Bob Sutton

The Winner of the Biggest Failure Award During Stanford Entrepeneurship Week

Last week was Entrepreneurship Week at Stanford.  There was a whirlwind of activities, from the premier of a film called Imagine It about last year's Entrepreneurship week, to all sorts of great presentations, to the Stanford E Week Entrepreneurship Tournament.  This event was sponsored and organized by the amazing folks at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, notably Executive Director Tina Seelig and Academic Director Tom Byers. Plus long-time faculty member Tom Kosnik, who has won numerous teaching awards and is widely loved, was also heavily involved.  You can read all about what happened here.

I wanted to draw special attention to my favorite prize given during the week -- for the Biggest Failure in the Entrepreneurship Tournament.  This was called the Stanford Rubber Wishing Tree project.  Failing and learning from it is a hallmark of all creative efforts, especially settings that produce successful entrepreneurship.  As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.

I am proud of the organizers of this event for giving a Biggest Failure award and also proud of student Dorothea Koh and the members of her team for accepting the award in the right spirit. Here is the YouTube Video on the Stanford Rubber Wishing Tree. It is wonderful.  And check out Tom Kosnik's wise comment.

Designing a Cup Holder for Bikes: A New Film From d.school Students on the Process

I have already written about Gus Bitdinger's fantastic "movie version" of one my favorite creativity books, Gordon McKinsey's classic Orbiting the Giant Hairball. The students at the Stanford d.school are at it again, and have new film, called The Stanford Design Thinking Process.  This 7 minute film shows how a group four students -- Madalina Seghete, Dorothea Koh, Mannan Amin and Ana Paula Azuela Garcia -- used the design thinking methods that we teach to develop a prototype drink holder for bicylcles. It shows the primary design practices including user observation, brainstorming, developing a point of view, prototyping, testing, and doing multiple iterations.  The idea for this project was sparked by students who wanted a place to keep a nice hot cup of coffee as they pedaled between classes. Check it out on youTube.

P.S. Mada Seghete reports that it took about 5 hours to do this little cup holder project and about another 15 hours to produce and edit the video -- so this is a very quick design process, but I especially like it because it shows the main elements of the design process so clearly.

Also, some of you might react with "that is mighty crude prototype."  That is a key part of the process . Our perspective on prototypes is that -- in the early stages of the design process -- we encourage people to come up with quick, crappy, and easily disposable "low-res" prototypes that allow them to quickly test a concept.  This prototype is good enough that the students could ride around with a cup of coffee (see the film), and thus test the concept. But it is crude enough that they could quickly discard it, modify it, and so on -- such lack of investment encourages  creativity because they don't become overly enamored in an idea just because they worked like crazy to make a bad or incomplete idea look "too perfect" and it enables rapid iteration though the design-build-test cycle.  Finally, note that, although Gus Bitdinger isn't even a member of the class these student's did the video for, he appears quite a bit in the video as a user of the product. I've been joking that we should hire him as the head of the d.school film department.

STVP Podcasts Closing in on 500,000 Downloads

I recently reported that the Stanford Technology Ventures Program was ranked #1 for podcast downloads on iTunes. I was curious what that meant in terms of numbers and asked Forrest Glick, the STVP web guru, what this meant. I was pleased to hear that my Weird Ideas That Work podcast was now over 11,000 (11,645), but stunned to hear that STVP’s total number of podcast downloads was over 400,000 (438,095). This is as testimony to the both the foresight and hard work put in by Forrest, Tina Seelig, and many others at STVP, who started talking about the potential of podcasts for higher education a couple years ago, when iPods were just becoming popular.  

STVP Podcasts #1 on iTunes

I've already written about the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and how they do so many things so well. The latest news is that if you go to the iTunes music store, and look under podcasts, their talks from the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders speakers series are now #1 in the higher education category.  You can download them for free through the link I've provided or from the iTunes site, and there are over 25 talks, ranging from Google's Marissa Mayer, to Autodesk's Carol Bartz, to VC (and much more) Randy Komisar, to Jeff Hawkins, founder of both Palm and Handspring.