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158. Mark Romera’s Globally Orchestrated Entrepreneurial Design Journey

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Entrepreneurship-as-design is brought to life in a wonderful conversation with Mark Romera, who conceived, designed and brought to market a values-driven vision of kids having fun playing in their backyards, via an impeccably crafted brand named Spimbey.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights.

Entrepreneurs can identify innovation opportunities even in the most established fundamental routines of everyday family life.

What’s more basic than kids playing with physical toys in the family back yard, running round, having fun, connecting with others? It’s fundamental to family life in the neighborhood. Yet, kids don’t get that experience so much these days. How to bring it back? That’s an entrepreneurial question that Mark Romera answered with Spimbey, a brand new playset product he designed and launched though his company, Spimba.

First, choose your customer.

Mark chose Mom. Kids are users, but Mom’s the customer. She’s part of a family with target-age kids and some backyard space. She wants her kids to have fun, play safely outside, play with others, and develop themselves physically and mentally. She worries about how much time kids spend on their digital screens, and how that affects their development.

How does an entrepreneur develop the requisite deep knowledge about Mom? Talk to her; engage her in conversation. Go where the play takes place — the back yard.

Distill a complex need into a simple solution.

Already, there’s a lot of complexity. Mom, kids, families, playthings and the materials they’re made with. This brings in safety considerations and regulations, as well as design and manufacturing needs and marketing and distribution needs. The best way to get started is work backwards from the simple solution — the concept of a finished playset, easily assembled by Mom or Dad in a suburban backyard. It needs to be simple for Mom to understand and picture in her mind, and all her questions (like safety and ease of assembly and sustainability) must have simple answers.

From this simple vision, entrepreneurs work backwards in a disassembly process to identify everything they’ll need and the network design to bring it all together.

Design and assemble a flexibly networked internal and external team.

Mark was a sole founder. First, he assembled his team in answer to the questions, who can help me with this journey? He also had flexibility for when and where he needed team members. For the “internal” team (not necessarily employees but performing functional management roles) he looked for process development, product development, brand development and web development. He made careful decisions about types of people, level of experience and the ability to take responsibility in an agile process. Most important was brand alignment — a premium, high quality, high integrity brand presentation requires team members of an appropriate caliber who understand reputation building and high consumer trust.

Next, he focused on assembling the external support team: design, safety experts, materials experts, testing labs and safety certifiers aligned with the appropriate regulatory regimes, manufacturing partners, external sales and customer service experts, logistics, freight and delivery partners. The entire value network must be linked, and scheduled for the right inputs at the right time, all working backwards in the calendar from the critical date, which is the high season for retail sales of playsets. Co-ordination of value network nodes and information flows with process inputs, sequences and handoffs is a complex exercise which must be programmed before any work commences.

The design process is a combination of creativity, rigor, networking and collaborative integration.

As we’ve learned, much of entrepreneurship is a design process, to get from a concept that’s generated internally to a completed product or project that can meet the rigorous demands of the external world, including Mom and the safety regulators, and the guardians of the distribution channels.

The design concept must take a form that everyone involved in the design process can see and understand in an appropriate way, without contradictions or misunderstandings. Then the appropriate design parameters must be assigned: safety, durability, ease of assembly and ease of use, manufacturability, regulatory compliance, freight and packaging constraints. Many of these design inputs must be outsourced — to computer design shops, materials specialists, manufacturers who can impose their own restrictions, warehousers and freight carriers who have specific requirements.

There is a lot of iteration, adjustment, change management and process orchestration to be managed as the design concept advances towards the market and becomes more and more solid, complete and comprehensively detailed. Mark emphasizes meticulous planning, and a calm demeanor with clear communications to keep the network aligned and on the same page.

Branding is a critical element.

The product is physical, but the benefits are psychological. This includes the sense of fun and easiness for the kids, and the feeling of satisfaction and safety for parents. These psychic benefits must be captured in the brand presentation, both online and in physical elements like design and color and packaging. For Mark, his brand is his philosophy, captured in communication, presentation, design, production and delivery.

Mark Romera’s personal entrepreneurial journey passed through various business roles and experiences before branching into entrepreneurship.

Mark worked in growth marketing, business intelligence, new business development and as an independent consultant solving strategic problems for business clients. As his responsibilities increased, he often felt like an entrepreneur inside the corporation. In growth marketing, he learned the power of testing supported by data. Test everything, without waiting for too much discussion about the pros and cons of an idea or concept. If it works, scale it up, if it doesn’t, try to understand why based on the data you’ve collected. Testing and experimentation produce data, and data reduces uncertainty. The data cycle requires speed for success, and not conventional structures or decision-making processes that slow things down.

Entrepreneurship brings unique psychic rewards.

