“Mom! today in class I learned how to prepare a smoothie!”
Yep. I’m a twelve grader, so you might think I’m intending to begin with some sort of joke or metaphor—but no, I’m serious. Today in class we prepared smoothies; a testament to our trial and error culture as innovators. The idea behind this, was to asses how our start up would look like in action if we were to offer it to our target audience: school. In order to test this service, we needed authentic feedback, so we invited the librarian and two high school students over to judge the healthiness, presentation, service, and of course taste of our 1-minute made delicias. And well, looking back now I’m not sure we could call them that way. |
did we produce a
killer smoothie? But, I’ve learned that although start ups are seen as a go-do-succeed cycle rather than one that requires management and strategical planning, entering uncertainty is an EXPLORATION and no one assures immediate success. Entrepreneurship sounds exciting because it sells people the idea that they can grow the greens from one minute to another from ACTING upon their inspirations. And yes, we were inspired to create the best smoothie possible for our public but we didn’t have the certainty that it was actually desirable. It wasn’t, but at least we learned the reasons why. I found a very relevant segment from “The Lean start up” that suits this situation perfectly. Eric rise said that the key to senior management to a start up is the way a company reflects and acts upon their ideas: |
take an example you're probably familiar with:
grades are a way of success self-assurance, and we many times fall into them, just like entrepreneurs fall into the Caesar's dilemma.
on the work over the score, when it came to launching the prototype the judges were no threat. Instead, we got carried away with questions about the product and learned from their reactions as they drank not just from what they said. Finally, although the class produced three smoothies in total (ours being the one that appealed the least to the judges), we all sat down and made sure we validated what we had learned. I have to admit I was a little disappointed from the mistakes we could have avoided if we had planned better, but being able to se that our audience DISLIKED our smoothie and letting them be open about WHY, allowed us to identify the adjustments we needed to make to meet and CREATE needs for them in the long run. |