From the Miami Herald.

“Managers authentically want creativity and people authentically cherish it,” says Jennifer Mueller, an assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. “But if you want to accept a creative idea, then you’ll have to come to terms with the idea that you don’t know with any degree of certainty that it will work. People often reject creative ideas is because they want to diminish uncertainty.”

Mueller studied this phenomenon after continuously listening to frustrated product developers whose concepts had been overlooked. She in turn devised experiments that paired creative words such as “novel” and “inventive” with both a positive word, such as “heaven” or “love,” and then separately with a negative word, such as “vomit” or “rot.” She found her subjects — who beforehand readily agreed to appreciating creativity — more rapidly agreed with the negative associations than they did with the positive pairings.

“We think of things in terms of categories and we have associations with these categories,” says Mueller. “It’s like stereotyping. We can associate women with warmth but that doesn’t mean it’s true — creativity is the same. It makes people feel uncertain.”

Eliminate doubt in your initiatives by making sure your presentation answers the questions that will be on the minds of the decision-makers, says Tom Steenburgh, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. They’ll want to know: 1) Whether there is a burning need for your product or service. 2) How your idea will meet that need. 3) The reasons you’re the person to carry out the task. Start it all off, says Steenburgh, by asking your audience a question or presenting them with a puzzle.

“Grab their imagination,” he says. “It’s like when you go to the theater and the curtain goes up, you’re ready for anything. Your audience is there with you. Open up the world of possibilities.”

You’ll also want to include in your presentation some cold, hard numbers, says John Layzell, a small business consultant in South Florida. Consider calculating the cost, potential returns or even some sales projections, he says.

“If you have a creative person pitching to a logical person it’s almost as if they’re speaking a different language,” says Layzell. “You have to pitch so it makes sense to them.”

Closed stores look ugly for passerby and detract from the streets they are, making them look less attractive and vibrant. That’s why the idea of dressing them up with attractive fake shop fronts, with colorful window displays is such a good one. Fake shop fronts are starting to appear in the South East of England, where the recession has taken its toll and many shops have closed, and are now making their way over to the US. As well as improving the appearance of the shopping street, they would also seem to have the benefit of inspiring would-be tenants what the store could look like when occupied. One company that is creating these fake fronts is Shopjacket and prices start from just a few thousand dollars.

These ones don’t just say what the business owner does, they demonstrate it.

What is it about the Zuckerberg story and how he founded Facebook that is drawing so much interest? The obvious answer is that he has become the world’s youngest billionaire at 26 years old and people would love to know how he did it. The film of course is a more than a story of building wealth – that would be boring – it’s about the network of friends and collaborators that helped Mark Z build his business. He doesn’t come across too well in the film, but as a geeky and duplicitous, though brilliant nerd, with no social skills and a chip on his shoulder because his girlfriend dumped him. Part of the story is about him apparently stealing the idea for Facebook from two twin brothers from Harvard who had approached him to work on a similar idea, as well as his dealings with his Facebook co-founder and how over time he was squeezed out of the company. But, the impression we are left with  should not be that it was all about the idea for Facebook that mattered, and Zuckerberg’s success is due to being opportunistic: that misses the point. Zuckerberg succeeded because he did what all great entrepreneurs did: he saw the beginnings of an idea, no doubt inspired by the twin’s idea, and from it created a big bold vision that nothing would deter him from. He put all of his energy and ability into making it happen because he saw its huge potential. A key part to staying true to the vision was the advice of Sean Parker, co-founder of Napster, who like Zuckerberg saw the potential of Facebook to be absolutely transformation in the role the web can play in people’s social lives.

So what lessons can we learn from the Zuckerberg story:

1. Ideas are two a penny, it’s what we do with them that counts.

2. Often there isn’t one single ‘big idea’ when it comes to business, it’s a combination of many small ideas  that make something compelling.

3. Creating a vision to where you want your idea venture to go is key.

4. Execution is everything. Facebook works because it fulfills a basic human need and is easy to use.

5. Collaborate with people who share your vision and offer skills you don’t have.

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I liked this blog post from entrepreneur Chris Dixon and decided to reproduce it in its entirety. Thanks Chris.

Developing new startup ideas

March 14th, 2010 | careers, product design, startups

If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I recommend you do it.  Be the opposite of secretive.  Create a Google spreadsheet where you list every idea you can think, even really half-baked ones.  Include ideas you hear about (make sure you keep track of who had which idea so you can credit them/include them later).

Then take the spreadsheet and show it to every smart person you can get a meeting with and walk through each idea.  Talk to VCs, entrepreneurs, potential customers, and people working at big companies in relevant industries. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn.  The odds that someone will hear an idea and go start a competitor are close to zero.  The odds you’ll learn which ideas are good and bad and how to improve them are very high.

Every conversation will contain some signal and some noise. Separating the two is tricky. Here are some broad rules of thumb I’ve developed for how to filter feedback based to the profession of the person giving it to you.

1) Employees at relevant big companies. These people are great at providing facts (“Google has 100 people working on that problem”) but their judgment about the quality of startup ideas is generally bad. They tend to have goggles on that makes them think every good idea in their industry is already being built within their company.  For example, every security industry person I talked to thought SiteAdvisor was a bad idea.  (If it wasn’t, they think, someone at McAfee or Symantec company would have already built it!)

2) VCs. VCs are good at telling you about similar companies in the past and present and critiquing your idea in an “MBA-like” way:  will it scale? what are the economics? what is the best marketing strategy?  I would listen to them on these topics but pretty much ignore whether they think your idea is good or bad.

3) Potential customers.  If your product is B2B, remember you’ll be selling to that person 2-3 years from now and by then the world and their priorities will likely have radically changed.  If your product is B2C, it’s interesting to hear how regular consumers think about your product but often they really need to use it fully built and in the proper context to really judge it.

4) Entrepreneurs. This is the one group I listen to without a filter.

Even though I have no intention of starting a new company for a long time (if ever), I still keep my idea spreadsheet and update it periodically.  Some of the ideas I wrote down a few years ago are now companies started by other people (some successful, some not).  A few I had the chance to invest in. It’s interesting to compare my notes and ratings of each idea with how those companies have actually performed. I also keep a list of “on the beach” ideas in case I have time in between startups. These are mostly non-profit ideas.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get to those but they are particularly fun to think about.

Punk band Anti-Flag and useless.org released a limited edition tee shirt for Earth Day. The shirts are unwanted shirts that were gathering dust in Anti-Flag’s warehouse, that have now been repurposed with a new message. All proceeds fund a water and sanitation project in Sierra Leone.

See more details here.