Customer Interviews No. 1

1. Opportunity: I personally care a lot about battery life when it comes to mobile electronics (such as phones and laptops). So I was wanting to see what interest there would be in a product that would help with charging away from an outlet, or assist with some other problem.

2. Market: I guessed that most students here on campus would be heavier phone and laptop users. So they would be a good place to see if there is interest, or other issues with mobile electronics.

3. Questions: The questions I wanted to ask were fairly open. What is the users usual usage for there phone and laptop? What do they like about there phone and laptop? What don't you like about your phone and laptop? What would you look for in a new phone or laptop? And if they mentioned battery life, or another issue, if they would want to have something else with them to help compensate for it?

4. Interviews: I talked to most of these people while at the UVS field, so this may be somewhat skewed. I also found out I have class with the last person interviewed, which was kind of neat. Sorry that the videos are poor quality, I wanted to keep it as out of their face as possible so I was usually holding it off to the side.

5. Opportunity Learned: After doing the interviews it seems that though battery life may of been an issue, most people didn't care a whole lot. However, many of them did say that connectivity on campus was annoying. So it's possible that there is something to explore there.

6. Interviewing Learned: Finding people who were ok being interviewed and being recorded was challenging. A lot of people don't like the video aspect, and said they would be more comfortable if it was just audio. Once getting into the interview, people seemed to be more ok with the questions though.

Week 4 Reading Reflection

The chapter had a couple exercises they mentioned to do. I thought this was kinda cool, because to develop most things, you do need to practice. One asked to come up with some functions for "An egotistical staff member" or "the office gossip". This was different for me because I initially feel that both these things tend to be just negatives. But the point was to try to turn negative things to useful functions.

It mentioned that most adults only use 2 to 10 percent of their creative potential. I don't know how something like creative potential can be quantified. Stating that also somewhat implies that their is a hard limit to how creative someone can be. Which seems very strange considering that creativity, especially in Entrepreneurship, is about ignoring established limits and pushing through with ones own ingenuity.

I'd be curious what the ideas the author came up with for the exercise about the "An egotistical staff member" and "the office gossip". I imagine we may of started with similar ideas, but we each could of gone a different direction after getting into it, which would be cool to see. The chapter also talks about innovations that occurred due to the 9/11 attacks. I would want to ask if they think there may be an ethical line to entrepreneurship when it comes to something like that. Could you take too much of an advantage on peoples fears, or is that just like any other trend to benefit from.

I did not like how the author tried to quantify creativity, like I mentioned in the second paragraph. I understand the want to assign numbers to everything, I am an engineer, but I've always viewed something like creativity to be above being able to quantify. That's just my perspective, and obviously it's open to interpretation, but that's how I feel.

Top 5 World Problems

Last week I discussed what I though were the biggest world problems we face today in this blog post. I'm going to try to rank the worst five of those now.

1. Inability to compromise. If people can't learn to work through their cultural differences, the world will continue to face needless conflict.

2. Environmental danger. We only have one Earth. If it is damaged not only in the short term will we face the consequences, but any future generation of humans will suffer because of the mistakes of the past.

3. Lack of economic mobility. One of the big ideas that people associate with America is the ability for anyone, through hard work, to do well for themselves. Unfortunately that isn't true for a lot of people, here and around the world. If people can't make it out of poverty, then it means their children probably won't either. In addition, that means more resources from the rest of the society must be spent to help them.

4. Inconsistent energy. Without reliable and clean energy in many of the poorer regions of the world, many people just can't move away from subsistence and try other things to develop their community.

5. Discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. It will never fully go away, but if societies at large discriminate it severely restricts and hurts the people affected.

Here are my ranked solution starting with the most feasible.

1. Environmental danger. The first big steps to take would setting stringent world wide environmental quotas on international trade. This would need rules that affect not only the worst offenders of pollution and destroying habitats, but also those who continue to trade with them. This is the most feasible because similar, though weaker, efforts have already been put in place. It is also a world wide issue that everyone, regardless of borders.

2. Lack of economic mobility. Providing better education, that helps give students the knowledge and understanding that they can control their destiny would help. Also making it easier and cheaper to access resources such as higher education would mean more people born into poverty have the option to be in higher paying positions. Lots of resources are already in place. They just need to be expanded and directed better in order to serve people more efficiently.

3. Inconsistent energy. It would be beneficial to establish renewable energy sources, like solar panels and wind turbines, in these areas. They could be independent of an existing, unreliable infrastructure and provide clean power more regularly to the inhabitants. This would require a lot of money and other resources to work. One possibility is to work with corporations who could take advantage of the newly freed workers, though that has it's own danger as well.

4. Discrimination based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. These things are baked into cultures, and can only change over long periods of time. The best people can do to quicken these transitions are to learn more about the different groups and having personal interactions with them. It's easy to make something a faceless entity, but actually knowing people, and knowing what they have to go through, certainly can change individual beliefs. It would be hard to do, but overtime things would get better.

5. Inability to compromise. If each party looked that the core of the conflict and considered what they are trying to achieve, without pride or emotion clouding their thoughts, finding a solution for everyone would be much easier. Again, this would be very difficult to stop, because it is so baked into human culture. Like discrimination mentioned above, the most we can hope for is gradual improvement over time.