SOPHISTICATED FINANCE

The Digital Age is Not a Solution

I have written frequently about the changing role of the individual in the Digital Age (here and here to cite two posts). In Einstein's Ideas and Opinions he describes how the Renaissance was a period where individuals made the significant contributions. As population became more dense, the need arose for organizations, as the means to address society's problems. These organizations developed the technology to make themselves more effective and efficient. In summary, as population density changes humans reorganize to address the new problems and develop supporting technology.

Basically, I think we are at another one of those inflection points based on population density. My reasoning is as follows:

• The population will increase by approximately 50% by 2100 to 10 billion
• Over 50% of the population now live in cities and the rate is increasing
• Wide spread discussion of public private partnerships to address social problems indicates a need for a new form of organization
• The easy gains in productivity improvement from computer technology are over because computing technology is now fully developed. (See article here.)

If the choices to address the population density problem are two-- individuals or organizations-- and organizations have reached their point of maximum efficiency and effectiveness with current technology: then we have three choices:

1. Find new technology that addresses the need for greater effectiveness and efficiency in the current forms of organization. Perhaps the use of outer space is the answer (Go Get an Asteroid Academic VC). Some experts say that we have waited too long and no technology can save us from population growth.
2. Redefine the individual through technology. Some might argue that crowd sourcing and (social) networking are proof that the role of the individual is again changing, but neither of these examples produce any meaningful gains in productivity or efficiency. To improve the effectiveness of the individual we have to harness a greater percentage of their intelligence or their physical productivity. Perhaps embedding computing devices inside the person is the answer. 
3. Redefine government, as a significant form of organization, perhaps returning to minimal government. Government originally emerged as a means to prevent unfair interference to people and markets. Over time that role expanded and government became  a substitute in many ways for individual empowerment. Perhaps we need to return to an environment where the individual is more responsible and the government is a referee and not a player.

In conclusion, this is not a post about the dangers of population growth. Human beings re-organize when population density changes (Einstein). I think we have exhausted the benefits from the current forms of organization. We have maxed out the benefits of current computing technology. My guess is we need to re-design the effectiveness of the individual or mankind will fail to address a new era of population density. While the Digital Age is getting all the press, I now think that it is not the technology to address a new era but rather the dramatic end to the last era. Opportunities still exist to better use computer technology, e.g. education, but the bigger opportunities may be in recognizing a new era in the history of mankind. Whether existing governments with their bureaucracies focused on the status quo will permit the necessary changes may be the biggest challenge.

Image credit: bangladesh.um.dk

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Thoughts from a Day at MIT

Schopenhauer, not Christensen from Wikipedia

Clayton Christensen, the well known HBS professor, once said that MIT has the highest density of creativity on the planet. Every time I spend a day at MIT I come to the same conclusion. Two observations inspired by things at MIT last week:

1. In the early days of artificial intelligence (AI) the focus was on the algorithms as the means to make AI productive. This approach proved only marginally effective and AI adoption grew slowly. Recently with the improvement in large database infrastructure and the exponential growth in digital data, researchers have realized that it was the lack of data rather than immature algorithms that was holding back the growth in AI. There are many implications to the accelerating use of AI. One that intrigues me is that computers will increasingly identify the "value" in the data and that this value will be commercialized and subsequently marginalized much faster. Therefore, the opportunity to create large value will increasingly come from outside the bounds of current knowledge, outside the data set. While this has always been true, the easier opportunities in the existing data may quickly be disappearing.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer, the well known 19th century German philosopher, said that music and art make physical the emotions. In most real time digital media one of the challenges is interpreting the emotions and changes in emotional state of the other party. Researchers at the MIT Media Lab are developing sensors to capture and communicate changes in emotion from all parts of the body. Their most well known demonstration is their opera, "Death and the Powers". A possible commercialization of the technology would be for Skype participants to wear sensors during a call. 

Wonder if Schopenhauer would have received a Ph.D from MIT?

 

Problem Solving and Business Model Development

I learned early in my teaching career that students need dramatic images and sayings to help retain concepts. From this methodology came the idea that students should tattoo on their arm "don't run out of cash". Later I started using the question "why can't I timeshare a dog?" to reinforce the idea of relaxing an assumption to develop a new business concept. Recently in social venture workshops I have compared non-profit foundations to stockbrokers, which usually quiets the room and grabs everyone's attention.

