http://www.ms.lt/ The
Minciu Sodas laboratory 2002.VII.08
Business Ecosystems
for Developing New Markets
Invitation
| Product
| Company
| Finances
and Management | Plans
for Growth
Invitation
How can your company be the
first to recognize promising innovations? Use your strategic vision to attract
proposals that go beyond your current strengths. Set up a business ecosystem
where your creative leaders enlist outside innovators to generate synergy. Develop
new customers, suppliers, capabilities and parallel possibilities.
Product
Successful companies spend on R&D
to generate opportunity. Risks are managed by estimating and averaging them.
However, the most promising start-ups arise where the risks are least
measurable. How can corporate R&D play the game of low-capital opportunists?
Thoughtful companies spend a portion of their R&D budget, say 5%, on
outside projects that fall within strategic interests, but go beyond current
strengths. Unfortunately, there is no rational way to select the right projects.
Instead, we propose the funding of a research ecosystem which would
focus on people rather than projects.
Spend the money that you normally would on evaluation, directly on getting things done.
Let the business opportunity sort itself out. Express that opportunity directly through people,
rather than institutions. Allow dynamic opportunities to grow in scale until they become noteworthy.
Help them find their first real customer. Nothing educates quite like the marketplace.
We set up this business ecosystem for you
so that it simultaneously furthers and selects the best people. It includes:
- A public declaration of your strategic interest.
- An open invitation to all who wish to pursue your strategic interest.
- A selection process that admits only those outsiders who are demonstrably
constructive.
- An internal distribution of funds to creative leaders throughout your
company as small scale budgets to be spent within this business ecosystem.
- A facilitated matchmaking of your creative leaders with constructive
outsiders who might be of service.
- A simple market for handling payment for services performed.
- An outreach program to inform key outsiders of private opportunities to
work for or with your company.
- A development program for those constructive outsiders who generate the
most synergy amongst your creative leaders.
- A private presentation of proposals for you by those champion outsiders.
- A quantitative measure of the performance of your business ecosystem.
- A qualitative analysis of how performance might be improved.
Your
business ecosystem will allow you to compartmentalize that R&D for which the
risk can't be directly measured. You will foster and measure innovation with our
help by tuning the ecosystem to grow the best opportunity. Your investment will
project your strategic vision both within and around your company.
Business ecosystem lets opportunity sort itself out until it is clear which
ones are promising, and helps them find their first real customers and suppliers.
Then it is possible to evaluate opportunity, including the capability and parallel
possibilities.
Company
Minciu Sodas is an open laboratory
for serving and organizing independent thinkers. We bring together our
individual projects around shared endeavors. We remake our lives and our world
by caring about thinking.
Minciu Sodas serves your enterprise by
integrating constructive people around your purposes. Our laboratory focuses our
minds on the questions and answers that get things done.
In 2000, we
received $10,000 from TheBrain and MindManager to develop an import/export
standard for software tools for organizing thoughts. We organized a
working group of users and makers of such tools. We drafted a standard,
which we pursued through the Infrared Data
Association and the XML for Topic Maps
Authoring Group .
In 2001, we received $10,000 from Agile Media to
organize and train a pool of web designers in Lithuania. We jumpstarted a
thriving community and drafted engineering strategies for mass customizing
websites.
For your project, we develop an atmosphere where your purposes
resonate. Amazingly, projects continue to build momentum long after
funding has ended. Each new project adds new people and makes for new
synergy.
Finances and Management
The Minciu Sodas
laboratory is a sole proprietorship of Andrius Kulikauskas, Ph.D. , a
dual citizen of the USA and Lithuania. From 1998 to 2002 he invested
$70,000 to develop the laboratory. He excels at clarifying the essence of
a system, and organizing people around a vision.
Minciu Sodas
draws on the talents of thirty active members. Several of our leaders are
available for work through our lab:
Plans for Growth
We are seeking $250,000 to
fund a business ecosystem. Our laboratory attracts wonderful talent.
We plan to demonstrate that enterprises benefit from funding
individual innovators. ( View projections
).
Assume that we can find one-half additional funding from new funders,
with similar pyramid shape. And customers to match the funding at the highest level.