With his growth hacking and exploit-and-expand experience, Mark felt ready and eager to step into entrepreneurship. He told us he wanted something more, because something was missing. He wanted the freedom to develop his own ideas from scratch and to create something new and cool. The psychic reward from entrepreneurship is special. It combines the challenge of immediate implementation and a successful sales season with the long term vision of building a global brand, extending a product line, and gaining acceptance in markets worldwide.

The entrepreneurial journey for Mark is immediately highly rewarding with the long term prospect of increasing achievement and success.

Additional Resources

Mark Romera’s “Entrepreneurial Journey as a Design Process” (PDF): Download Now

See the completion of the journey: Spimbey.com

154. Henrik Berglund: Entrepreneurship As Design

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For entrepreneurs, design is not just lines and shapes and colors and decoration, and it’s not just the look and functioning of a website or a building or another object. It’s a process of advancing from an idea or concept to marketplace realization as a customer-desired new service PR product. In fact, according to Professor Henrik Berglund, entrepreneurship is design.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

Entrepreneurs advance from idea to implementation via a process of design.

How do entrepreneurs exercise judgment? How do they advance from an imagined idea or business concept or anticipated value to implementing their project in the marketplace and making sales to customers?

It’s a creative process. Some call the domain design science, although we Austrians would think of it in a more subjective framework as human design. In general terms, design provides the bridge from the internal environment of the firm (its capital, its capacity, its skills, its resources, etc.) to the external world of customers and the marketplace. Design facilitates the fit between the two. It’s a goal-driven process of getting to the right design: a value proposition design that attracts customers, an effective value network design for assembling all the components, a business model designed to deliver the value, and pricing and cost choices that result in profit.

The steps in the design process take the form of design artifacts.

Design is not abstract. It’s action. The action takes the form of constructing design artifacts: things like sketches and flow chart diagrams and network maps and templated value propositions and business model designs and business plan spreadsheets, prototypes, landing pages and A/B tests.

There is a design pathway from more abstract and conceptual to more substantial and closer and closer to a marketable product, service, or business. The artifacts are not arranged in any specific order, but they are characterized by the progress from abstract to functional and detailed.

Most importantly, the design artifacts are measurable and testable, so that entrepreneurs can get more and more information about how well the design fits with the real world — customer assessments and feedback, simulations, beta tests and other feedback loops serve to make the design more substantial and the entrepreneur’s level of confidence higher.

Experimentation is one kind of design pathway.

Professor Berglund described experimentation as a design interaction with an existing real-world situation, where the testing process is to assess how well the entrepreneurial vision works in that world. Is there demand? Will customers find the proposition useful, and will they buy? Through repeated and experimental testing, entrepreneurs measure their way to the best-fit adaptation of their concept to the market.

He used as an example of experimentation an early step in the development of Dropbox, in the form of a video that carefully described its function and benefits, and sought feedback from the market in the form of requests to join a beta test. The video was successful in attracting a beta test audience, reassuring the designers of the potential use case.

Transformation requires a different kind of design approach.

Transformative ideas do not have an existing market — a “real world” — in which to experiment. There is no identifiable demand at the outset. The process is co-creation, with potential users and customers, of a new world or a transformed world. The design path is not the use of carefully constructed measurable artifacts, but of another kind, which Prof Berglund describes as mutable and transformable.

He used the example of the iPhone, transforming from the functionality of a phone — with a use case of intermittent 2-way communication events – to the concept of a handheld device with continuous use for a multiplicity of purposes aided by integration with software apps and internet connectivity. The vision was never precise, as it can be with experimentation. Apple outlined a more vague vision of possibilities and soft boundaries, and invited individuals and communities of software developers to join, collaborate, make specialized local contributions, and synthesize a new, emergent system over time.

Firms will typically employ a mixture of experimentation and transformation in a portfolio of projects.

Experimentation and transformation are “ideal types” of design, not always as clearly differentiated in the real world as they are in theory. Nevertheless, it’s important for entrepreneurs to differentiate between them, and to maintain a portfolio of projects that instantiates both types.

Professor Berglund and Chalmers are engaged in a new synthesis of entrepreneurial theory and practice.

Prof Berglund observes in a book chapter called “The Artifacts of Entrepreneurial Practice,” that entrepreneurship scholarship has not always been very useful or helpful to practicing entrepreneurs. Now this is changing as researchers move closer to “the real-time doings and sayings of practitioners involved in entrepreneurship”. In the spirit of transformation, there’s a new synthesis of theory and practice that is being co-created. That synthesis is one of our guides at Economics For Business; we hope to gather from business entrepreneurs their evaluations about which elements of theory and research are of most use in practice.

