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IDEA GENERATION
IDEASCALE SYSTEM
OPPORTUNITY PITCHES
MULTI-VOTE
CONCEPTS
MULTI-VOTE
PREDICTION MARKET
DATA COLLECTION BUSINESS CASE & POA
EXPERIMENTATION SIMULATED CAPITAL
MARKET
INDEPENDENT
PROJECTS
ACCESS TO ANGEL
INVESTORS
P4-P5
EXIT BY JANUARY,
2013
750+ opportunities ~250 Opportunities ~50 Opportunities ~25 Concepts ~12 Experiment Design ~12 Business Cases ~0-2 businesses
identified by submitted by pitched by developed by and Reporting by by teams of 4 launched
individuals Individuals individuals teams of 2 teams of 4
COURSE INFORMATION
FOR LATEST INFO: WWW.IDEATOURNAMENTS.COM WARNING
PROFESSOR KARAN GIROTRA Alumni describe this course as a twisted combination of
TECHNOLOGY & OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT, American Idol, The Apprentice and The Survivor. Outside of
KARAN.GIROTRA@INSEAD.EDU reality television, this is highly unusual. It is also totally and
ASSISTANT: CONNIE NG completely voluntary, and optional. It is not required for any
COURSE STRUCTURE degree or major. More alumni feedback is on the next page.
SPSD: Idea Tournaments is an experimental workshop that The techniques, tools and approaches followed in the course are
combines two novel approaches to Innovation/Entrepreneurship: all derived from recent and ongoing research. Like with any alpha
Renaissance Innovation and Idea Tournaments. Renaissance product, the course structure and exercises may change during
Innovation is a novel technique to identify entrepreneurial the course.
opportunities via innovating the business models in existing
competitive industries. Idea Tournaments is a process that leverages
COURSE WORK
the wisdom of the crowd for entrepreneurial opportunity The context of searching and refining an entrepreneurial idea
generation, selection and refinement. Taken together, these provides many rich problems with which to develop the tools and
approaches are in contrast to the conventional serendipitous methods in the course. Thus, all work for this course is focused
process of entrepreneurship and instead provide a systematic risk- on real problems related to advancing the business concepts we
limiting pathway to realizing entrepreneurial outcomes. will generate. Each exercise will help us refine and help take our
business concept to the next stage. There is no "make work“, or
As a class, we will follow these techniques and jointly start one or make believe exercises for this course. Of course, real work is
more new ventures. We will use the principles of renaissance often much more demanding than make-work, thus participants
innovation to generate about 250 new business opportunities and should budget an exceptional workload from the course.
through a variety of selection mechanisms, we will filter and GRADING
develop these opportunities until a handful of outstanding business
concepts remain. Students who have entrepreneurial passions will The primary gain from the course is learning a systematic, risk-
be encouraged to take these concepts forward with a team of limiting technique for entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, a grading
classmates in P4/P5. The plan is illustrated on the preceding page. scheme is mandatory:
► Class participation and attendance (25%),
Alumni of this course have gone on to develop multiple successful
► Simulated Capital Market Performance (10%)
businesses and have realized significant financial gains from the
ideas generated and developed during this course. ► Individual work. Peer Evaluation (10%) + Professor Evaluation (5%)
► Group work. Peer Evaluation (30%) + Instructor Evaluation (20%)
SPSD: IDEA TOURNAMENTS KARAN GIROTRA INSEAD
REPRESENTATIVE ALUMNI FEEDBACK
Course Objectives
► “I took this to learn about a new way to manage innovation (from business/consulting objective). This was achieved but I also learnt how to
be a better communicator (oral and written), idea generator, team manager, and ultimately discovered deep entrepreneurial desires that I
had no idea I had in me before I did the course. Finally, through the competition I become a lot closer to my classmates, so much more than
any other activity I have done at Insead (academic or otherwise)”
Work Load
► “As hard as you want to make it. Not as bad as ACF but it gets close. To be honest it was a pleasure to work on the pitches and prototypes”
Professor
► “I enjoyed that the professor is sharing his insights fresh from his research activities, and appreciate that the material is still being developed
in part based on the classroom experience.”
► “He conducted a very interested and engaging course in which the students were motivated to present their ideas and listen to other’s ideas.
Everybody was there to learn and have fun in the process.”
► “very effective”, “cogent”, “repetitive”
Disclaimer: Students quoted above are all from class of J’09. Comments are replicated with no editing (except for spelling mistakes)
IDEASCALE SYSTEM
OPPORTUNITY PITCHES
MULTI-VOTE
CONCEPTS
MULTI-VOTE
PREDICTION MARKET
DATA COLLECTION BUSINESS CASE & POA
EXPERIMENTATION SIMULATED CAPITAL
MARKET
INDEPENDENT
PROJECTS
► You will get as many as 4 opportunities to convince your classmates of the potential of your business idea.
