Innovation and Entrepreneurship

In this video Alexander Osterwalder makes some great points and provides us with simple tools for use by entrepreneurs including his Business Model Canvas referred to in his book Business Model Generation.

"No Business Plan survives the first contact with customers" - Steve Blank

"The Plan is useless but the planning is everything" Dwight Eisenhower

He Referred to Dan Roam and his books
In this video talk Dan speaks about combining the verbal and visual for "ViVid". It's a set of tools that help us create visuals to work with our words. "Whoever best visualizes the problem is most likely to solve the problem"."the Person who comes up  They tend to get funding, feedback and help from others. That's because visualizing the problem helps map it out, shows that they understand the problem and can get help.

Dan Roam: Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don't Work from BrightSightGroup on Vimeo.

Dan Roam's ViVid "Forest" image

Here are the examples from his talk that help me remember what each of the images represent:

Form - Give the idea a single image / picture like Alexander's Business Canvas

Only Essentials - Bottom Line up Front

Recognizable - Visual, recognizable titles like "Deep Blue Ocean" , "Blink", "Linchpin" etc. 

Evolving - Michelangelo's parachute or Edwin Land's evolving polaroid camera 

Spans Differences - Tesla focused on combining efficiency and power which were previously considered mutually exclusive. 

Targeted - Narrow and identify the audience clearly

Another image that's particularly useful for facilitators would be the Visual Thinking Framework and Codex which are on his website. I've put them here for my own notes (because this blog is my own "web log" of learning notes) which of course I share with you. 

My #1 takeaway: Use Visual Thinking to avoid the "Blah Blah Blah" and illustrate your ideas so that they get the attention they need.