Socialized Engineering

On Thursday I had the pleasure of attending an Innovation Open House for the first time. I’ve been meaning to since they first launched (shortly after this: http://www.innoeco.com/2009/07/lets-organize-some-innovation-open.html blog post), but scheduling prevented me.

The best part was definitely getting to be actively involved with a company. Doing is much more effective as a learning tool than asking questions (at least for me) so it was nice to help ZipCar brainstorm for their university strategy.

Our group's ideas for university marketing

Since I’m leaving for the next three weeks, I only have seven weeks left in Boston. It’s odd to have only seven weeks left in a city I’ve spent the majority of the last four years. I’ve started trying to check things off the “I’ll do it eventually” list.

Yesterday:

Walden Pond

My travel companion hadn't heard of Thoreau. He thought it was just a nice pond.

One concept that came up in the Founder’s Journey class I’m taking at MIT really resonated with me.  While we often describe people as “starters vs. finishers” might it be best to describe them as “optimizers” or “blank sheets of paper”?  It’s really about the types of problems that people prefer to address. Some people like to take a blank sheet of paper, determine a problem, and sketch out a first pass solution. Others like to shave one penny off of the cost in order to save $1,000,000 when they sell 100,000,000 of them. Regardless, it’s a nicer, more concrete way to frame the descriptions.

For my birthday my brother got me some AquaNotes:

You can write in the shower!

And so far i’ve really enjoyed them. I’ve taken to using them to make lists with my suitemates. Thus far…

Problems with a 300 Person Institution

• Collective Memory
• Impact of one person
• Never get away from problems
• Predictable
• Factions
• No privacy
• No new people
• Disproportionate bureaucracy
• 150 of them are jerks

Things that are Motivational:

• Coffee
• Music
• Getting yelled at <–
• Conversations
• Olympics
• Kitties
• Aquanotes
• Shouting “let’s do this!”
• Deadlines
• Groups/teams

Anyway, I highly recommend them. Easy and high quality for writing in the shower. Excuse to stay in the shower and experience hot water for longer. Fun. Good to-do lists.

Last week, Babson Business Law Professor Carolyn Hotchkiss talked to our leadership and ethics class about ethics in business and entrepreneurship.

Notably,

Great Entrepreneurs are passionate about an idea, not scads of money.

This really resonated for me. I’ve always felt uncomfortable when people introduce themselves as a “serial entrepreneur,” because the term seems to indicate that you don’t stick with something. Additionally, most self-dubbed serial entrepreneurs I know have flipped their companies, or the companies have failed, but rarely have they been the companies that I’ve heard of and respect.

It’s not as though I think that you have to do one thing forever- but if you don’t care about an idea, why do it?

I have days I call “LOA Days.” They tend to be an amalgamation of different meetings, visits, and conversations.

Today:

• Observation of “The Entrepreneurial Manager” at HBS
• Lunch with Mei and Jun of ThinkEco, developers of the Modlet.
• Coffee with Alyshia at Andala Cafe.
• Visit to IDEO with Founder’s Journey to see talks by IDEO and Colin Angle of iRobot.
• Design review for Wanderlust.

Sometime, I’m going to:

• Do ProbStat for tomorrow.
• Do MobDev that was due last week.
• Talk to restaurants about menus.
• Figure out geolocation in javascript.

I realized I hadn’t given a good run down of what I’ll be working on this semester.

1. SCOPE! I’m still working on my beloved SCOPE project- designing for transitioners.  We’ve just narrowed down to one idea, and we’ll be making a front end fully functional prototype
2. Entrepreneurship Capstone- I’ll be working on a project for a small company, ThinkEco, based out of New York. They have an electrical outlet technology that allows you to monitor and schedule power consumption. I’ll be looking into their software interfaces and business development.
3. Founder’s Journey at MIT- I’m also taking a similar course at MIT, known as Founder’s Journey. For this class, we’ll be studying interactive menu devices to see how they may be adopted by restaurants.
4. Mobile Application Development- For this I’m getting more experience with Android from a business, design, and implementation standpoint. I’m not sure what the project will be for this yet- the first part will be a competition related to the EchoNest API, and the second a self-chosen project.
5. Design in Context- An Art History/Design class, this exposes me to many of the movements and ideas that go behind present day design. It’s providing me with a good grounding in the historical roots of what I work on. A few cultural projects will be the highlights- I just finished an essay on the form and function of Bic Cristal pens.
6. Leadership and Ethics- A course shared between the presidents of Olin, Babson, and Wellesley.  So far, we’ve read two books (Good to Great and How Good People Make Tough Choices) and had a bunch of discussions about the nature of leadership and ethics.  We have a huge emphasis on the difference between simple and easy.
7. ProbStat- I just need to get this over with. There will be a project coming up, and I’m curious to see what I end up doing. It’s not bad, but also not thrilling.
8. Gate Hopper- Finally, I’m working on an independent project that’s going to be debuting in the next couple of weeks. I’ll give you the name as a teaser, and more coming soon!

Feel free to ask about any of these projects in more detail, I’ll try to give updates as they go along.

A week and two days ago I finally made the leap into the world of smart phone users.  When it comes down to it? So far, it hasn’t made a huge difference in my life. It almost seems like the phone is the expensive toy you always wanted as a child, but once you had, you weren’t entirely sure what to do with it.

Things I’m a huge fan of:

• The glowing white button. I wish it breathed a little more slowly, like my Mac does, but it’s a really nice way to be alerted about events.
• The archive button in the mail app. Having a phone designed for gmail is way preferable to using my iPod, which never let me archive.
• Word suggest. It makes texting more bearable. Honestly, I still miss texting in t9.
• Live wall paper! Self explanatory.
• Haptic feedback.
• Industrial design/laser engraving.

Things I’m less of a fan of:

• Shorter battery life. I miss going for days.
• Five screens is a little unnecessary for apps. One would probably be fine.
• The buttons on the bottom force me to touch slightly above them, rather than on them. I got used to it, but it’d been a bit aggravating.