that I've given my uni software plus in younger hands - Michael Aichinger - and launched my new business.
A little review:
Exploit the wu-wei paradox
I am still passionate about transforming future technologies into margins. I planned to work less, and do more - hoping the wu-wei principle will help me: let the complex stream work for me.
When you start your own business, it's just you and your ideas. But I had already featured partners…continuing work with them made it easy.
Building technology stacks first
Technology trends influenced my entire business life. I adopted technologies in their infancies, including computer graphics, symbolic computation, machine learning…always testing new platforms like the massive parallel computing muscles…
For over 25 years now I deal with Wolfram Language - the language to program everything. First in client-, then in partner- (UnRisk…) now in advisory-projects.
I'm wondering that it's still not a big climber in ratings of programming languages. To me it's confirming that "great" doesn't always mean "popular"
From its many advantages I pick two: the internal value of building technology stacks easily…and the external value of its declarative nature that let innovators build functions, tasks and workflows like "stories".
What always struck me when developing technology businesses...and still does:
The fear of regret
When I made my first tumbling steps into computing, in the mid 70s, nearly everybody agreed: "No one ever has got fired for buying IBM".
A wonderful example of understanding "defensive decision making". This is not "in search of the optimal risk" - it is loss aversion. Choose those, being good in not being bad?!
To remove this kind of fear is one of the big challenges in innovation marketing. Innovators need to know that at first they make things for somebody, not everybody.
Yes, loss aversion can make sales figures disappointing:
The eager sellers and stony buyers principle
I've written about this principles in past posts...
It tells us that sellers overrate their innovation's benefit threefold and that buyers overrate threefold what they have…the mismatch is one to nine…
We should buy that green electric car but their refueling isn't that easy, right?
What to do? Make innovations thats gains outweigh the losses by far? 10times improvements are rare.
The advice is to help actors managing the behavior changes required by the product changes…I've developed rules that help reducing the mismatch.
Rational markets?
Markets seem to be adaptive, but do we really have an idea why business works as it does?
We know from financial markets that the market efficiency hypothesis doesn't hold. Market behavior is, partially, predictable on the long run.
Rational buyers would ask for ugly cars, right?
Innovators that understand that some behavior is predictably irrational will have a competitive advantage…when, say, finding the right position on the value / cost map.
To understand markets, we've big data?
Big data is a big joke
The major concern is not about the access to such data and how to slice and dice them, but the nature of the problem. It is all about high-dimension-low-number-of-samples and that in those sets large deviations are more attributable to noise than to insight…as well, as the fact that data need to be "uncooked".
Life in the market data salt mines is often too hard...
The trust vs attention dance
Both are scarce elements in our businesses. Trust is fragile and attention is limited. If clients want constant attention to trust us, we might become a problem.
And in fact we find trusted brands that are not at top of an attention list. A misunderstood brand promise can kill businesses.
There are tactics to avoid falling in his kind of traps. One, I always recommended using, might be seen as arrogant: "No, this innovation is not for you!"
Did I stand still...
just exploiting my experiences dealing with innovation for 40 years?
I've developed The Innovation Mesh that adds emotional factors...when assessing an innovation.
More general, I've worked on principles that help optimizing market risk…atop my understanding of the essence of financial risk management…(value at) risk of the jungle.
Innovation means new. New means uncertain…
Antifragile systems are immune to prediction errors. Antifragility gains from volatilities and uncertainty…ways to the antifragile include stressors, redundancy, tinkering…and optionality.
Real options help "buying" antifragility. I've put significant efforts in segmenting markets...and intensified partnerships with real options valuation tool makers and application experts.
It will be an exciting next year.
Working less and do more I'll need to sharpen the methodologies and tools and rely even more on featured partnerships.