► For each of these opportunities, we will follow a very strict time limit. Please bring your own timer, to help you stay within the
limits.
► You are required to submit powerpoints for these presentations the day before the class. We will integrate these powerpoints into
1 deck and announce a presentation schedule. Any other time you take to setup, will be deducted from your presentation time.
► The classes will be in a standard INSEAD classroom. Take into account the available technology and reliability of INSEAD IT as you
plan your class presentations.
► You bear final responsibility for ensuring the presentation works, and dealing with any unexpected events.
► I will strongly advise to not use proprietary software, animation, etc. in the early rounds of the tournament. In later rounds, when
you have more time for presentation you are encouraged to use videos, role plays, etc.
► Some pointers on making good presentations are provided in Appendix I.
► It is equally important to attend presentations from other participants and give constructive and thoughtful feedback.
TEAM FORMATION
► The course starts with individual work, we re-organize in teams of two after session 5+6 and again into teams of four after session 8+9.
► This process is designed to identify the most promising opportunities and to re-allocate our resources to these opportunities.
► If your idea is not eliminated, you will be responsible for finding new members of your team. Put differently, you are now given the right
to integrate more team members to work on your idea. if your idea is eliminated you will need to pair up with a surviving project/team.
► For logistical and class-scheduling reasons all pairs must be formed within the same section. However if you can find a counterpart
from the other section to swap your place, you can change your section to reach the section where your ideal teammates are based.
Inform the secretary of the course swap, and cc me and all concerned students.
► Learning Objective: I understand that some of you may not be able to find your ideal team mates and partners. However, I think the
ability to recruit talent after your idea has been granted more resources, and the ability to become a productive and useful part of a
new startup team are all necessary skills for any aspiring entrepreneur. This team formation exercise will help build these skills. Some
alumni find hiring, working with and managing other individuals to be one of the most useful parts of the course experience.
► Startups have far higher turnover than regular companies and successful leaders in startups work under all circumstances. You are
unlikely to be able to assemble your dream team in your venture. I believe, the course experience is in fact a more pleasant team
situation than at any startup that I have observed.
REQUIRED READING:
1. Course Outline (latest version on the course website,
www.ideatournaments.com)
OPTIONAL READING:
1. TheBakeoff-Gladwell-TNY.pdf
2. For each of the opportunities, generate a descriptive title and an exciting 50 word description. The description should identify the
novel element– the need, solution or delivery mechanism and make a strong pitch for the business opportunity. Save titles and
description. You will be required to enter them into a web-based system in a few days.
SPSD: IDEA TOURNAMENTS KARAN GIROTRA INSEAD
3. GENERATION II: RENAISSANCE INNOVATION- BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT
REQUIRED READING:
1. “Business Process Innovation", Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine,
Forthcoming article in the Harvard Business Review. Alternate Title:
Renaissance Innovation.
3. You should have received an email invitation to our web-based high throughput
idea screening system (http://spsd.ideascale.com). Reply to the invitation and
The Coronation of the Virgin 1502-3, by Raphael
setup your Ideascale account. Familiarize yourself with the interface.
Note: Invitations will be sent to your INSEAD account. Only registered
students will receive an invitation.
SPSD: IDEA TOURNAMENTS KARAN GIROTRA INSEAD
4. GENERATION III: RENAISSANCE INNOVATION –OPPORTUNISM
FUN READING:
1. TBA
2. For each of the opportunities, generate a descriptive title and an exciting 50 word
description. Save titles and description. You will be required to enter them into a
web-based system in a few days.
3. You have now generated over 15 opportunities. Select the best 5 of these, and
submit at http://spsd.ideascale.com. All Submissions should be completed before
end of the day 14th January (Local Time). Do not rate opportunities now.
4. If your idea did not make it, you need to partner with
someone whose idea makes it to the next round. If you can’t
find a partner, send me an email and I will try my best to find
you a partner.
5. The working unit from now on is the team and not the idea,
thus you and your team-mate are free to pursue any idea
whatsoever for the next stage. It will be the same after every
elimination round.
PREPARATION QUESTIONS/HOMEWORK
1. What would be some of the challenges in running these
idea tournaments in an organization? Should
organizations run these tournaments or not?
