Quiz 2 Review

Choosing your identity

- Entrepreneurial strategy:
o Choose your strategy
 Choose your customers
 Choose your technology
 Technologies for an application: which technology should be
selected for autonomous driving?
 How can you go beyond broad speculations & have a meaningful
forecast of how fast technologies are likely to evolve?
 The technology S-curve: a period of technology exploration
followed by a period of technological exploitation…. But whether
to explore or exploit is (at least in part) a choice of the innovator/
manager…

 The technology s-curve at work:

o Powerful & widely used tool for tools for the analysis of
technology evolution EXTREMELY important to think
carefully about the techs you’re studying & adapting the
framework to fit the application
o Framework can be applied at multiple “levels” of analysis
& possible to gain insights from playing around with
different levels of “aggregation”
o Helps to start a discussion about what kinds of capabilities
to invest in, what types of problems to focus on, and
potential for emerging technologies to overturn existing
 sources of competitive advantage

o For a start up, new S-curves allow you to choose a

technology to reshape an industry

o For given idea, an innovator chooses between different

potential S-Curves trajectories, each which reflects a
different mix of exploration vs. exploitation

o Choosing among technologies STEPS:

 Compare distinct technologies
 Divide diff techs into useful & meaningful
categories. If overlap -> group them into 1
S-Curve
 Assessing performance metrics
 Comparisons involve quantitative &
qualitative metrics & benchmarking
 Assess the likely path of each S-curve
 Use hard data & informed speculation; how
choices can impact S-Curve to move ahead
rapidly
 Choose your S-curve:
 Range of tech & innovates you can leverage;
1 or 2 techs no one has mastered in market
yet
 Choose your competition
 Choose your organization
 Choosing organization identity
o 4 parts:
o Founders Purpose:
 What do founders want to accomplish? What is the
purpose? What does success look like?
 Connection to Steve jobs – what is he trying to
accomplish? What would he NOT do?
o External Position:
 How will the firm position itself to achieve its
objective? Strategic commitment to product &
factor markets. Shaping the industry. Reputation.
 Core strategic commitments:
o What is the relationship with
customers?
o How are you positioned within
channels?
o What types of customer research &
learning will we undertake? How
much commitment do we have to
our current customers?
o What kind of reputation do we want
with customers, supply chain
partners & competitors?
o How do we establish a reputation?
o How are we establishing leadership
& defining the industry in which we
participate?
o Internal Capabilities:
 Founding team & responsibilities. Capability
development. Capital investments. Resources.
Organizational design. Incentives. Culture.
 The structure of the founding team:
o Who is the first person you hire?
Second?
o What capabilities are you building?
o What are the main capital
investments we need to undertake?
o What resources do we need to
maintain under our control?
o What is the boundary of the firm?
o How do we learn and experiment?
 o How can we establish the norms &
incentives to create a great culture?
o Ecosystem:
 Founding location. Rely on ecosystem resources.
Mentors, angels, accelerators. Shaping the
ecosystem.
 Relationship with surrounding environment
o Which geographic location are we
choosing for our venture?
o What type of resources in the
ecosystem are we relying on?
o How will the support from the
ecosystem translate into our
success?
o How can we contribute to the
ecosystem?

o Value creation hypothesis
o Value capture hypothesis