on the specialisation)

The Tagcrumbs Blog just launched

After an amazing stay in the Americas, working for New Ventures in Mexico City and travelling through the south of Mexico as well as Belize and Guatemala, I‘m now back in Europe.



During my time over there I co-founded a company called Tagcrumbs (together with Sascha and Cornelius) and we all have been working hard to advance this idea. I cannot tell you too much about the application itself yet as there‘s still a lot of programming going on and we also have to finalise the design. However I believe it‘ll be an interesting application to check out and I will let you know as soon as you can test it.

Nonetheless we already started a company blog - we call it our start-up diary - where we present the team, write about startup life and shortly we‘ll be giving out more information on the product itself as well.

To celebrate this first step in bringing our idea to fruition, the team will spend a couple of days in Berlin, working from here, seeing old friends and going out for a drink or two tonight. I'll twitter where we'll go - feel free to join the international crowd we gathered!