The latest idea that I have introduced into my repetoire of teaching tricks is "functional fixedness". This concept basically shows that we have an inherent inability to deconstruct physical things in order to re-assemble them for new purposes. The famous example is you find a box with two rings, a candle and matches. How can you connect the two rings. Most people cannot come up with the solution because of functional fixedness.

Yesterday I heard about a great example of functional fixedness that has spawned a new business model. Most restaurants rent their space but have limited operating hours that match the meals they offer. The rest of the day the space is dormant. In a new business model for restaurants, restauranteurs are renting the unused time (and space) to launch totally different restaurants. For example, during the day the restaurant offers American cuisine for breakfast and lunch and closes at 4 pm. Now at 7 pm a new restaurant uses the space to offer nouvelle French cuisne dinner meals. Both restaurants have lower operating costs and the physical space (functional fixedness) is better utilized. Very clever.

Answer: melt the candle and use the candle wick to tie the two rings together.

More Big Data-Clear Story

My friend @John_Menezes sent me this link to Clear Story after yesterday's post on "Data-based New Business Ideas". Clear Story is working on tools to manipualte big data sets, analyze the data and draw meaningful insights. What is particularly noteworthy are the blue chip investors-Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures. These three firms are all top tier VCs, which suggests that the opportunity in big data analytics is very large.

Data-based New Business Ideas

Last week I met with a young engineer to discuss his early stage company. The company has about $1.5 million in revenue and provides a sophisticated telecom service using proprietary software to manage real time data. The company has one large customer and the entrepreneur wanted to discuss how to find the next customer(s).

In the course of the discussion, I realized that the company, as a by-product of providing its service, was capturing information about company operations that the client did not have. Making the engineer realize this point was a challenge because he thought he was in the telecom services business. Any company that is capturing a large amount of real time data should step back and see if there is a more valuable use of the data.

 For example, a company that does processing of insurance claim collections for doctors has a huge data base on the different procedures and costs for a standard medical procedure--a broken leg. Every legitimate doctor bills the same services and procedures. Any doctor that consistently bills insurance companies differently is probably a crook. We could use this database to identify Medicare fraud by doctors. Yes, the company does medicall billing to insurance companies but using the data to prevent Medicare fraud may be a more valuable business for the company.

This story last week in the NYT about GT Nexus also illustrates my point. The company has a cloud-based service that integrates the supply chain logistics data of large international companies and their thousnds of suppliers. Effectively the status of a shipment can be traced from point of origin to the ultimate customer. Taking this data in its entirety and you have a detailed view into the world economy, a data base that few, if any, other organizations have. GT Nexus has the ability to forecast economic performance based on leading trade indicators, calculate the balance of payments for countries and identify new sources of products by country (e.g. formally China and shifting to Indonesia). The by-product data of supplying logistics tracking is perhaps more valuable than the underlying service.

I frequently write about the need to understand the customer and not get trapped in constantly focusing on product development (especially for engineers). In companies that capture large amounts of real time data, perhaps one should consider if there is a more valuable use of the data for a new customer.

 

Chomsky on Creativity and Innovation

Noam Chomsky is one of the legendary thinkers of the 20th century. Now an emeritus professor at MIT, he established his reputation in the fields of linguistics and philosophy. He is also well known as an activist for social causes.

A recent speech (with video) on the "Purpose of Education" is in this article from Fast Company. What caught my attention was this quote on creativity and innovation:

"It’s the way cultural progress takes place generally. Classical artists, for example, came out of a tradition of craftsmanship that was developed over long periods, with master artisans and others, and sometimes, you can rise on their shoulders and create new marvelous things. But it doesn’t come from nowhere. If there isn’t a lively cultural and educational system, which is geared towards encouraging creative exploration, independence of thought, willingness to cross frontiers, to challenge accepted beliefs… if you don’t have that, you’re not going to get the technology that could lead to economic gains.”

Great thinkers always explain complex ideas simply. Culture and education foster creativity and innovation.

