ReifiyingHCI (part 1) - Investment in Team

This series of posts will be a sort of ecclectic collection of thoughts and observations from my dual-life as an entrepreneur and academic. They will be posted in fairly random order, and in fairly random order of importance. Some of these observations and personal discoveries may be common knowledge to those of you reading this, but others may find them surprising. Here goes:

Having lived (on cans of tuna - no bread - for lunch) through the dot com crash of the early 2000's and watched first-hand the startup investment game, one of the things i always wondered about was how any investor - angel, venture, institutional - made such a large decision to invest millions of dollars in an unproven concept. There are of course a number of factors that go into the decision (investment horizons for their fund, the way a prospective investee fits into their existing portfolio of companies, acceptable rates of failure, etc), but perhaps the most interesting fact that i learned is that investment folks invest less in the concept than they do in the team that came up with it. In HCI/d education, we speak very little about the character, the personality and the charisma of the design team, but in fact the people with the most money to lose actually place the highest value on these things.

..and when considered for more than a second, this makes sense. Markets change. Economies change. Societies change. When an investor puts money into a venture, they are betting against a 3-5 year future which, in a society that is, according to Marshall McLuhan, moving at electric speed (very fast), is likely to be completely and unpredictably different in 3-5 years than it is today. Therefore the concept that an investor sees in front of them today is likely to be obsolete tomorrow. They expect this. Therefore the thing that is the most likely to provide a good return on their investment is the team that came up with the concept - and especially their energy, process and smarts to be able to keep coming up with more concepts to adapt to the rapidly changing environment.

In a fairly recent presentation, Idris Mootee, CEO of Idea Couture - a strategy/design firm, showed the following slide with the characteristics of highest importance to Angel and Venture Capital investors. From my talks so far with investors and entrepreneurs, it appears to be pretty accurate:



Some potential implications of this:

• A hyper-efficient iterative design process that can communicate well to all stakeholders (including investors) is clearly more important the one or two good epiphanic designs.
• Investors may want to understand your process. If they can see how you got to today, they can plot a trajectory to where you might be tomorrow, which is what they really care about.
  
• Investors are more design-oriented than is obvious at first glance. They just speak a different language.
• Trustworthiness is more important to investors than either sales potential or the entrepreneur's experience. People who don't have their ethical house in order probably will have a hard time surviving.
  
• Choosing and managing a team is of primary importance when starting any organization
  

ReifiyingHCI (part 1)

The process of starting a business has been extremely intense and interesting. It has forced me to learn about design and the reification of design (a.k.a. business) by drinking from the firehose of practice as well as from the water fountain of books. I would highly recommend the process to anyone who wants to learn at a rapid rate. Over the next few months, i will be blogging more about the process of starting BigTreeTop.com from an HCI/d perspective. I have been relatively quiet about our business until now because a) just about every spare moment is taken up with other academic and business activities, and b) i wanted to first, before writing, ensure that i had a good handle on what is smart - from an intellectual property perspective - to write about publicly (if i had my way, all IP would be out on the table for the world to kick around, but people better-versed than am i in the ways of current legal/business practice convinced me that this would have been a bad idea).

To my colleagues at IU Informatics: If i've been a bit distracted in classes and meetings over the course of the past 6 months, i hope that you won't take it personally. The thousands of tasks around getting an idea like BigTreeTop off the ground are pretty good at pushing themselves consistently to the forefront of one's consciousness, especially when paired with simultaneous PhD work. This will probably continue for a while longer, but my hope is that, in time, the effort will produce a living, breathing organization that that we can all use as a test bed for HCI/d research, as well as an experiment the result of which we can analyze and from which we can all learn.

I hope that the upcoming series of musings is interesting information for those of you currently studying HCI/d, for those of you now practicing it, and for those of you who have an idea that you would like to some day make a reality in the form of a real live organization.

HCI/d and NPD - Acronyms Ahoy!

