 The next talk is a slight change but it's going to be even bigger and better than the ones we have. I will do a very short intro and hand you over. Alec, too, you've already seen before is actually Head of Entrepreneurship. Good intro! Strong intro! Head of Entrepreneurship at City University. He's going to talk about problems not solutions. Rhaid i'n meddwl yma. Mae'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio wedi'i gweld 5 munud. Felly mae'n rhan i'r ddafodd y Dacol. Ond oherwydd, mae'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio a'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Mae'n gweithio'n hyllustu, ond gweithio'r methodoli, i gyd o'r delwch, gorfodd i'r wy lluniau gyda lle. Ond, er defnyddio'n gweithio'r cyfrifio, mae'n cyfrifio gyda'r ddweud i'r ddweud i dweud i'r ddleuniau. Ond defnyddio'n gyfrifio i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i mi... ond rwy'n fy有 chсяf hwylid, pa dyna'n gyhoeddi'r rhidio. Ond rwy'n ymddir i fy mrydd fel y dyddigol am gyfrifio'i'r ddweud i mi i ganddo i ymd countrysideau Gallwch, gallwch, gallwch. Roeddwch, gallwch. Rydyn ni'n rhaid i'ch gael eu lle. Rwy'n cael ei ddaeth am y mic. Roeddwch. Roeddwch. Roeddwch i chi'n rhaid i'r gael, rydyn ni'n ddysgu eu mic. Roeddwch. Roeddwch. Roeddwch wedi bod nhw'n ystyried o'r ddysgu o'r ffarmysysgol yma, a rydyn ni wedi'u gweithio gyda'r cyffordd rhaid. Roeddwch i'n gweithio'r lab yn yw? Roedd, yna. Mae'r gilydd gyda'n gwybod. Mae'n erbyn i'n mynd i gyd a ganddoch. Mae'n golygu'r ysgol a'r unedig ffordd, a'r Unedig Ym Mhartfordshire a'r LSE. Mae'n rhan o'r hyn rhan o'r mhagor ystod. Mae'n rhan o'r hyn ar y cyflawn i'w sgwrs. Mae'n rhan o'r hyn o'r dysgu'r sgwrs o'r sgwrs a'r helyn o'r llwyfr o'r ffordd i'w dweud o'r ddaf yn ymgyrchol. am y syniad ysgrifennu syniad yn ffordd, a rwy'n gwneud yn gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Ond yna, rwy'n gweithio yn digwydd, rwy'n gweithio i'r astudio'n gweithio'n gweithio, oed yn ymgylcheddu, ac wedi bod yn ffortunadau ar y cyd-aerffaniaeth eich cyfrifiadau yn y cwmwr, ymlaen o'r gychwyn i'r ysgol, felly'n i'n nhw'n uchymai'n gweithio'r atau Cynwys ydych chi'n gwybod i'r rai. Felly, o'r gwaith, o'n ddiddorol, sy'n ddiddorol am ffand, ddiddorol am wahanol yma yw amlwg, dyfodol a'r wahanol ar y cyfnod ddiddorol i'r cyfrifroír maen nhw wedi ar 100 oed. Felly dyna, mae'r ddiddorol, yn fath o bwysig ymddangos, yn ffordd i'r ddiddorol am ffanddau ar y cyfnodol. Maen nhw'n ddiddorol a'r ysgolwch ar y cyfarwyr sy'n ddiddorol. a we run all of our programmes for them. So this is something that I stress to all of our students. When they're thinking about the very... You know, their concepts at the very beginning of their journey of starting a business, it's all about identifying problems. Lots of people find it very, very easy to jump to a solution or have an idea. That's the fun bit. I mean, that happens quite quickly. But actually identifying a problem is the key to having a successful idea or product or service or whatever it is you're making. And so I don't mean for this presentation to be patronising in any way. It is fairly basic, but hopefully it'll be enjoyable and you'll kind of think that it's relevant as well. So here we go. So why problems? Does anybody want to hazard a guess as to why we start with a problem? Yep? Because people will be willing today for the solution. That's true. You can make it someone's problem and then you've created a business model. That's another nice way of doing it. Yep. Yes, so a problem has a contained amount of things that you can solve. And within that, there's probably money to be made. That's definitely true. But problems exist and there are so many of them. We'll come forward to some of these solutions that we talk about in a minute. But problems are definable. They're there. They exist. They're already there. If you're creating ideas before you've actually identified what you're solving, then you might be in this loop of never-ending innovation that doesn't solve anything. And innovation is a whole other kettle of fish. And I stress this to all of our students because the journey of starting a company is very similar to this rather than that. And a lot of our students do expect, ah, I'm just going to create the next Snapchat or I'm just going to create an app where we can share photos. And it's expensive and it's time consuming, as I'm sure some of you will agree. It takes hours of your time to create a business. And if you do it and at the end of it, you're not solving anyone's problem, then you haven't got a market. You haven't got a business model. So why not start at the very beginning with solving someone's problem? Are you familiar with this model, the lean canvas model? So this takes elements of how you construct a business and very simply puts it in a map. And you can look at each one of these elements and start to apply how your business operates or if you've got a new product or a new service. It's actually very useful and very quick, especially if you're in a team meeting and you're thinking about the next feature or you're maybe diversifying your range of services, then you can quickly mock it up with this. And the map literally does say, what's the problem? What are we offering? What's our USP? And why are we the best at doing this against our competitors? There are many models that have a different type of makeup as well. And you look at your customer segments as well. And there are relationships between these segments on the map that define if you're solving a problem, there's a