 

Functional Fixedness and Problem Solving

I have written about a technique called "relax the assumption" here and here. Several people find this technique a powerful model to solve problems and innovate. When I do workshops on this technique, I always start by asking the question "why can't we timeshare dogs?" This question makes clear that you only relax the assumption about ownership and we have dog timeshares. 

In a typical workshop I then ask how many new businesses can you create by relaxing one assumption about the original Model T Ford. Everybody thinks of customizing the car color and rental cars. I end the examples by pointing out that fast food restaurants is another example. Do not change just assumptions about the car but rather about people's lifestyles.

I have always considered "relax the assumption" to be a technique that I developed. This article from Big Think shows that my technique addresses what psychologists call "functional fixedness" or ingrained limitations in your thought about the function of something, such as a Model T. Now I have a scientific basis for my technique. 

Miami-Pino Spring Entrepreneurship Workshop Series

The Pino Entrepreneurship Center at FIU has released its schedule of workshops for March through May. These workshops are open to the south Florida business community as well as students. I will be giving two workshops:

1. "Developing a Killer Business Plan" which focuses on how to develop a business concept and a business model and also provides a checklist for how to write a business plan. March 2.
2. "Financial Modeling" which deals with the logic, design and construction of an Excel model for a business or business plan. More on my philosophy of business models is here. This is the first time in about two years that I have offered this workshop so you may want to save the date May 11.

John Fleming (LinkedIn profile) will present a workshop, "Marketing Strategy and Social Media for Entrepreneurs" on April 13. John does a great job on some complex but important subjects for every entrepreneur.

Registration, location and pricing for my workshop March 2 is here. Proceeds go to the Pino Center.

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The Convergence of Human Behavior, Design and Branding

DESIRE!

 

UX Magazine had an interesting post today,"Desire is a Universal Language". Take a ways from the article:

• "Half of our waking cognition is purely unorganized, emotional thought". Desires play a much greater role than rationale in all activities including decision making. 
• "Dr. Steven Reiss, an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at The Ohio State University studying intrinsic motivation, has identified 16 basic desires that guide almost all of our meaningful behavior." 
• Brands that engage one of these basic desires make more powerful connections with customers, e.g. desire for knowledge explains the popularity of the Discovery Channel.
• "We make decisions based on predictions of pleasure", the satisfaction of desire.
• "Once we establish the pleasure–desire relationship ... create the symbolic language that helps people predict the pleasure of using a product or service".
• "We can design in desire, forming powerful and often intangible connections between a brand and the people it serves.

The intrinsic motivation of desire(s) for the customer serves as the universal theme that may enable design, engineering and sales and marketing to share a universal product vision. Every business decision would revert back to whether it enhanced the motivation or desire of the customer. Such an approach would perhaps simplify the use of value creation-value capture framework.

 

Business Plan Templates

Several people sent me links to enloop, a new business plan template site. I spent a couple of hours playing with it this weekend. I thought it was pretty much the same as all the other business plan websites. 

To do a proper business plan, the Sequoia Capital site gives the best outline here. I have used this outline for years in my classes and workshops. This outline highlights the key questions to answer. By the nature of the questions posed on the right hand side of the page, one realizes that a template is not likely to be useful in preparing a description.

The other major failing in most templates is that there is inadequate attention to developing the revenue assumptions in order to understand the growth drivers in the business. My book provides considerable detail on how to develop revenue assumptions and understand growth drivers. The absence of the detail also prevents the preparer from demonstrating their business logic. 

New Business Ideas 2011--III-Academic Portfolios

I have privately been advocating that schools help students create portfolios of their academic work. With all the digital and sharing technology available, eventually universities are going to ask students to submit a portfolio of their work with their applications. I am not talking just about creative types--designers, painters, fashionistas--but rather traditional academics such as history and physics students. 

The key to a good portfolio will not be just the last paper in AP History or the senior science fair project but the ability to demonstrate intellectual growth and maturity. This would imply that students should start their portfolio in junior high school or early in high school.

I think these academic portfolios will include papers, videos, photos and perhaps diaries, blogs, websites and links to FB pages.  Presentation will be in a Flipboard style with tags and full search capabilities. Everything posted would be downloadable.

