A socially responsible extension- The Weekend Business Challenge

Due to the holiday weekend, Nick and I decided to extend the scond Weekend Business Challenge until this Thursday, December 2nd, 2010. We wish you a bright start to the new week, and we are hoping to hear more of your ideas about CSR. Ciao!

Thank you - can the world be more beautiful?

At NVSBS, we are thankful for the innovators in this world. They bring new joy to our lives every day.

We are thankful for those who offer their time to criticize our ideas.

We would like to especially thank those who work while we are on a holiday.

We highly appreciate musicians, cooks, parents, teachers, artists, actors, and gardeners who sacrifice their time for the sake of what they feel is their calling in life.

We are thankful for those who make sacrifices for the sake of what they believe to be the right thing to do.

Thank you, readers. Thank you, subscribers. Thank you, critics and supporters. You bring meaning to this world.

What is corporate social responsibility? The Weekend Business Challenge 2

Corporate social responsibility – which people also call by other interesting names like CSR, sustainability, and corporate conscience – is a model of business behavior that regulates a company in a way that aims toward generating benefit to the society. This CSR entails activities that range from making donations to nonprofit organizations and hosting recycling programs to making social responsibility the entire company's pivotal goal. In its strongest form, CSR runs next to social entrepreneurship. It is unclear however which form of CSR bring the most monetary profit, and whether it is appropriate for profit and social responsibility to stand next to each other in the same discussion.

After a brief break, NVSBS is coming back to challenge your minds with a new Weekend Business Challenge. This time, we would like to hear your ideas fire up into a discussion of corporate social responsibility. Do you believe that CSR is necessary in the modern world or, rather, that it creates inefficiencies that hurt society? We'd like to hear every one of your ideas about how to best implement sustainability in a corporate environment.

When I think about CSR, my mind inevitably arrives at the thought that today, too many businesses participate in their actions because they think they are supposed to. Too companies create environmental sustainability programs because of a lack of better ideas. Unless your firm transforms the wind into energy, these commitments to alien goals will not be able to bring much benefit.

So what should we do? You tell me, and I will tell you.

This challenge will run until Sunday, November 28^th. Once we have all your submissions on the twenty-eighth, I will read and feature them in the post for that day. Also, I will answer my own questions and I expect that our collaboration will leave everybody with fresh ideas and satisfaction from spreading wisdom and increasing the world's well-being meter as a team.

How and why not to rush capital into your company

Perhaps the biggest question one faces when starting a venture for the first time is “How will you afford it?” That question goes both for leaving one's day job and finding capital to support the company. While for the first-time entrepreneur, keeping the day job is a good option that will spare him quite some worry – we've been there – finding fresh capital might be something to hold off for later. Two major streams of increased financial stability and decreased need for borrowing are savings and postponing spending altogether.

The reason saving is so important to success lies in future's uncertainty. If I rely on inheriting a large sum of money at some point in the future and thus neglect my work, my chances at wealth go down every minute I choose to daydream instead of writing a business plan. If a firm's prospect depends on a single angel investor that might or might not show up, I have to suspect that the firm will not live for long, either.

Therefore, if financial injections are inevitable for a venture, it's best to conjure them from personal savings. A borrowing-free approach will make the firm that much more attractive for outside investors later on. It will eliminate the burden for repayment to outside parties. It will relieve a firm from outside controllers. Napoleon Hill said it well in his Law of Success: forming the habit of saving is the only way to independence.

And yet, in most cases, one does not even have to resort to spending his savings for a company to enter its blooming season. A manufacturing firm's need for packaging is a good example of a situation where being thrifty can result in a better costs-to-profit ratio than developing an original spending plan. I'll admit it: Developing and manufacturing new packaging is a fun, creative process. And yet, today's world could use less boxes, bottles, and double cellophane wraps. Instead, one can use that which has already been made. Look, the humanity is looking to reduce the speed at which it fills its landfills. Not to be preachy or to point it out, but yes, great opportunity for some truly socially responsible innovation. Saves money, too.

An even richer source of increased ROI that doesn't require any spending are the intangible assets that inhabit our planet. We humans have things like knowledge, experience, and imagination. Those who have already passed on left us with some pretty good intellectual and physical infrastructure. Those who are still here have not yet reached their full life potential. So, 21^st century entrepreneur, go out there and make use of what other people are more than happy to offer. They will thank you for that.

Quickly before you go catching the wave of free underutilized opportunities, leave your comments and subscribe to the NVSBS blog. We hope you have a blast this weekend.

How to bring Frankenstein's creature to life and then profit from it

Mary Shelley's infamous protagonist Victor Frankenstein knew it from the moment his creature saw the world: Victor's principal venture was going to bring an ROI that even the most optimistic business plan could not predict. Whatever happened there? Victor invested his college years into developing a clear goal, and, before too long, his vision materialized.