way of measuring that, and also customer development. So where is your market? And then you get something called a product-solution fit or a product-market fit. But we won't go too much into the theory. This you can find on the internet anywhere. And there's lots of really good videos on YouTube which explain it really, really simply. But if you haven't used it before, have a go. It's good for some people, but not for others. The bits we're going to concentrate on are the problem-solution area for this brief talk. Thomas Edison, he was a smart guy. And I like this quote, because I think it sums up what I'm trying to tell you guys. He would like to find out what the world wanted first and then he would invent it. There was no sort of inventing something and then coming back to the problem of solving. And I reiterate that continuously, but that's a point at the talk. However, he did have a couple of failures. He made these dulls which projected a noise which was a bit like scratching on a blackboard. And they were attracted from the market very quickly. So he wasn't perfect in any way, but I like what he said about problem-solving. So now we're going to explore a few things together, starting with looking at the problem itself. So how do you identify what is a good problem? And there are these elements that you would look for in a problem. So even if you think you found something that's got solvable criteria, you might want to consider these. Is it valid? Does it actually exist as a problem? Is it a problem, I don't know, after eating chewing gum that the water makes your mouth feel colder? Maybe that's a first world problem. Is it important to anyone? Does it actually matter to anybody? Is there a market out there that's willing to pay for this sort of stuff? Is it well defined? Does it have boundaries? Is it defined by time or budget or it could be many things? And most importantly, can you do anything about it? And we'll talk about wicked problems in a minute. And competitors, has it been solved already? That's not a problem. I mean, that's not too much of an issue. Many of you are probably doing similar things in this room. But what defines you against your competitors is your USP or your unique value proposition. So if you can design something that's slightly better or at least your users and your customer segment, then that's fine. So competitors sometimes drive you to perform even better. Now, sorry, the lights aren't great in here to show you what that is. Does anybody know what that is? Yeah? Did someone say yes? Yes. Yes, sorry, yeah. Yeah, is it in Brazil where they put the water bottle to bleach it? Yes, yeah. Through the room. Yeah, fantastic. So this is a brilliant example of problem solving. In the factories in Brazil, at which there are plenty, this is in the favelas up in the hills, there are lots of workshops, there's lots of industry actually in the favelas and they suffer from not having a regular light source because they're using, they're farming off the mains electricity illegally to power the factories. They keep on getting power cuts. And if you're working with some heavy machinery or something fairly dangerous, it's not going to end well. So what one of the engineers came up with was cutting a hole in the ceiling and filling a two litre bottle of Coke with water and a bit of bleach helps to frack the light into the factories. And it's equivalent to something like a 60 watt light bulb. So the problem there was people were hurting themselves and probably dying in these factories in the favelas. So how did they solve this? They needed to create more light within those factories and this cost next to nothing. This is using existing materials to do it. Fantastic. This is another one of my favourite examples. Has anybody seen this before? So that there that the baby is wearing is an incubator. And it doesn't look like one of the incubators that you'd normally see in a hospital but it does exactly the same thing. Because essentially what an incubator does is help regulate the temperature of a baby which is critical in early life and it helps reduce that child mortality rate which is really, really high in countries across some of Africa and South America. So a group of students at Stanford were tasked with the challenge of developing an incubator for 1% of the cost of a modern day incubator. And this is what they did. And they did it so successfully that now this is distributed throughout the world by the UN and help organisations in those countries. Saving, literally saving lives. Because the core problem they were trying to solve was we need something cheap that is going to help maintain the temperature of a baby from birth. And they've done that when they've saved lives. That's pretty impactful. Can't remember why I put this slide in but it annoys me to look at that. I don't know about you guys. That's right. The paperclip itself. Does anybody know the origin of the paperclip? It was solving the problem of attaching a label to fabrics in I think it was a sofa shop back in the day, quite a long time ago. And it literally came about from bending a piece of wire and attaching the label to the fabric. And that's where the paperclip came from and now we use it in everyday life. It's origins actually had a use that's specific to the problem that they couldn't attach a price label or information about that fabric to it. There we go. And then on the other side, we've got lots of solutions that are created without establishing a proper problem. And you can probably think of some in your head, but