Practical tips, psychology, and ethics of entrepreneurship
TEDxUniversity Francisco Marroquin (TEDxUFM)
Friday, September 16, 2011
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research conferences, May 22-27, 2011
Plump Jack Inn, Squaw Valley. Law, Institutions, and Human Behavior conference, May 22-25; Innovation and Economic Growth conference, May 25-27, 2011. Some highlights/key points:
Prof. Bart Wilson, Economics, Chapman University. In experiments conducted with Econ Nobelist Vernon Smith, entrepreneurs were stronger drivers of economic growth than were either the presence or absence of intellectual property (IP) rights.
Prof. June Carbone, Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society, Univ of Mo., Kansas City: Today, the most highly educated men and women are the most likely to be married, in contrast to 1970, when education was not a factor. Working class women are more unhappy and divorce-prone if they have to work to support family. Middle and upper class women work more because of choice and are happier as a result of work. The greater the inequality in male wages, the lower the female marriage rate in cities: the top is the only group where marriageable men outnumber marriageable women. Investment is women’s education increases marital as well as income prospects. Increased male inequality increases female search costs and delays in marriage.
Prof. Carl Bergstrom, Biology, Univ of WA. The work of American geneticist Sewall Wright (1889 –1988) on theoretical population genetics with R. A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of genetics with evolution. Selection is inefficient in large, heterogeneous populations; well-mixed populations get stuck on local peaks. In contrast, spatial segmentation and inbreeding creates small, homogeneous populations in which selection is efficient. They can search the adaptive landscape in parallel, then spread innovations via migration, even if limited.
Bill Casebeer, DARPA. Tight linkage between economic growth and trust. If an avatar that physically resembles you is programmed to (virtually) exercise/work out, it is more likely that you will exercise/work out.
Prof. Marshall van Alstyne, BU Dept of MIS. By tracking how many people search for flu-related topics, Google can predict flu outbreaks 1-2 weeks ahead of the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
Sarah Brosnan, Georgia State University, Dept of Psychology & Neuroscience Institute. The primates most willing to (intelligently) break rank with the lead chimp and use high-value tokens for sought-after grapes instead of low-value tokens for less-desired cucumbers, were the lowest ranking chimps in the group. The rest simply mimicked the lead chimp and only got cucumbers. My question: were the chimps low ranking because they had previously broken rank, or did they feel free to break rank because they were low status? (Can’t help but to see a similarity between low status chimps and geeks J) Sarah: some of both.
David G. Rand, Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard, uses Amazon Mechanical Turk for cheap, large-scale social science experiments. Findings: if interactions are with people at random, cooperation declines. In contrast, homophily (hanging out with people similar to you) promotes cooperation.
Gordon Getty. Growth is free.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Entrepreneurship and Customer Satisfaction
Interview by Kaizen, Center for Ethics & Entrepreneurship, Rockford College, Rockford, IL
Escape from FarmVille
Farmer or hired hand? Entrepreneur or slave?
Not sure.
Every morning I tend my crops. My purple squash are blooming luxuriantly. My tall stalks of golden wheat sway gently. My peanuts are just sprouting, and my pumpkins are plump and ready for picking. As I click-click-click to harvest them quickly before they rot, coins magically fly up from my fields and add to the balances of my virtual bank accounts. A friend sends me a gift of a chicken; I send a plum tree in return. Another neighbor fertilizes my crops; I help milk his cows. I’ll log in again this afternoon to harvest my carrots, again tonight for my cotton, and again tomorrow morning to feed my cattle, all while coins and gifts roll in. I lean back in my cushy chair. Life is good.
Lately I’ve been logging on to plant, fertilize and feed every hour. I wake up early, stretch my lunch hour, sneak out of meetings and conference calls and turn in late to tend to my farm. My crops and livestock daily win ribbons and medals. In between, I squeeze in a few hours of work, eat, and sleep.
Welcome to FarmVille.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
10 Lessons in Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Feedback
The full article from January, 2010 appears on the Global-CEM site at http://www.g-cem.org/jsp/eng/content_details.jsp?contentid=2461&subjectid=1001.
