The Top 4 - Bottom 1 is back...

Some of you will be familiar with the Top 4 - Bottom 1 format which ranked my experiences as I travelled around the US and South America. I had completely forgotten about this until one of my class mates sent me a link to the Times - Top 50 websites of 2008, reading this list I found a few great sites I'd never heard of before (e.g. Askmen, Afrigadget), a few great sites I knew about (e.g. WikiTravel, Open Source Food) and a few I didn't really agree with (e.g. PopSugar, The Nest) which may portray my personal interests more than the quality of the sites themselves so anyway check out the list and decide for yourself... Or if you don't want to decide this or a bunch of other entrepreneur related things for yourself and you trust me, I am going to be posting an authoritative Top 4 - Bottom 1 lists for a number of different categories - scientific discoveries, medical breakthroughs, green technologies, websites, companies and Dragon's Den pitches.

To kick it off, given that I am currently studying marketing, over the next 5 days I will be posting the Top 4 - Bottom 1 advertisements of all time. Starting at number 4 (although I haven't yet completely thought this through - so I reserve the right to change its ranking at anytime) is this absolute gem starring Brain from The Thunderbirds.






Now to be fair I love this ad but I have never bought a bottle of Drench water... Maybe it's because I never buy bottled water or maybe its because I have never seen it in the shops but I'm sure if I was going to buy some bottled water and it was available I would buy it - hence I can justify putting it in at number 4

6 Seconds of Thought

Ok so the basis for this entry was the following quote from one of the girls on my course 'For you, I'll give it some thought...maybe six seconds of thought...' Clearly a very flattering and generous offer :-)

Later that night whilst waiting for a Pizza to be delivered, I got to thinking about just how generous that offer was, what could someone accomplish in 6 seconds of thought and more importantly where the hell was my pizza.  Anyway in the next 6 seconds this is what I thought. 

1. Pizza delivery in Lund is remarkably slow
2. The city is tiny and full of students
3. Students want to earn money and they ride their bikes everywhere
4. Why doesn't the pizza shop take advantage this, hoist a flag outside everytime it has a delivery to send out and get a passing student to take the delivery for a small fee?

In 6 seconds I had come up with maybe the greatest business idea in the history of Sweden (Ikea who?)... or had I?  As I ravenously tucked into my Pizza half an hour later I thought about the delicious smell of pizza wafting up from my bike basket on its way to someone elses home and wondered how many of these student delivered pizza's would reach their final destination....

The Evolution of the Heffalump...

My Heffalump - created using Spore

Next year will mark the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's seminal work The Origin of Species which details the theory of evolution by natural selection and which continues to be heralded as one of the most powerful ideas in history so what better way to kick off a blog that will following the thoughts and ideas that will hopefully evolve into a successful business than to consider evolutionary theory and its application to the generation of business ideas.

In our first lecture Hans Landström compared defining entrepreneurship to trying to define the Heffalump from Winnie the Pooh 

"...a rather large and important animal. He has been hunted by many individuals using various trapping devices, but no one so far has succeeded in capturing him. All who claim to have caught sight of him report that he is enormous, but disagree on his particulars."

To me the Heffalump represents the entrepreneurs idea, an organism which in the entrepreneurs mind is 'a rather large and important animal' but in reality is more like a tiny fish at the bottom of the food chain, whose species is on the brink of extinction.  The survival of this Heffalump and the fulfiment of its evolutionary potential to become the 'large and important' animal it should be depends not on the survival of any one single trait that the Heffalump possesses but on the survival of the Heffalum as a species, the entrepreneur must be able to recognise mutations of the Heffalump that give it a competive advantage in the market place and avoid those that make it susceptible to predators. Sexual selection will also play a vital role, the Heffalump should preferentially mate with other Heffalumps that have desirable traits - mates with money, power, skills and influence will all play an important role along the evolutionary timeline...

Interestingly (if you are kind of a biology/tech nerd and let's face it, if you are still reading this post you must be....) a new game called Spore in which you create an organism and guide it along a treacherous evolutionary path in order to reach its greatest potential is being released by Electronic Arts  this week.  The game's has been tested and praised by evolutionary biologists at Yale University although with the proviso that it greatly simplifies the evolutionary process (see the New York Times Article).  Whether the game accurately represents evolution or not, it certainly represents an entrepreneurial use of Darwin's work, most probably one that will sell many more copies than Darwin's original book!

The creature creation software, which allows anyone to create their Heffalump  with limitless variations is available as a free download from the Electronic Arts website, a move which was praised on the excellent Wikinomics Blog here.  The blog will follow the creation of my own Heffalump; will it be successful?  Stay tuned....