I'm currently doing an independent study with Dr. Thomas Hustad, a professor of Marketing in the Kelley School of Business. His extensive knowledge of the area has been extremely helpful in scoping a new area of research for me that occurs at the nexus of marketing, new product development(NPD), and overall business strategy, particularly as these things are increasingly facilitated on massive scales (or could be) via computer systems. For any hard-core HCI/d folks out there, i'd highly recommend taking at least a quick tour through the some of the NPD material that is out there. Essentially, the field of NPD covers the product life cycle from concept creation to launch, and even into later product-related activities which includesthings like customer relations management (CRM). For the HCI designer in practice, or for those of you headed into practice in the future, it is imperative to understand the hardcore business viewpoint on the business to product to consumer relationship.

What does an MBA-trained NPD person see when they look at a potential product? Where we as HCI/d professionals are trained in and tasked with understanding the user, the NPD professional (take for instance a product manager who is tasked with getting a quality product out the door) is trained in and tasked with understanding the financial, legal and logistical issues that make it possible (or not) to launch a quality product to these same users, but to still maintain legal compliance, company strategic objectives, product schedules and to still at the end of the day to return some money to the stockholders whose money is funding the entire endeavor.

For the HCI/d professional, it is important to understand the current NPD thinking for a few reasons:

1. In our current economy, unless you are designing a product only for your close circle of friends or for opensource distribution, product design is usually part of a larger, fairly standard business process. If we as HCI/d designers are not aware of this larger process, we risk designing amazing solutions that cannot make it to market where they can actually be a benefit to real users.

2. One of the struggles that has always faced NPD teams is innovation. Right now we are in a time of unprecedented online user participation. Wikis, Social Networking, Consumer Reviews, etc. etc. Since consumers are now becoming socialized to participate in an online context, HCI/d designers may be just the people to develop effective ways for lots of users to participate in product innovation. In the NPD literature, this has been written about in the last few years, but not done very well to this point. I'm currently reading Eric Von Hippel's book Democratizing Innovation - available for free online under a creative commons license, which takes a broad societal look at this idea. I think the HCI/d community can take a lead in this area if we step back a bit and think about the computer imaginative-(pdf download) idea that one very good way to bring thousands of people together to foster innovation may be through the Internet.

3. As HCI/d pracitioners, we can gain some valuable insights from the ways that business people get things done. There are always tradeoffs between idealism and pragmatism in any process. In my experience, excellent pragmatism is what makes good MBA grads into a great business leaders. This sort of pragmatism is absolutely necessary in business, since there is usually hard empirical accountability for one's actions. The excellent pragmatist is expert in efficiently considering many factors and making smart decisions that have positive outcomes.

4. As designers, we can bring new ideas - especially in the area of customer interactions - into this process that can perhaps foster breakthrough product developments, rather than just incremental ones. In an article entitled New Product Development as a Complex Adaptive System of Decisions this month's issue of the Journal of Product Innovation Management, Ian P. McCarthy, Christos Tsinopoulos, Peter Allen, and Christen Rose-Anderssen introduce a complex adaptive system that, in their words:

..develops and presents propositions that predict how the configuration and organization of NPD decision-making agents will influence the potential for three mutually dependent CAS phenomena: nonlinearity, selforganization, and emergence. (from the abstract)

it also

..takes into account considers individual NPD processes to be capable of switching or toggling between different behaviors—linear to chaotic—to produce corresponding
innovation outputs that range from incremental to radical in accord with market expectations. (also from the abstract)

I am still working through the article, but what the publication of this article represents is a willingness of the field of NPD - and perhaps an eagerness on its part - to find new ways of stepping out of its linear, deterministic roots and into more organic means to understand and to improve New Product Development. I have seen similar shifts in the thinking of business strategy experts, who are even looking back at some older ideas like Stafford Beer's Viable System Model. At the IU School of Informatics, recent collaborations between the Complex Systems and HCI/d folks have shown a great deal of promise in the design of music recommendation systems, analysis of social networking, identification of shortcomings in traditional HCI in predicting large-scale computer-facilitated emergent user interactions, and other areas. Perhaps NPD will be another place we can help.

I'm still in the early stages of understanding the codified field of NPD. More to come in the near future.