Someone once told me that Sean Taylor, the late, great UM and Washington Redskins safety, was identified in junior high school as a future Pro Bowl player. The same is true for academic genius. If universities could search the portfolios of younger students, they could follow their intellectual development and perhaps begin a recruiting dialogue much earlier.

Many academics also believe that creating a portfolio benefits the student's intellectual growth. Portfolios encourage reflection on one's work and develop critical thinking abilities.

 Image credit: dickblick.com

Related articles

• ePortfolios: Tool or More? (folio-magic.com)
• Should Portfolios Replace Placement Tests (Good Education)

Urbanization: A New Business Opportunity

At the end of every semester I give a lecture on what markets offer the best opportunities in entrepreneurship over the next fifty years (the working lifetime of a typical student). I will not bore you with the standard answers, such as education and healthcare. I think two opportunities that are under emphasized are:

1. Urbanization
2. Agriculture

In 2008 the percentage of the population living in cities passed 50% for the first time. As incomes increase in Africa and Asia over the next 20 years the percentage of urban population may approach 60-70%. Conservatively, that represents a migration of 700 million additional people into cities. Given the limited financial resources and antiquated infrastructure in most cities, cities face almost insurmountable challenges. Water, sewage and transportation will be big opportunities for innovation. Two interesting articles on urbanization are this report from the UNFPA, the UN group studying population, and this HBS Working Knowledge article by John Macomber, an HBS professor.

With increased population over the forseeable future and some estimates reaching a world population of 10 billion, the critical question is how to feed these people. Improved standards of living for those new urban dwellers will also exacerbate the situation. While just production may be an issue, where will the fuel come from to power machinery and provide fertilizer. The graphic below shows that energy efficiency in U.S. agriculture has improved significantly, but most of the improvement comes from the switch from gasoline to diesel fuel and provides no significant improvement in CO2 emissions. A .9 units of energy for each unit of food looks to me like a big opportunity for innovation.

Source: USDA

Related articles

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New Business Ideas 2011--III

Over the last few years I have written several times on the business opportunities from capturing the large amounts of data generated from the Internet and providing analytics and analysis on such data sets (including here, here and here).

This post from Xconomy Boston provides an interesting example of this trend, citing some former students at the MIT Media Lab who have founded Ginger.io. What are three really big opportunities:

1. Healthcare
2. Mobile
3. Analytics

Ginger.io captures all three trends in a service that tracks and reports on the behavior of pharmaceutical users based on their cell phone usage behavior patterns. As Xconomy reports: 

"If the software tracks a population of patients taking a drug, and some respond in an expected way but others don’t, the pattern might suggest a way to target the drug more effectively “If you’re a pharmaceutical company, to know a segment is behaving differently and doing better on that drug, that can help you market that medication,” says Anmol Madan, co-founder of Ginger.io and a Media Lab PhD."

Finding the Customer/Market

One of the concepts I teach in my entrepreneurship class is that a new business concept is really just a hypothesis until annual revenues reach about $10 million. Too many entrepreneurs lock on to an initial idea of who their customer is and run out of cash before they find a customer base of sufficient size to sustain the company. By considering a new business concept a hypothesis I am trying to encourage my students to be more flexible in their thinking, to realize that their initial thinking may be wrong and to be on the lookout for a better market for their product.

In 2005 I helped raise the initial Series A venture capital for a location-based services company--LOC-AID. LOC-AID originally planned to target the large carriers and offer them location-based games, geo-fencing products and related consumer apps. The longer term strategy was to provide a gateway for consumers to share their location regardless of the cell carrier they used (in 2005 this sharing was not possible). Neither of these strategies appear to have ever worked, but in building the gateway LOC-AID found its customer and market. It was neither the consumer nor the cell carriers.

Read Write Mobile reports that LOC-AID is now one of the largest providers of location-based information. Their customer base is now financial institutions and other firms that use location as an additional way to verify security. For example, a credit card is presented to a merchant in San Francisco but the card holder's cell phone location shows that they are in NYC. FRAUD ALERT. LOC-AID's gateway to all the carriers provides a location on almost all cell phones in the U.S. for financial institutions. Other examples are in the RWM story.

