Duke ECE 490L: How to Start New Ventures in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Poornima Vijayashankerpoornima@femgineer.com

Jeff Glass jeff.glass@duke.edu

Akshay Rautar118@duke.edu

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Introduction

• Story of how this course came to be!

• Pratt ’04 - ECE/CS

• R&D Engineer @ Synopsys

• Founding Engineer @ Mint.com

• Founder & CEO @ BizeeBee

• Founder of Femgineer.com

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Agenda

• Syllabus for this course

• Goals

• Unlisted goals

• Today’s lecture: Ideation

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Syllabus

• Lecture - Class Participation

• Readings - Quizzes

• Labs

• Final project

• Office hours: TTh 3-4pm CIEMAS 3431 & 3591

• e-mail listserv: duke-ece-490l@googlegroups.com

• Texts: Lean Analytics

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Goals

• Goals

• Commercialize your idea

• Understand market research

• Customer discovery and development

• Dynamics of teamwork

• Explore financial models and fundraising

• Unlisted Goals

• Participate in the Duke Startup Challenge

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Resources

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Advantage of being an engineer.

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Ideation.

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Resist the urge to build.

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Romantic period.

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“Value in a startup is validating learning not creation of stuff.” - Eric Ries, Lean Startup

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1. Come up with a hypothesis. 2. Figure out what you want to measure3. Run an experiment. 4. Measure results from experiment.5. Learn.6. Move on to next hypothesis.

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Uncertainty.

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Limited resources.

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Learning

ReleasingBuilding

Balancing act.

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Can apply to ANY business.

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Let’s get started!

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Purpose of this class is to help Goldilocks...

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No idea!

Too many ideas!

Is this the right idea?!

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Where do ideas come from?

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Creative Minds.

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The idea fairy.Past experiencesPassions

Pains

ReadingConversations

InterestsHobbies

Digesting

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Don’t jump into building...

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Ideation Philosophy

• Don’t fear thought crime!

• Put a team together

• Make a list of people to reach out to: mentors, potential teammates, experts, influencers.

• Don’t fall in love with an idea!

• Fall in love with the process of generating and executing on ideas.

• Realize that ideas evolve.

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More on Thought Crime

• Get another company to steal your idea.

• Tell them your idea!

• Execution is key.

• Eventually someone will steal your idea if it is good.

• Market leader.

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Two Paths

Invention

understand advances & limitations in technology & create a commercially viable product

e.g. transistors v. vacuum tube key to modern day electronics, incandescent light bulb vs. candle and heating oil

Re-Invention

improve upon an existing product

e.g. Mint - Quicken

e.g. Tesla - Hybrid

come up with a new take on an old concept

e.g. Twitter - telegram, sms

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Invention

• List new forms of technology that interest you

• Understand the limitations

• Potential application

• Existing technology

• Why is this so popular?

• What are its limitations?

• New forms of technology

• How does it outperform existing technology? Saves money/time, takes up less space, more reliable, longer life, higher quality.

• What is limiting it from becoming popular? Regulations, additional R&D, additional infrastructure, change in behavior?

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Re-Invention

• List 5 things you have thought of improving.

• Who faces these pains?

• Have they tried to solve the pain themselves or are there solutions that solve these pains?

• For each existing solution list why it rocks and why it sucks.

• What are some related pains?

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Techniques.

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Mind Mapping

• Visual outline of information

• Ground rules

• 1-2 hours per session with breaks.

• Don’t discount of judge any ideas!

• Take your time & don’t rush.

• Capture all ideas and connections.

• MindMeister

Supplemental Reading: Mind Mapping Guidelines31

Example of a Mind Map

BlogEducation

Consulting

Online Offline

Entrepreneurship Engineering Business Engineering

Brainstorming various directions to take the business mind map

Co-WorkingTwitter

Build prototypesMarketing

Analytics

Spotlighting women

Startups

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Review

• Ideation

• Invention & Re-Invention

• Thought Crime

• Techniques - Mind Mapping

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