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Discovering a Blue Ocean Idea
- 1123581321 9y agoText-only cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Yzj1yHEgE0J:https://capitalandgrowth.org/articles/720/part-3-six-paths-to-discovering-a-blue-ocean-idea.html&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5Yzj1yH...
- bobsil1 9y agoWhy fight over chewed-up turf? If you're able, focus on a greenfield hard tech idea well ahead of anyone else.
- kristiandupont 9y agoBecause the turf is actually there. Focusing on something well ahead of everybody else will very often lead you nowhere.
- ccozan 9y agoThere are numerous examples of ideas/business that were based on that ideas that came ahead of their time and lost big. Only a few people, for example Musk, might be able to bet on some idea and (maybe) win. He might want to fly now to Mars, but this way ahead, we are nowhere of this capability.
- timthelion 9y agoAhead of your time isn't just a problem of tech. Consumers won't buy into a product that they are "not ready for yet". A good example of this is CAS file systems al-la IPFS. The tech has been around for at least 35 years. plan9 had a fully functional CAS file system. But now, IPFS is finally getting traction, mostly because users are comfortable enough now with cloud-like services that they are capable of mentaly dealing with the abstraction.
- ergest 9y agoBecause you might be able to do a better job (think Google vs Hotbot, Facebook vs MySpace)
- bobsil1 9y agoSo focus on something fundamental, that everyone needs, using an approach that's far ahead.
- hyperpallium 9y agoThere's a weird comformity effect where one tends to think in the same terms as those around you, so you see the same issues, consider the same alternatives along the same dimensions. This can happen without you noticing it, your direct perception sublimating like a dream on waking. There is gold, just one or two steps off the beaten track, but we can't see it, because we are on rails, only thinking in terms the track affords. But it's not so easy to go off the rails: you can easily get disoriented and overwhelmed, and once you have found something, it's difficult to verify... and even harder to convince anyone else.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoNote, too, that there’s more garbage than gold off the rails. Simply going off the rails isn’t enough. Thoughtful exploration, on the other hand, can be tremendously rewarding.
- Lambdanaut 9y agoNote, three, that all garbage is gold under the light of a sufficiently child-like mind devoid of expectations, ideals, creeds, beliefs, biases, and stigmas. The insane man is only insane when in a world of sane men.
- dwaltrip 9y agoEhh. Some things are just not as useful as other things. This follows directly from the laws of nature. All elements lighter than iron _release_ energy when they fuse together, while iron and anything heavier must _consume_ energy to fuse together. Carbon is one of the most important elements for life due to its unique chemical properties and immense number of useful molecular arrangements. The molecule we call water is essential to life as well, as it is incredibly effective, compared to the alternatives, at transporting materials to and from different parts of an organism (among other things [1]). And so on... [1] http://www.ivyroses.com/Biology/Why-is-water-important-to-life.php http://www.ivyroses.com/Biology/Why-is-water-important-to-li...
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- mankash666 9y agoI find this to be empty & impractical. If this methodology were beneficial, blue ocean businesses would be propping up like mushrooms. I challenge anyone who's read this to propose a single blue ocean idea here
- contingencies 9y agoThink for yourself. (Edit because of downvotes: I was serious, this is a blue ocean idea. For example, imagine children with their own ontology of language and experience (not culturally acquired). That's about as blue ocean as you can get. Neural networks are pretty close. Neural news at nine.)
- nerdponx 9y agoThere are whole fields of anthropology, psychology, etc. debating how much of language and experience is learned versus innate. As for neural networks, generative models, genetic algorithms, etc., they can help us optimize on known search spaces but that's about all they can do. It's a big leap from designing simulation-optimized bicycle parts to generating truly new ideas.
- contingencies 9y agoNo, the field has moved a lot further than that. Did you read the recent Software 2.0 rant by the Tesla AI guy? https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 https://medium.com/@karpathy/software-2-0-a64152b37c35 Other good sources are The Master Algorithm (ML) or The Brain That Changes Itself (neuroscience), the former surveying general capabilities and limitations of various approaches and the later surveying findings from medicine on just how plastic our sensory inputs and interpretive capacities are through recent research.