I'll make it easier for you. Anybody ride one of these? Now this was something we were all meant to be riding on right now. It was designed in the 70s. I can't remember his name. We're fantastic. There's even one in the coffee shop over there on Goswell Street. So if you want to walk back through time, then this was an electric vehicle that we, so we don't want to walk anymore. We just want to do this. And even in the rain, it doesn't matter. It still looked cool in the rain. But it did happen again with a segway, which now you can't, I don't know if this has actually worked properly in airports. I know some, I think even in Heathrow they've started to use these, but the take-up was minimal at the very beginning of its journey, the segway. And now they're just used for stag and hendews, you know, doing a tour of Budapest or whatever. But again, they're not solving anyone's problem. It's just scanning for innovation and wondering maybe too far into the future right now what we might be doing. And then who's tried on a pair of these? Yeah? Who owns a pair of these? I don't think you can anymore. Well, this was taken back to the R&D department at Google because of lots of problems and the realisation that faces are actually quite pertinent to conversation and communication with people. And it was weeding people out, basically, that people were wearing glasses that were scanning you or, you know, doing lots of things. The technology itself is very good, but the user study at the very beginning of this, they didn't do enough research to actually work out why we'd be using these. What problem is this solving? But it has been taken back to R&D. And there are some other products out there. I don't know if you've seen them, which are actually using all-in-the-ear type smart devices. So translation is quite a neat thing. There are a couple of videos out there now that do almost instant translation so you can have somebody speaking one language to somebody else in another language and it will translate to that relevant language for them. It's quite impressive. And one of the other things that I stress to all my students is that why jump to these crazy ideas? That's fun. That is really fun. When there are so many problems already out there. And sorry, this is a bit broad because it was meant for that student audience. We have bacterial resistance. We're all going to die shortly and this is probably why. So why not try and solve that? And I mean, the power of data at the moment is incredibly important to some of these challenges. Clean drinking water, we still don't have clean drinking water available to everybody globally. It's still a massive problem, still not solved. Cyber security, is anybody working on that right now in this room? The challenges that that brings are fantastic, are huge and are only going to grow. And then local challenges. There are things on our doorstep right now that still exist for one reason or another that haven't been given the consideration or thought where we can help and try and solve those problems. Homelessness in Islington is huge. And recently we just hosted a social enterprise festival where our focus was on local challenges and trying to help solve local problems rather than jumping to social network where you can tell someone that you're having a drink. And then there are small problems like this as well. When you get home and that ready meal which will probably happen tonight and you tear off half of that goddamn cellophane. So they exist in all walks of life at different scales as well. And for you guys it might be that you've got problems on a technical basis with product or service development or it might be something within your company that you're trying to solve. Or with your clients. How closely do you work with your clients and understand what their problems are? Now there is that other phrase that Henry Ford said. If I asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses. But he created the car which essentially is a mechanical horse. It's getting you faster from A to B. So sometimes your users don't always give you the full picture of what they really want. So that's something else that you can explore in terms of covert user research. Is anybody in here a UX expert? Aha, fantastic. Or user research, how much user research do you do for your products and services? I don't know how to quantify that. Some, a little, a lot. Lots, some, see. We're getting some confessions here. But that's another discussion altogether. So I mentioned earlier that some of those larger challenges and problems are recognised as things in the world of academia. And you do actually stumble across wicked problems. Has anybody heard of these? They're not wicked problems but they're so large and complex and they have so many changing variables that they're not solvable. Now, that almost sounds like a challenge, doesn't it, to some people, but it really is quite tricky to do it and you would require an algorithm probably as large as this and a group of scientists or brainy people like this. And there's quite a few brains in there. I think you've got Plank and Schrodinger and Einstein. But it's best to steer away from something like that. And that might relate to you and your companies in terms of trying to solve something that has so many variables all at once and that's about breaking it down into those components. I prefer problems a bit like this, just working, and even if this does play a part of a larger scale problem that isn't quite wicked, but making sure that you understand the