A couple of other points to note:

• We presented LOC-AID to over 20 leading Silicon Valley VCs, who all passed, before finding a lead investor on the east coast
• The consumer is not the only market for all of this modern technology; B2B applications can be large markets if you are flexible enough in your thinking to find the new opportunities

 

Narrative Science

In April 2008 I wrote a post on a new business opportunity. Essentially I was suggesting that the preparation of the MD&A section of SEC disclosures 10-Q and 10-K could be automated with the current technology available. 

I have continued to believe that artificial intelligence technology combined with certain technology to curate information would produce automated systems to generate high quality text. The NYT reports in this article that my idea is much closer to reality. A project launched from Northwestern University, Narrative Science, has secured venture funding and ten clients. Narrative Science has a product to mimic human reasoning and produce the resultant text using artificial intelligence. 

Wonder if they read my blog in Illinois?

Global Capitalism at Risk

Image via Wikipedia

Harvard Business School produces a lot of high quality research, frequently distributed through their own publications such as Harvard Business Review. Some of it is thought provoking and some of it is seminal work in the field. Examples of seminal work would include the early work of Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen.

Global Capitalism at Risk by HBS professors  Joseph L. Bower, Herman B. Leonard, and Lynn S. Paine may at first appear as just thought provoking, but there is an idea here that may prove to be the foundation for a change in thinking on the scale of Christensen and Porter.

The article states that market capitalism may breakdown within the next 25 years and become disfunctional for the following reasons:

• Increasing inequality in wealth distribution
• Increasing immigration to rich countries
• Fragile financial systems
• Climate change and environmental degradation
• Continuing degradation in education and healthcare
• Increasing government corruption that disrupts free markets
• The traditional protectors--business, government and international institutions--can no longer manage the problems

While this analysis may appear to just be the liberal thinking of a few academics, the near collapse of world financial markets in 2008 suggests to me that the professors should not be ignored.

The proposed solution is "the creation of entities that can organize large-scale collective action" that disrupt markets through innovative solutions. Implicit in this proposal is rejection of the idea that only governments are responsible for collective action. The historical black and white distinction between government and businesses in determining the "public interest" must be loosened. According to the article, many business leaders are afraid to wade into the area of the public interest, perhaps more comfortable operating only on the basis of self-interest. The authors conclude that capitalism may be lost if business leaders cannot change to take a more active role in the "public interest". 

The seminal idea is to develop a framework that facilitates this change in business thinking to embrace the public good without abandoning responsibilities to shareholders. Some may think of Porter's "shared value" as a solution, but I think his approach is merely incrementalism. Rather than starting from Porter's perspective of competitive advantage, the framework needs to start by defining the public good. Economists have argued about the definition of public good for centuries, but businesses rarely discuss the theme. We do not need to reconcile the views of Hayek, Friedman and Keynes. Perhaps all we need is a definition that businesses can accept and an HBS framework that helps CEOs to understand the issues and act to solve the wide ranging problems before it is too late. A thoughtful discussion of the public good would also probably lead to a re-definition of the role of government and a more effective and smaller style of government. That would be a daunting task but maybe business could frame the issue in terms of the public good. My thoughts on public good are here.

Note: Porter's "shared value", the article discussed above and the work of Christensen and others at HBS in education indicate a new trend at HBS which has not been much in evidence in HBS publications for the 30 years I have been a reader. Simply put, I think the professors at HBS are encouraging capitalists to take over many of the traditional roles of government or at least to pursue profitable opportunities that previously were government responsibilities. I very much like that idea if my interpretation is correct.

Related articles

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Bond Rating Agencies--China vs the U.S.

Traditionally bonds for corporates, banks and sovereigns have been rated by Moody's, Standard & Poor and Fitch. All three of these rating agencies are based in the U.S. It is not surprising given the size of the U.S. bond market and the large institutional investor base here. Of course the size of U.S. debt markets may call in to question the objectivity of U.S.-based rating agencies. These were the same rating agencies who missed the problems in real estate loans and derivatives in 2008.

As reported in this post, capital markets are increasingly becoming influenced by Asia and the capital being accumulated there. So it comes perhaps as no surprise that China has developed their own rating agencies. The leading rating agency is Degong Global. Degong downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+ in 2010. Some might speculate that the downgrade was politically motivated. Hard to believe that Degong, based in the most politicized capital market in the world--China, has much likelihood of being taken seriously.

