networking – Argo Ventures

Why Business Leaders Need to Think like Scientists (1/2)

Stefan Söllner — Mon, 21 Jan 2019 18:03:42 +0000

When you look at human history, there are two major drivers that shaped the world we live in today: warfare and innovation.

You can look at history through a variety of lenses: the struggle to survive, the biological imperative or the journey to seek greater meaning through spirituality. But ultimately, the major events throughout history are always defined through either warfare or technological progress.

Be that the spread of religion through conquest, or the discovery of fire so that we can cook and absorb nutrients more effectively.

Although there are business parallels with warfare such as leadership and competition for resources, the act of innovation is the most relevant. If you are a business leader or entrepreneur reading this, you have likely already wrestled with this concept.

You have likely formulated innovative ideas and solutions yourself, when launching your own venture or going after new product segments.

And if you’re in a business that has been slow to adopt digital transformation, understanding innovation and how scientific thinking can help is especially important. Product life cycles are becoming shorter, so finding a reliable way that will allow you to consistently innovate is the difference between you being a 5 year or 50 year business.

The consequence is this: if you’re lagging in regards to digitization, younger and more nimble companies will quickly blindside you and steal market share.

No company on earth is exempt from this fact.

If you fit the profile, ensure you read about how we are helping other companies with digital transformation here.

Discovering knowledge and solving problems

A scientist is a person who is engaged in systematic work to understand the natural world.

Although innovation can be described as the act of bringing a new idea into the world – it’s the knowledge that scientists produce that drives innovation. And it’s this knowledge about business, the markets and your customers that will allow you to innovate.

By extension, the discovery of secrets in nature lead to the ability to more effectively solve our problems – commonly through the means of entrepreneurship and engineering. One of the finest examples of this is the understanding of physics that allows us to use large chunks of metal as transport in the form of aviation.

Engineering solutions to known problems represents innovation in the real world, but in business it’s not always the case that a complete picture of the knowledge is known. Although the process of engineering a solution is different from the process of scientific discovery, understanding the way scientists think about knowledge is important to know which problems should be solved in the first place.

The same way that scientists set out to discover new knowledge and understand the world is the same way that entrepreneurs should think about their markets, customers and technology.

Hence, you should think about business as a type of economic science.

How do scientists think and work?

To understand the parallels between science and business, you need to get to grips with the scientific method which represents the core way of thinking in the field.

A basic outline of the method can be described as follows:

Pose a question
Hypothesize about an outcome
Experiment to test your hypothesis
Observe and record
Analyze results
Draw a conclusion

Reading this list, you likely have thought about occasions when you’ve used this method without even knowing it. It’s the most logical way to approach a situation when you want to find the best answer.

It represents logic in its purest form, and its application has even been observed with children.

Let’s take a look at a practical application of this method with business in mind.

1. Pose a question

In this case, you’re the founder or CEO of a small or medium sized business whose growth has stalled over the past quarters. Recognising that you need a wider product offering to increase growth, you set out to discover the best course of action. Through your previous knowledge, you pose the question: ‘would this new product solve an important pain point among our existing customers?’.

2. Hypothesize about an outcome

As you likely have a deep understanding of your customer, you are able to use logic to come up with a judgement about a potential outcome. The knowledge you already have is giving you clues as to what could potentially work, but you are not completely sure yet. In this stage, you are contesting with intellectual guesswork and the best course of action isn’t to spend millions on building out a new team to launch the product.

3. Experiment to test your hypothesis

You have a good inclination that the new product can solve a customer pain point. But at this time, you have no data, either quantitative or qualitative to back up your assumptions. In order to validate your hypothesis, you build out a small prototype and release it to a segment of your customers to test their reaction.

4. Observe and record

After releasing the product, you realise that customers aren’t showing any engagement with the new product. Customers are logging on to the application, but aren’t staying for long. They are using certain features of the product, but not exactly for the solution that you initially had in mind. Overall, the usage is low and the product lacks impact.

5. Analyze results

You pull together all the numbers and look at the bottom line. How much time did the customers spend using the product? Did they purchase the product after the trial? Did they use the core features that were built to solve specific problems?

6. Draw a conclusion

Looking at the data, you may come to the conclusion that the product isn’t what your customers want, which would nullify your hypothesis. However, as there are many variables that you didn’t account for, it’s hard to say for sure that this is the right conclusion. For instance, perhaps there may be technical problems or the interface isn’t easy for users to navigate which lowers engagement.

Design Thinking

A similar way the scientific method can be seen in business is through design thinking which looks as follows:

Define the problem
Research
Form ideas
Prototype and test

This is essentially the scientific method tailored to businesses, which reflects the example outlined above. At both of these methods core lies the principles of using logic to either discover new knowledge or solve problems. The methods enable you to maximise efficiency in doing so, getting you to the right answers faster so that you cut costs and increase growth.

If you aren’t sure how to execute either of these methods, Argopreneurs may be able to help you. By sitting down with you and looking at your unique business challenges and market, we can help you use these methods to innovate new product segments – through solving existing problems and discovering new knowledge about your business.

Der Beitrag Why Business Leaders Need to Think like Scientists (1/2) erschien zuerst auf Argo Ventures.

