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/

How Do We Learn - Kolb Learning Style

How Do We Learn : Kolb Learning Style Inventory (LSI) is designed to help you understand how you learn best in educational settings and in everyday life. Learning can be described as a cycle made of up four basic phases. The LSI takes you through those 4 phases to give you a better understanding of how you learn. Knowing more about your learning style can help you understand:

• how to maximize your learning from educational programs
• how you solve problems
• how you work in teams
• how to manage disagreement and conflict
• how you make career choices
• how to improve personal and professional relationships

I would suggest for you to complete the LSI and record your scores. You can then plot your scores on the LSI Grid.

The benefits of this process is to apply what you know about your learning style to:

• solving problems
• working in teams
• resolving conflict
• communicating at work
• communicating at home
• being a parent
• managing money
• considering a career

Here are some tips for strengthening your use of Diverging Style:

• tune in to people's feelings
• be sensitive to values
• listen with an open mind
• gather information
• imagine the implications of ambiguous situations

Here are some tips for strengthening your use of Assimilating Style:

• organize information
• test theories and ideas with others
• build conceptual models
• design experiments
• analyze data

Here are some tips for strengthening your use of Converging Style:

• create new ways of thinking and doing
• experiment with new ideas
• choose the best solution
• set goals
• make decisions

Here are some tips for strengthening your use of Accommodating Style:

• commit yourself to objectives
• seek new opportunities
• influence and lead others
• become personally involved
• deal with people

You may find additional resources at the Hay Group site.

Know Your Strengths & Weaknesses: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment is a psychometric questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions.

The original developers of the personality inventory were Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers. They began creating the indicator during World War II, believing that a knowledge of personality preferences would help women who were entering the industrial workforce for the first time to identify the sort of war-time jobs where they would be "most comfortable and effective".^[1]:xiii The early forms of their questionnaires eventually developed into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which was first published in 1962. The MBTI focuses on normal populations and emphasizes the value of naturally occurring differences.

Fundamental to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the theory of psychological type, the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions:

• The "rational" (judging) functions: thinking and feeling
• The "irrational" (perceiving) functions: sensing and intuition

Individuals are either born with, or develop preferred ways of thinking and acting. The MBTI sorts some of these psychological differences into 4 dichotomies, resulting to 16 possible psychological types. 

Attitudes: Extraversion (E)/Introversion (I) Characteristics

• Extraverts are action oriented, while introverts are thought oriented.
• Extraverts seek breadth of knowledge and influence, while introverts seek depth of knowledge and influence.
• Extraverts often prefer more frequent interaction, while introverts prefer more substantial interaction.
• Extraverts recharge and get their energy from spending time with people, while introverts recharge and get their energy from spending time alone

Functions: Sensing (S)/Intuition (N) and Thinking (T)/Feeling (F)

There  two pairs of psychological functions:

• The two perceiving functions, sensing and intuition
• The two judging functions, thinking and feeling

Sensing and intuition are the information-gathering (perceiving) functions. They describe how new information is understood and interpreted. Individuals who prefer sensing are more likely to trust information that is in the present, tangible and concrete: that is, information that can be understood by the five senses. They tend to distrust hunches, which seem to come "out of nowhere." They prefer to look for details and facts. For them, the meaning is in the data. On the other hand, those who prefer intuition tend to trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information (either remembered or discovered by seeking a wider context or pattern). They may be more interested in future possibilities. They tend to trust those flashes of insight that seem to bubble up from the unconscious mind. The meaning is in how the data relates to the pattern or theory.

Lifestyle: Judgment (J)/Perception (P)

Myers and Briggs added another dimension to Jung's typological model by identifying that people also have a preference for using either the judging function (thinking or feeling) or their perceiving function (sensing or intuition) when relating to the outside world (extraversion).  For extraverts, the J or P indicates their dominant function; for introverts, the J or P indicates their auxiliary function. Introverts tend to show their dominant function outwardly only in matters "important to their inner worlds.