Might be a good new business idea to start a rating agency based in Singapore or Switzerland where political interference would be minimal, no allegations of vested interest are likely and home country debt is not significant enough to affect ratings.

I found this story on Big Think, who found it on Mail.

 

Africa Looks Promising

Everyone is watching China and those of us in Miami are always focused on Latin America. With my work for OLPC I have been following Africa for the first time in my career. In the next 10-20 years I think that Africa could emerge as the new darling in emerging markets. My logic is in part based on these facts:

• Angola is the fastest growing economy in the world at over 10 percent per annum
• Demand for natural resources will increase dramatically over the next 10-20 years, which will benefit the resource rich continent of Africa
• China is investing large amounts of foreign aid in infrastructure in Africa
• Sources of capital are starting to focus on Africa, as evidenced by the FT report that Carlyle is setting up a private equity fund for the continent

Keys to the success of Africa will be whether it can develop its human resources and a middle class. Education and health services will be the important requirements to achieve these two objectives.

Interesting fact: Africa is a larger land area than China, the U.S. and Europe combined.

Image credit

New Business Ideas 2011--II

Recently I have been getting requests to reblog my SF posts on other sites. Most recently I got a request from @gtea at Toolbox for Finance, which also includes toolboxes in accounting, strategy and operations.

Here's the problem. I do not have the time to go to every site and manually re-blog my posts. What I need is for someone to develop an app that allows all these re-blogging sites to automatically capture my blog feed. Perhaps it should be built with the option to omit a site if the post is off topic. TypePad allows for easy reblogging to FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but I need a product for the next tier of sites such as Toolbox and Proformative. A special thank you to Finance 3.0 who featured my blog posts without my having to do anything :)

There's one other problem. I do not post on finance topics that often. Send me your ideas in the comments on topics in finance that you would like me to discuss here.

• Toolbox would have been a good site to add to this post on Sources of Financial Education.
• The first new business idea of 2011 is here.

Thoughts on CES

I spent Friday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Attendance was up compared to 2010, which probably signals an improvement in the economy. My thoughts on the show:

1. Everybody was showing HD and 3D monitors and TVs. The most interesting technology was a 3D television from Sharp that did not require the special eye glasses and a Samsung monitor that converted a 2D signal to 3D.
2. Everybody has a tablet that will be sold in the U.S. either 1Q or 2Q 2011. The best looking tablet was a 10.1 inch device from Motorola which was jointly developed with Google. The Blackberry tablet (7.0 inch panel) was also noteworthy because it does not require a second data plan for connectivity. After seeing many tablets I concluded that the 7 inch tablets are too small for everyday use and that the 10.1 inch devices would be the best choice as a laptop substitute (traveling machine). My guess is that if the iPad comes out with a new form factor it will be a 10.1 inch screen.
3. As for operating system, the show was all about Android. The functionality of Android is advancing quickly with Version 3.0 Honeycomb. This functionality gives me little incentive to consider iPhone or iPad as my next devices.
4. The biggest exhibitors at the show were LG and Samsung, surpassing Microsoft and Intel in size of exhibit area. The most popular exhibits when I was there were Motorola and Blackberry. Everybody wanted to see their new phones and tablets. The pundits may have written these two companies off but show attendess were definitely very interested.
5. Most disappointing part of the show was the lack of attention paid to energy consumption, solar power or battery life. Hardly anything related to any of these subjects. I guess the non-profits and universities are going to solve these problems because show companies appear unconcerned.
6. The new business idea that became obvious to me during the show is that tablet computers are going to be the connected family computers for middle class families in the developing world. With a cellular modem, a price of $100-200 and a 24 month payment plan, tablets are going to be a huge business in the developing world and the cellular providers will dominate this market. Localized, branded web storage should be an equally attractive business. That is assuming we can find the power to recharge the tablets.

My new book, Billion Dollar Company: An Entrepreneur's guide to business models for high growth companies is available on Amazon. The book website is here, with book reviews, two videos, an extensive bio and much more.

Related articles

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