2. Naming/Branding Exercise: Identify a name/branding for your business. I need you to come up with a business name and a four
letter ticker symbol, which we will use in our simulated capital market. Naming is a search problem very similar to our search for a
good business idea (recall the metaphor of searching for the deepest point in an ocean). I would suggest that for finding a good
name, you employ the same principles that are behind the idea tournament in our course: a) Generate a large number of ideas b)
select c) refine d) iterate till you have an acceptable solution. I would encourage you to generate as many as 50-100 names and then
sequentially select the winner. Some resources to help you with this:
1. Recent research by KG on what makes for a good name. Referenced above, Download from SSRN
2. Igor Naming guide 15-Igor+Naming+Guide.pdf
CLASS LOGISTICS:
1. Please bring a timer or any other device that will help you pitch the opportunity to class in 240 seconds. You will have exactly
240 seconds and at the end of 240 seconds, you will be forced to stop.
2. After the pitches by teams of two, we will have a detailed survey covering the business prospects of the presented ideas. Based
on the results of the survey, we will select only half of the projects to go forward. The results of the survey will be announced at
end of the day 29th of January.
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE….
PREPARATION WORK:
1. Visit the website of Better Place, www.betterplace.com and familiarize
yourself with the concept of the business and the hype associated with
the business.
2. Analyze the business model of Better Place. What are the revenue
streams, cost streams and what is the asset velocity?
3. What are the risks in the business model, highlight environment risks,
opportunism risks?
4. What are the key uncertainties in this business model?
5. What should be the valuation of Better Place?
PROJECT WORK:
1. Analyze the business model of your venture. What are the revenue
streams, cost streams and what is the asset velocity?
2. What are the risks in the business model, highlight environment risks,
opportunism risks?
3. What are the key uncertainties and threats to this business model?
4. Email a 1 page summary of your analysis to
ideatournaments@gmail.com no later than 11 PM 31st of January.
PROJECT WORK:
1. Think of the key uncertainties that your venture faces. Can you design
experiments to test them in some limited way?
2. Design small experiments to test out the key uncertainties. You are
encouraged to develop a prototype of your product and service offering,
ideally a functional prototype; but at the very least a prototype that
enables testing. It is compulsory to get your hands dirty at this stage. This
means you need some real prototyping and data. Arm chair analysis can
lead to disqualification from the tournament.
3. Email to ideatournaments@gmail.com a 1 page summary of your
proposed experiment design no later than end of the day 3 rd Feb.
4. Over the next week, you are required to run some of these experiments
and report on the results of these to convince your classmates of the
viability of your business.
5. Useful Resources
1. Mechanical Turk: Human Intelligence Tasks
2. Google Adwords: Use for evaluating costs of acquiring customers
3. Google Analytics: Use for analyzing customer behavior on websites
4. Rent-a-coder : Outsource software development. Warning: may take more time
than the course permits
5. 99designs.com: Outsource design/branding tasks.
2. Note that after the prototype presentations, each of you will be able to provide comments to other teams in the session. We will use a
form for that purpose and then cut and distribute them immediately after class. For reference, here is the form I have used
before.... Proto-Feedback-2008.doc
SPSD: IDEA TOURNAMENTS KARAN GIROTRA INSEAD
14. PRIORITIZATION AND PLANNING
FUN READING:
1. Vanity Fair article on Segway. 14-segway-vanityfair.pdf
2. Steve jobs talk at Stanford. 14-JobsTalk-Stanford-2005.pdf
PREPARATION QUESTIONS:
1. What did the Segway team do well in creating the Segway
Human Transporter?
2. What concerns do you have about the Segway approach to
innovation?
After class today, we will conduct an in-class investor survey. For reference
purposes, here is the raw survey form, that I have used
before: InvestmentSurvey-Fall2008.doc . (Note to SEC Lawayers: This form does
not represent any binding offer for sale or purchase of securities.) The top 4
“What a puny plan.”
businesses based on committed investments will be publicly announced over the
next few weeks. - The Humungus in Mad Max: The Road Warrior
INFORMATION DESIGN
INFORMATION DESIGN
HELPFUL READINGS:
1. Chapters 4-6, from the Visual Display
of Quantitative Information by
Edward Tufte (I do recognize the
irony of giving you a bloated, lousy
B&W scan of these pages. You really
should buy the Tufte book.)
2. WIRED_Essays_On_Powerpoint.pdf
Tufte on Minard: Napoleon’s March to Moscow
FURTHER READINGS:
1. Interview with NYT graphics editor, for those really interested in information design.
2. Wikipedia article on Edward R. Tufte: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Tufte
3. Stanford alumni magazine article on Tufte: http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2007/marapr/features/tufte.html
4. The Cognitive style of Powerpoint, Edward Tufte. Download here