Considerations About the Endpoint of Your iTeams Project
iTeams projects start with your choice of a technology and conclude with your reporting on clear and actionable next steps for an organization that solves a real-world problem. You’ll report on a space ripe with opportunities for impact. Whether you worked with a technology from a lab or chose to work on one of the problems we scope for you every semester, your final report will have to outline the way in which technology offers a provable advantage and enough of a competitive head start to ensure the survival of an organization that solves a problem, including the necessary steps to seize that advantage. Good next steps do not arbitrarily restrict scope to one application; rather, they decrease uncertainty and increase value.
The endpoint of iTeams is very different from that of most courses on entrepreneurship and innovation, most of which expect you to come up with strategies for “technology push” or “market pull,” develop “elevator pitches,” identify “strategic frameworks,” draft business plans, and spend time focusing on design, product marketing, to name some. Our endpoint is sufficiently different from those courses to warrant some explanation.
Is a technology “ready?” “late?” “early?”
In short, none of the above. While it might take as little as a year to get any technology to become the basis for a new organization, you’ll need to venture beyond the technology you see now to evolve it to have a positive impact in society. That’s a high uncertainty, data-scarce endeavor that will require that you discover ways to obtain the evidence of potential impact in a space that is as yet unexplored.
Why don’t we just pick an application from the start and do market analysis?
You could do that, but then you’d no longer be working on the technology the lab has to offer or on a problem that matters, but on a product-guess you imagined and used to black-box the technology. Black-boxing the technology is a high-risk, low-reward strategy. If your guess is wrong, you’re sent back to the beginning. That process does not scale very well. In iTeams, everything is a variable, and your job is to manage uncertainty. Expect your inquiry to modify the technology specifications, the target audience, the market, and the ultimate goal (startup, more research, license, whatever) numerous times. The more you engage in active exploration, the easier and better it gets.
You’ll find yourself using the toolkits of intellectual property, finance, entrepreneurship, technology development, strategy, management, and entrepreneurial marketing a bit differently than you may be accustomed to. You’ll also learn to use the skills and knowledge you acquire in your disciplinary training in another way: to discover and seize new opportunities.
Why do you use the keyword opportunities to describe the endpoint of iTeams, rather than “markets” or “applications”?
This is easiest seen working backwards from a future in which you’ve already attained impact. The technology you chose is an earlier incarnation of the technology that makes that impact possible. The community your innovating serves benefits from a constellation of elements that you’ve choreographed to work together at an adequate scale: an organization, several technologies (old and new), and people—to name some of those elements. Everything—the advantage, the constellation of elements, and the work left to be done—hinges on the impact. Back in the present, before that impact is material, you must appraise an opportunity.
Why do you expect the technology to offer a head start or unfair advantage?
Scaling up a technology from lab to society is a significant task, so much so that you need it to give you an unfair advantage. The effort entails revisiting variables and assumptions done at lab scale, discovering what else needs to be proven to make the same principles work under a different set of conditions beyond what the lab tested for, and exploring tradeoffs and scale invariants driven by the endpoint you foresee. Whether you are producing a new industrial plant or scaling up software, scaling up a new technology takes more resources than using a technology that has already been proven at scale by someone else. It would be unwise to expend resources to scale up a technology that can be replicated easily with something else that already exists. So you’d better demand that your technology supplies you with a significant, sustained advantage that justifies the effort to scale it up. That’s why we use the word unfair: to stress how significant you need the advantage to be to compensate for the costs of scaling up.
What do you mean by “space of opportunity,” and how is that different from just an opportunity?
Working from the present, your biggest risk is driven by the development required to move a technology from the lab to society without clear evidence suggesting that the endpoint you envision can work. This is a significant scale-up process. Banking all development on a single opportunity being true is unnecessarily risky. Following traditional risk-assessment principles, the more diversified an opportunity, the lower the risk. However, when scaling up, maintaining diversified opportunities, a technology platform, or a similar degree of options open will almost always increase scale-up cost. The way around is to find how knowledge acquired about one opportunity reveals something about another distinct opportunity. If you can relate opportunities to one another and trade information about them, no matter how distinct, we say you have a space of opportunity. To describe one such space, we ask that you outline three distinct opportunities and produce next steps for your project that contribute evidence for all three.
Note for the mathematically inclined: we are using the keyword “space” much like you might in algebra. Roughly, you need a way to locate points (opportunities) and a way to measure distances between them (next steps).
What do you mean when you say that iTeams puts to test some deeply held beliefs about entrepreneurship and innovation?
We believe strongly that innovating is practicable, doable, and that you can go about it systematically, and that’s how we set out to teach it. That belief is at the core of what makes iTeams unique. However, as some of your peers and now alumni point out, innovating does not start out being intuitive. At times, it may even appear to run counter to what you learn in other courses—although it really doesn’t. But things do tend to look quite different in hindsight compared to how they present themselves when you and everyone else approach them for the first time. Innovating has you looking forward at a problem that is still undefined and unsolved.
What makes something counterintuitive isn’t the “thing” itself but your vantage point. Sometimes we allow the background we come from to act like a constraint and inadvertently limit our options. We all respond differently to content that seems counterintuitive: we resist it, suspend disbelief, find it fascinating, grow skeptical, or dismiss it outright. All those reactions are, as a matter of fact, learning indicators; at some point in your childhood, for instance, everything was counterintuitive (cognitive research suggests so), and you overcame it.