- nerdponx 9y agoFirst of all, Karpathy is a heck of a lot more than the "Tesla AI guy". Second, he's describing a pretty radical implementation of what amounts to a new form of fuzzy constraint programming using exactly the technique I described: brute-force optimization on a very sophisticated objective function. It's fundamentally statistical, and it's still fundamentally an optimization problem. Neural networks happen to be modular compared to other optimization techniques, and they happen to do a miraculous job at capturing latent higher-order structure in these optimization problems. The real innovation he's describing is that we now have powerful enough optimizers that it's cheaper, easier, faster, and sometimes more reliable to just fuzzy-optimize problems instead of coding bespoke solutions for them. That's pretty amazing, but suggests absolutely nothing. Now, a self-modifying neural network might be interesting, that can monitor its own performance and decide when to retrain part of itself, mutate its own architecture, or request new training data. But we definitely are not there yet. With all that said, there's a much more down-to-earth version of your idea that neural networks can have their own ontology and experiences: that's just an anthropomorphization the latent structure that they capture. This isn't unique to NNs -- it's something researchers have been exploiting for decades. It's only a small stretch to argue that that's what fitting a decision tree or a principal components model is. This is reflected directly in the jargon that these models "learn" a representation of the data. You can extract new representations of reality right now by running HDBSCAN on a data set of your choice. Neural networks just let us scale that up to richer, higher-dimensional problems. Maybe that's all "experience" really is, consuming data from the world and encoding various representations of that data. But when it comes to generating truly novel ideas, instead of incremental improvements on existing ideas, I'm bearish on how far our current neural network technology can go. Maybe AlphaGo, which apparently invented new Go strategies that no human player had ever thought of, is a counterexample. Or it's the exception that proves the rule. I guess we'll see as computation power continues to improve.
- muzani 9y agoBe careful of blue ocean ideas though. Most of the time, the market might not exist yet. The ocean is blue because there's nothing to feed on there.
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- baybal2 9y agoChinese factories and OEMs are great at this soft of things, and they do it in a very simple way. That simple way is rather hard to adopt for companies in the West that are invested in their "core product" even if they have full realization that it is about to die. Remember things like selfie sticks, electronic cigars, the bloody wifi lightbulbs and kettles, hoverboards, child trackers, consumer grade drones, and tons of other stuff that most people buy without giving any thought to who and how made the original product.
- baybal2 9y agoTake a look what Chinese do, and their logic: Making manufacturing business is HARD, harder, or many times harder than a yet another online service. Growing and scaling such business is also hard, and it does not scale much downward as such (you have to fire workers, and they riot on you, storm your apartment and beat you and your familiy.) The business is noticeably seasonal and have sharp highs and lows when it comes to consumer goods. "The next big thing" opportunity like phones and tablets are come and go, they last a maximum of 2 "feast" years. There are "cash crop" type products like battery banks, chargers, usb flash sticks. It makes profit all the time, but it's not that high. In between big contracts, or when the factory is busy making products for itself in a feast year, factory owner do not shed capacity, but switch most of if to cash crop product Then he puts together most talented engineers and gives them task to invent random stuff, and do trial run manufacturing. Instead of setting up a brand around these new products, they are unceremoniously dumped to trade agents. If agents will be placing a lot of repeating orders, then, more consideration will be given to such product. That is "the complicated Chinese strategy" in 9 sentences.
- mannykannot 9y agoMetaphors are easier to come by than good ideas.
- pascalxus 9y agoThe hard part isn't ideas. The hard part is finding actual problems that can be solved in a better way. As ycombinator put it: You have to "find customers with their hair on fire". Finding that kind of problem, along with a better way to solve that problem, is the key.
- snarf21 9y agoExactly, execution is everything. Ideas are, at best, a head start. People tend to focus too much on the idea and not the value proposition. Remember, people will always buy a "better" life, you just have to make sure you can give it to them.
- platz 9y agoHe's not even talking about execution. He's referring to understanding customers needs.
- lucas_membrane 9y agoAm I a wrong to be a bit put off by seeing 'complimentary' twice in prominent places in the article where if one saw 'compl_mentary' one would be 99.999% certain that the '_' should be an 'e'? May we dare assess quality of thought by quality of expression nowadays? Perhaps, for some reason beyond me, the writer indeed meant 'complimentary.' Perhaps the writer is an ESL writer who is being kind enough to write my language for my benefit. Here is my blue ocean alternative to address this obstacle to understanding: offer those who post an easy and guilt-free way to disclose, as a tourist does when reading phonetic translations from a cheat-sheet, that they are using a language in which they are likely to err for the benefit of the audience. Or perhaps this comment text box could allow proof-reading a translation of the contents to another language before posting. Would that be a complementary feature?