The goal is to find the first customers and suppliers. We can project the number of
customers and suppliers. Then the opportunity can be evaluated. We can assume that
we've hit a niche for the service. Therefore we've crossed the chasm at the 15% mark.
Can we make any judgement about the niche size? We can assume that the pragmatic
threshold was bridged only by the highest tier of the pyramid. This means that if the
number of levels is n, then the number of non-pragmatic levels is n-1 and is
representative of the 15% of customers who are enthusiasts and visionairies. So, if the
pyramid is successful, and the customer is real, then the niche size which that
customer represents should be at least S = 2.33*N - 3.33 additional customers.
We're approaching enterprises that need to cultivate partnerships.
- Corporations that want to achieve strategic interests through shared
public endeavors.
- Governments and non-profit organizations whose mission is to build up the
public wealth.
- Start-ups that need to flesh out their ideas and develop a business
context for them.
- Project managers within large corporations who need to show their
projects' potential.
- Political leaders who wish to encourage public participation to get things
done.
- Corporations who want their independent thinkers to express themselves and
integrate themselves.
We are looking for a funder with a vision.
- A bank dedicated to clarifying life's big decisions.
- A software maker dedicated to reorganizing life's experiences.
- A pharmaceutical company dedicated to prescribing quality of life.
You benefit, as an R&D expense, from learning how our research
ecosystem can function as a marketplace, sustaining itself, justifying itself,
and rewarding investments. We can then work with you to set up and
optimize business ecosystems dedicated to strategic endeavors.
Vision is
pursued through change. Change comes from a minority. No status quo
can directly reward those who go against it. Supporters must come from
outside.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. noted that a healthy
organization lives within a larger movement. The same is true for an
enterprise that brings together workers and their families, customers and
suppliers, shareholders and managers, neighbors and regulators. Your
enterprise can apply its integrity to energize the larger movement that will
work openly for change. Our business ecosystem gives many shapes to
working openly: consultations, assignments, fellowships, associations,
partnerships.
Our business ecosystem pumps outside talent amongst
knowledge workers. Talent challenges us to care to think: When to follow
rules, when to break them? When to invent, when to implement? Support change, or
initiate it? Learn or innovate? Act or direct? Inspire others, or motivate
ourselves? Share knowledge, or reinvent it? Our funder gains slack: a
ready pool of talent, a vehicle for projecting corporate values, and an open
space for forming strategic partnerships.
We have analyzed six marketplaces for open
source software that arose in 1999. We are most similar to
SourceXchange, the brainchild of Hewlett-Packard's corporate IT department,
which wanted to shield contractors from the complexities of its contracting
process. HP wanted to outsource all projects that didn't need to be part of HP's
intellectual property. They wanted access to great talent, and a time-to-market
advantage, but they needed a predictable market. HP wanted their competitors to
be able to participate as well. HP approached O'Reilly Associates, offering some
funding as well as dozens of projects in the $5,000 - $40,000, six man week to
four man month range. Brian Behlendorf was chosen to lead CollabNet , but SourceXchange was overshadowed
by CollabNet's portal for collaboration. CollabNet now hosts specialized
developer communities sponsored by Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems,
Oracle, etc.
We've concluded that our business ecosystem should harness
for our funders the passions of our participants. We'd like to harness the
energy of our
working group to develop a network of software tools for augmenting our
thinking. For example, Hewlett-Packard might sponsor work to explore how
large-sized printers could be used in conjunction with tools for organizing
thoughts. Their purpose would be to open up new markets to increase sales of
such printers. Hewlett-Packard would give its own researchers budgets to spend
at our laboratory, to publicly explore use cases, promote ideas, attract
industries, invite feedback.
Such work is best done openly.
We have attracted the talent, and have a blueprint for our economy .
We need $125,000 to fund our laboratory expenses for one year, and
$125,000 to pump our business ecosystem. We are looking for a corporation
with a strategic endeavor around which we might organize our economy. We
would then work to attract other corporations. Alternatively, we are
looking for an investor who desires a sizeable return from each such economy,
and would benefit from close ties with such corporate endeavors and
partnerships.
Andrius Kulikauskas
Direktorius
Minciu
Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@ms.lt
+1 (773) 651-3785
Chicago,
Illinois