Ten Lessons:
1. Timeliness is important to customers everywhere.
2. Targeting leads to higher satisfaction.
3. Benchmarks bring meaning to statistics.
4. Accountability and operational efficiency benefit hugely from customer feedback.
5. Satisfaction scores vary widely among performance attributes, touchpoints, and businesses, meaning that targets cannot and should not just be pulled out of thin air.
6. Behavioral data is trumping survey data.
7. Satisfaction tells only part of the story.
8. Use multiple vantage points; triangulate.
9. Customer advocates have fads, too.
10. Feedback truly makes a difference.
Ten Lessons:
1. Timeliness is important to customers everywhere.
2. Targeting leads to higher satisfaction.
3. Benchmarks bring meaning to statistics.
4. Accountability and operational efficiency benefit hugely from customer feedback.
5. Satisfaction scores vary widely among performance attributes, touchpoints, and businesses, meaning that targets cannot and should not just be pulled out of thin air.
6. Behavioral data is trumping survey data.
7. Satisfaction tells only part of the story.
8. Use multiple vantage points; triangulate.
9. Customer advocates have fads, too.
10. Feedback truly makes a difference.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Open Source Software and Social Ecological Systems
Two great talks in Palo Alto on Thursday, April 8:
1) Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL at PARC, on Open Source business models. OS is not altruistic; it is the self-serving component of OS that makes its possibilities limitless—everyone is incentivized to serve themselves. OS cannot exist without a user community. OS does not reduce R&D costs, but leads to higher software quality sooner. It both reduces marketing costs and speeds market penetration.
Any software that is core to a company that is not core to a competitor will get open sourced by the competitor sooner or later (e.g., Google open sourcing Android, a market core to Nokia, Apple, and Microsoft). Red Hat, the largest OS company, is the exception in its lack of IP; most OS companies retain significant IP. MySQL made money by licensing a subscription bundle including monitoring tools, legal indemnification, support, etc. 3 next big things after OS: cloud computing, mobile Internet, open data.
2) Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Economics Nobel Prize laureate at Stanford, on Understanding Social Ecological Systems (SESs). Contrary to conventional economic thinking, cooperation arises in many free-rider/shared resource (commons) environments (such as forests, oceans, and the atmosphere) without government intervention. Trust among users is key: trusting others to reciprocate reduces the fear of being a sucker. Communication is essential in inducing cooperation; communication with sanctioning is most effective. Reputations of participants (their historical behavior), longer time horizons, are also key. High social capital = low transaction costs.
In response to my question, she knew of and liked SFI’s Steve Lansing’s work in Bali to restore local rice farmers’ social norms and rituals that preserved precious water but which had been disrupted by well-intentioned government intervention. Described herself as a “radical poly-centrist” supporting not one central authority but multiple networked authorities.
1) Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL at PARC, on Open Source business models. OS is not altruistic; it is the self-serving component of OS that makes its possibilities limitless—everyone is incentivized to serve themselves. OS cannot exist without a user community. OS does not reduce R&D costs, but leads to higher software quality sooner. It both reduces marketing costs and speeds market penetration.
Any software that is core to a company that is not core to a competitor will get open sourced by the competitor sooner or later (e.g., Google open sourcing Android, a market core to Nokia, Apple, and Microsoft). Red Hat, the largest OS company, is the exception in its lack of IP; most OS companies retain significant IP. MySQL made money by licensing a subscription bundle including monitoring tools, legal indemnification, support, etc. 3 next big things after OS: cloud computing, mobile Internet, open data.
2) Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Economics Nobel Prize laureate at Stanford, on Understanding Social Ecological Systems (SESs). Contrary to conventional economic thinking, cooperation arises in many free-rider/shared resource (commons) environments (such as forests, oceans, and the atmosphere) without government intervention. Trust among users is key: trusting others to reciprocate reduces the fear of being a sucker. Communication is essential in inducing cooperation; communication with sanctioning is most effective. Reputations of participants (their historical behavior), longer time horizons, are also key. High social capital = low transaction costs.
In response to my question, she knew of and liked SFI’s Steve Lansing’s work in Bali to restore local rice farmers’ social norms and rituals that preserved precious water but which had been disrupted by well-intentioned government intervention. Described herself as a “radical poly-centrist” supporting not one central authority but multiple networked authorities.
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