Unfortunately I had to
miss this week’s guest speaker in my Managing E-commerce class, but this allows
me, in turn, to do what I said last week: write a bit about some of the
takeaways from Alistair Croll’s presentation.
He stressed the need
for entrepreneurs to produce what they can sell instead of selling what they
can produce. This implies to launch a product, track the public’s reception,
analyse the data, if the results are positive go on with it, and if they aren’t
move on to develop another product and so on. This raised my question: What
about the costs of launching a product? It sounds very expensive to do that
over and over again just to “try”. The speaker’s answer made clear that I was
thinking of a traditional way of product launching, which implied costly field
surveys, manufacturing the product and distributing it. What he meant was to
“virtually” launch the product, using tools such as Kickstarter, online ad
campaigns to probe public’s reception, and other tools that entrepreneurs
didn’t have before, but currently technology’s making possible.
Another concept that Croll
pointed out is the increasingly shorter company’s life spam compared to a few
decades ago. Indeed companies become obsolete much faster than before.
Therefore, they should invest around 70% in developing their current business,
20% in innovating with a connected one, and 10% in a disruptive one (Ex.
Car2Go). This sounded like cannibalization for me, but actually if you don’t
come up with something new, your competitor will.