Now, I hope that those of you who've read the book realize that I'm joking. NVSBS would not wish the outcome of Frankenstein's actions for anybody. But a part of the story's moral still holds true: With enough persistence and the right idea generation mechanism, one can reach any ambition, including bringing the dead back to life - I'm not even mentioning generating simple everyday sales. Later in the article, I've posted a video that showcases how entrepreneurs would employ Frankenstein's creature in a more desirable way. The video is an excellent example of innovative thought that allowed the German company that made it distribute an extraordinary advertisement by word-of-mouth. I strongly suspect that the reason behind this project's success at going viral rather quickly lies in five concise concepts behind idea generation.

1. Ask questions. Tom Szaky, the founder and CEO of TerraCycle, has said in a presentation I attended earlier this year that the whole idea behind his upcycling business started with the question: "What is garbage?" Often, inquiring beyond the matter of fact leads to either greater understanding of the world or to discovering plentiful pathways for innovation, like it did for Tom Szaky. If you make electronics, ask your neighbors about how their lives could be more convenient, and your research and development will see genius coming through. If you are a freelance writer, ask questions when reading the New York Times and your opinion pieces will flourish, and so on.

2. Welcome the unusual. The "unusual" is unusual because people have not recognized its value. What that means is that everything obscure holds abundant wealth for the person who sees its value first and then shows it to the rest. Early adopters also get to indulge in the benefits of welcoming the unusual before the crowd follows. Maybe it's risky, but also it's the only path to successful idea generation: everything that's no longer unusual already holds too many entrepreneurs to support any new business.

3. Embrace the obstacle. Life's troubles are the entrepreneur's biggest assets. Once you think of a way to overcome a hurdle and make life easier for everybody else, you will be able to harvest lots of advantages from your findings. Apple does this by eliminating bulky hardware. Blackberry does this by putting your e-mail account into your pocket. MS Outlook does this by combining the functionalities of multiple professional software packs under one roof. You get the picture.

4. Link unconnected areas. Being an expert in more than one area or just thinking about several topics on a daily basis can bring your idea generating abilities a mile closer to those of celebrated polymaths like Michelangelo and da Vinci, whose expertise ranged from engineering and anatomy to writing and sculpture. With that said, broad interests can put a small business owner at significant advantage because of the immense innovation possibilities that reaching into multiple fields keeps. If your firm is a computer repair store, and you minored in art in college, one day you might as well come up with the idea of gold-plating your customers' MacBooks as an extra service.

5. Use the resources on hand. Maybe neither you nor I hold millions in the bank vault, and getting capital in this economy might not be the easiest task either. However, you do have plenty of other assets that are already free. Not to limit you down, but here are some examples: public domain art, the local library, tap water, your congressman's ears, the ocean, the sky, your friends and family, and, importantly, your knowledge and experience.

Now let's look at the real Frankenstein's creature and why innovative thought is not nearly as scary as Mary Shelley dared to depict it.

Let us know in the comments what you thought about the video and how soon you could tell the monster's identity. And, finally, don't forget to subscribe; it's good for you.

How to invent a bicycle

Every now and then, an idea will stick to my mind and will not let go so easily. The invention will materialize in my imagination in different shapes and forms, and sometimes the idea will be so pervasive that I will put effort into making it happen. This "bug" may be a completely new thought or just an improvement on some previous development, but in any case, I predict that most readers here are not immune from the inventor syndrome either. From personal experience, I can say that the brain children of plenty of inventors, entrepreneurs, designers, and artists go through the following life cycle that I'd like to call instinctive idea generation:

1. An image of a final product suddenly pops up in the thinker's mind
2. The image goes through some massaging and development as a thought
3. The owner of the image puts it down on paper
4. A model of the conceptual product goes through tests
5. A final version of the product comes out into the markets

Realistic or not, this sequence is a recipe for creative disaster. It can work with aesthetic creations, but with anything else, the five-step system above fails to ensure that the product meets a need or serves any sort of purpose. Therefore, even if the final product manages to reach the point of launch, its best chance of success will be to become a fad, and then quickly die out. That resonates with the idea that instinctive idea generation may create a cool-looking object, but consumers will quickly realize its lack of meaning and abandon it to the creator's despair.

Nevertheless; I plead thee, innovator: Do not despair. Things are not so hopeless for the creative thinkers out there. The best way to ensure that a project fulfills a purpose is to start with a question or a problem instead of a ready image. As an illustration of a successful innovation-based venture, Artemy Lebedev Studio published overviews of the creation process for each of their designs. For them, every project starts with a clearly formulated goal. Then they proceed to the fun part of thinking and creating. The results are stable and sound.

We would love to hear about your experiences with innovation and creative business models. Furthermore, NVSBS strongly encourages innovative thinking and is here for any visionary who might want some advice about the practical side of it all. We look forward to seeing new comments and subscriptions, and you will hear from us on Sunday! Have a good Friday now.