In Case You Missed It: YPO Gold Transformation Bootcamp

Stefan Söllner — Thu, 15 Nov 2018 15:50:28 +0000

Amid the oak and linden trees of Charlottenburg, there lies an event space. A marble staircase, a stained-glass backdrop, and, suddenly, an exquisite room of entrepreneurs. Over 40 Young Presidents’ Organisation (YPO) Members visited Berlin over the weekend to participate in our Transformation Bootcamp. Forty-eight hours of keynote speeches, interactive workshops, shared meals, and traded ideas and experiences ignited connections that will last a lifetime. YPO Gold Berlin and Argo Ventures presented an event that went above and beyond expectations.

Day One: The Beginning

The two-day session opened with a warm welcome by Stefan Beiten and Sascha Grumbach and a nourishing breakfast. As an invigorating first keynote, Professor Dr. Julian Kawohl, leading professor of strategic digital management at the HTW Berlin, introduced the Ecosystem Strategy Map. Through this, he articulated how corporate officials can use innovative technology to enable disruptive transformation within their existing business structure. Corporate officials, he said, must take initiative immediately in order to keep up with global megatrends. Accelerators, corporate venture units, incubators, partner models, and participation in bootcamps, like the Transformation Bootcamp, were some of Kawohl’s many solutions to this challenge.

Source: Argo Ventures

After an inspiring initial keynote, Nina B. Fischer supplied the participants with a preliminary introduction to Design Thinking. She focused on complexity, spontaneous change, and agility as essential components of a strong company dynamic.

Then, participants were divided into seven teams and encouraged to put Fischer’s techniques to practice.

Putting Theory to Practice

A large part of the day was spent in teams, where participants were presented with real-life challenges disseminated by Berlin startups. Through Design Thinking, team members brainstormed solutions to the challenge, creating by the end of the day a business model that would provide an innovative solution to the problem.

Participants used their expertise to design exciting business solutions. Members received advice from assigned coaches, brainstormed solutions, prepared questions to pose to field experts via a live conference call, and completed a business model canvas to collect their ideas. YPOers even got creative, implementing Legos, putty, yarn, and fabric to visualize their solutions.

Source: Argo Ventures

To supplement their innovative business solution workshops, YPOers attended an afternoon keynote by Kristofer Fichtner. The founder of thermondo provided insights into digitization and its impacts on business models. He stressed the importance of agility in capturing exponential technologies. His words energized the participants to level up the impact of their projects, and to think outside of the box in order to develop their business solutions.

Sascha Grumbach followed Fichtner’s keynote. Grumbach emphasised the need of business model innovation. Companies, through the Business Model Canvas he proposed, can escape cutthroat competition by changing the rules of the game in just nine simple steps. After this process, the business models with which the teams were engaged took on a new and stronger structure.

A Success

At the end of Day One, with guidance from many speakers and coaches, the teams presented their business models. One example of a productive solution to handling business trips was iTravel. iTravel is an AI tool used to book travel arrangements based on the digitised schedules of busy entrepreneurs. After a day of workshops, a day both intense and successful in equal measures, guests attended an extraordinary dinner together. At GRACE Restaurant, inside the Hotel am Zoo, entrepreneurs and Argo team members mingled in a relaxed, warmly-lit room.

While having a glass of wine and enjoying a decadent three-course meal, members networked from the burrata through to the classic cheesecake. Dinner guests discussed and chose the winner of the design thinking and business model canvassing challenge they had been faced with during the day. In this relaxed space, participants and organizers alike had the chance to develop further relationships.

Day Two: Practice as Theory

Source: Argo Ventures

The second day started strong, retaining the productive spirit of the first day. Christophe Maire of Atlantic Labs presented his insights on the success of Gate5 and Nokia. His presentation gave participants a more incisive sense of how markets can be disrupted by technology, and proposed future implications of this disruption. Following this keynote, participants greeted Dr. Nandu Nandakumar for a video conference. Dr. Nandakumar, CTO at Razorthink and serial entrepreneur, shared career secrets on how to use AI to successfully scale your business. His highly informative keynote introduced how AI works, and presented various use cases to shed light on scaling with artificial intelligence.

With the theme of the morning in sight, participants were able to zoom in on business scaling with a riveting keynote by Nikolai Ladanyi. Ladanyi of scale up is an author, entrepreneur, and scale-up coach. His presentation gave interesting insights into the challenges and solutions in scaling a business. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, he said, leads to astonishing possibilities in terms of scaling. This methodology provided several perspectives to get a better understanding of how and where to start.

Source: Argo Ventures

Following an engaging first keynote, Ladanyi returned after a short break for an enlightening second keynote on the topic of Culture and Team. This second discussion outlined the process of defining the team, culture, and core values within their businesses. His discussion examined methods of personal and professional development that characterise the image of a business. His presentation and integrated approach to the keynote gave the audience many ideas for further improvement in their professional ecosystems.

Bringing It Home

In the final keynote of the bootcamp, Mo Moubarak gave the participants some excellent takeaways under the umbrella of company culture. Moubarak founded MoBerries, an AI-driven SaaS platform. Mo’s candid advice covered how to identify and nourish your unique company culture. His keynote addressed the structure and process necessary to developing and sustaining this culture as you scale. The empowering speech uplifted members and capped off a transformational bootcamp.

Source: Argo Ventures

Der Beitrag In Case You Missed It: YPO Gold Transformation Bootcamp erschien zuerst auf Argo Ventures.