Additional Resources

“Opportunities as Artifacts and Entrepreneurship as Design” by Henrik Berglund, Marouane Bousfiha, and Yashar Mansoori (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_154_Paper1

“The Artifacts of Entrepreneurial Practice” by Henrik Berglund and Vern L. Glaser (PDF): Mises.org/E4B_154_Paper2

HenrikBerglund.com

Chalmers.se

124. Irene Ng: Designing New Consumer Experiences in the Era of IoT

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Value-as-experience is an insight from Austrian economics. Value is not inherent in objects or even in services. Value is not derived from functional use, but is the good feeling the consumer experiences during consumption. Consistent with the Austrian understanding of the market as a process, value is a process. It plays out in time in the consumer’s mind. Consumers learn what is valuable to them in the process of choosing and consuming and evaluating.

These insights add some under-appreciated marketing considerations to a firm’s capabilities, such as an appreciation of situational traits and of the importance of context. Irene Ng provides the E4B podcast audience with a set of contemporary tools to design new experiences and even create new markets in the era of the “Internet of Things” (IoT).

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights.

To design experiences, start by thinking in terms of ecosystems.

Ecosystem thinking pays attention to how knowledge, people, technology, processes and the environment are connected and work together. Systems awareness is becoming wider and wider, observing the interaction and value creation among multiple service systems. Consumers’ value experience occurs within a service system, and thus the service ecosystem worldview is increasingly important for entrepreneurs in an ever more connected, digital and data-driven world.

The subjectivist viewpoint is fundamental to designing consumer experiences.

We are taught from the youngest age to have an object view of the world. We describe situations using nouns: for example, in a room, there is a chair and a piano. Meaning and purpose are identified via the nouns we use. Economics shares some of this noun-based view of the world: assets, knowledge, material things, property.

For the design of consumer experiences, verbs are more relevant, not just as descriptions but as connections between objects and people and behavior and thinking. If I play the piano or drink tea, I am connecting objects and people in action. The world becomes a matrix of verbs and interactions. What individuals do impacts on objects and on other individuals. Design becomes a matter of what a system of objects and people and connections and actions and flows can do.

IoT brings new capacities and new affordances to service ecosystems.

Irene listed 4 new capacities of IoT that contribute to new ways to design experiences:

  1. Liquefy information: A physical object’s information can be sent across space and time. When several information flows are combined for greater information density (e.g., from multiple objects in a kitchen used during cooking) we have more knowledge on which to base an experience design.
  2. Turn objects digital: Software and sensors embedded in an object give that object new capability. For example, a running jacket can communicate location and speed, measure temperature and heart rate, and provide programmability.
  3. Assemble individual objects into a service system: Objects and devices connected and working together exhibit abilities that they don’t have individually. A door lock plus a camera plus a tablet plus the internet can perform as a remotely monitored security system.
  4. Enable transactions between separate task spaces: A task network (such as cooking in a kitchen) can be linked to another task network (e.g., grocery shopping) and a transaction between the two enabled (deliver fill-up ingredients when inventory runs low).

Now a designer can think about a new set of affordances: properties of a system that show users what actions they can take. Ideally, the consumer will perceive the new affordances without the need for complex instruction.

Marketing changes its focus from consumers’ personal traits and segmentation to situations and contexts.

The design of an experience shifts from the use of objects to connected things with information flows in a system. A customer’s perception of the experience within the system may be affected less by their personal traits (as is often assumed in segmentations such as “early adopters” or “social approbation seekers”) and more by situational traits and context.

For example, the situation of “taking my morning coffee” affects an individual’s perception of how well a coffee mug meets their needs (how well does it fit under the spout of the coffee maker), along with a chair to sit in or a news service (paper or digital?) to read. How well do all these artifacts and services work together in this situation?

Similarly, context affects system perception. An individual might like a certain style of streaming music at home, consumed through a sound system while eating dinner, and an entirely different style for working out in the gym, consumed through a portable digital device and earpods.

The design of experiences considers situation and context, and can potentially accommodate a very broad range of people through personalization rather than cater to a narrow market segment.

The human being remains the best sensor in the system, and all design must support and enhance this role.

There may be a temptation for digital designers and technicians to become immersed in the capabilities of an IoT system and forget that it is the human who judges the value of the system through the experience it enables and supports. The human is not outside the system, but is the master sensor, providing both inputs, outputs and judgment. IoT systems provide support, using data to enhance the human experience. Empathy is still the designer’s number one tool to identify the market drivers — the dissatisfactions to be addressed — that underpin favorable human perceptions of the value of IoT systems.

Additional Resources

“Designing New Consumer Experiences in the Era of IoT” (PDF): Download PDF

“The Internet of Things: Review and Research Directions” by Irene Ng and Susan Wakenshaw” (PDF): Download PDF

“Service Ecosystems: A Timely Worldview” by Irene Ng (PDF): Download PDF

“Mimicking Firms: Future of Work and Theory of the Firm in a Digital Age” by Irene Ng (PDF): Download PDF

Value & Worth: Creating New Markets in the Digital Economy by Irene Ng: But It on Amazon