Harvard Business School Resources

Here's a link to the amazing list of resources available for entrepreneurs from Harvard Business School https://sites.google.com/site/startuptribe/general-information/communications

Innovation Games

Daniel Pink, in his book A Whole New Mind, talks about the benefits of game play to spur creativity and innovation. We have had success in practice playing these games with our peers.
You'll be surprised with the results. I've found great value reading this book. Here is a list of what you can expect:

• Learn how your customers define success
• Discover what customers don’t like about your offerings
• Uncover unspoken needs and breakthrough opportunities
• Understand where your offerings fit into your customers’ operations
• Clarify exactly how and when customers will use your product or service
• Deliver the right new features, and make better strategy decisions
• Increase empathy for the customers’ experience within your organization
• Improve the effectiveness of the sales and service organizations
• Identify your most effective marketing messages and sellable features

Check out how Innovation Games can help your organization http://innovationgames.com/

Higher Education : Disrupted/Democratized

Higher Education is being c/democratized...

You can now enroll in free classes from the worlds most prestigious academic institutions including the likes of:

• Standord/Berkeley (www.coursera.org)
• Udacity (www.udacity.com)
• MITx (http://mitx.mit.edu/)
• Harvard (to debut later this year)

What will this mean for traditional brick/mortar universities?

Does it threaten the traditional university business model?

What Business Models will these new higher learning platforms exhibit?

Are we moving towards a skill based rather than degree based learning?

How will learning analytics shape student learning?

Last semester, I took Sebastian Thrun's Artificial Intelligence course and it was an incredibly valuable journey. I spend most of my free time now taking new course offerings through Coursera & Udacity.

Education Bubble here we come ... 

Lean UX Workshop

Excited about the User Experience for Lean Startups workshop tomorrow: 

Lean UX Basics 

Get introduced to practical UX techniques in a Lean Startup context. You'll learn how a healthy intersection between product management, UX, and development can set up your team to work together so that great product UX is an inevitable outcome.

Customer Development Interviews & Generative Research 
Gain the necessary skills to effectively talk to your customers. You'll survey the worlds of generative and evaluative research and learn the differences between them. You'll learn interview techiques, create a topic discussion guide and practice interviewing. 

Developing product and interface ideas 
Ideation, iteration, sketching...the magic happens here. You'll learn to create many ideas in minutes and how to use information gleaned from customer interviews to create scenarios of use. Then you'll sketch-prototype the ideas and prioritize the best ideas to pursue.

Quantitative and Qualitative Evaluation 
Learn how to best match your questions, hypotheses and unknowns with the right research methods. You'll participate in an in-depth discussion about quantitive vs qualitative research and identify the right strategies for your project.

 

Git Casts

If you're new to Git, and not sure where to begin, I recommend checking out the following screen casts @http://gitcasts.com/