components before you get to that larger problem. And it can be quite a depressing thing to go around looking for problems all the time. Kind of start getting to the mindset of, oh yeah, that is a problem. Here's a problem. Or just trying to analyse how rubbish the world is right now. Or all your companies. Don't do that if you're an employee because your boss might not thank you for that. But we explored this earlier. So what makes a good problem? Just bear these things in mind. If it's quantifiable, if it's valid, does somebody have this problem? Those are things that you should look for. And have any of you read? There's a couple of books out there. There's Undercover UX, which is quite a good book, which is all about being undercover and observing problems and the way that users react to things. It's basically social experiments without people knowing it. And there's another one written by Steve Blank who is kind of the godfather of entrepreneurship in the US. And he has an ethos about getting out of the building and just exploring and finding these problems. Or at least finding the people who have these problems. Something with epiphany in it. Epiphany, yes, that's it. The four epiphany of a startup or something like that. Yeah, it's actually quite a good and easy read and you can probably find it free on the web. But get out of the building. I know some of you are probably designing products for clients who aren't in your office, obviously. And it's about you getting to know them as well as you possibly can and the users who will be using this product. So your customer and user are a different thing. And hands up now, who has met a user of their website that they've developed for their client? And do you enforce it as part of your strategy in terms of your product development? Yeah, okay, well, that's pretty good. It's amazing how many people don't. Because, well, it depends how much flexibility you've got with your client. Because it's quite a lot of work. But it's an important part of the work. And there's always this battle between devs and user research, which is as old as sort of game of thrones type battles. But there are important parts to both and it would be nice if you could do these things side by side. And some companies have managed to do that. But anyway, getting out of the building and understanding what that user actually wants can be a very important part to your client offering. And also it's probably another service you can offer at a rate. And another quote, I think that is the based on being curious, getting out there, asking those questions. Why, why, why? Or how do you do this now? It's about asking those open questions that will give you the detail that you need. Sorry, this is about users of that product. If that's what you'll be developing. But understanding exactly their process now and how yours can improve it. Going undercover, literally sitting somewhere and observing people. If you're a service designer for a train station or a network or transport point, you will spend your time travelling journeys and sitting in those spaces observing people. It seems like an obvious thing, but a lot of people miss this step. And just document everything. I think that was said by Paul, wasn't it earlier? Yeah, just make sure you capture everything. So this is more in the user journey and the product development cycle. But write it all down, otherwise it's lost or it's a kind of, I think this happened. And Andre mentioned this as well. Information overload, a lot of our processes were all very busy. Who kind of arrived here this morning and didn't even realise how they got here. You've put your headphones in, you get on the train and somehow you've arrived at a place and now you're hearing a talk. Which is probably a strong six out of 10. So it's about being mindful and breaking down some of those components in terms of your everyday workload. Why are we doing this? Instead of getting on the tube every morning and just having that as a vacuous time for you, you're wasting time maybe. Maybe that can be spent more wisely thinking about the things that you're going through and you can apply that to your everyday workload as well. And does anybody know this guy? Well, I've shown you a picture and given you his name. So you'll know him now. But Tony Fidell, he worked at Apple for many years and he was responsible for the first generations of iPod. So he's quite smart and he came up with Nest. Does anybody own Nest? I might come and talk to you later. And his ethos with Nest was that there's this thing on our walls that is tricky to operate, hard to program, doesn't quite get the temperature right. It's burning electricity when I'm not in the house unless I turn it right down and I've got to go and turn it up again when I get in, blah, blah, blah. Why do we keep doing this? And that thermostat had actually been in place, the earliest thermostats in homes were just after the Victorian era. And then we had these things from the 70s that nobody really changes in their homes until the range of smart hubs came out for temperature control. And using a simple algorithm, it works to your behavior patterns. But he was fed up with these problems that we'd been ignoring for so long even though it was costing us so much money. That was a true problem. People were burning electricity needlessly and they were being uncomfortable in their homes or having this awful system that didn't quite work. So he invented this and now he's doing very well with this. And I mentioned earlier about Google Glass where the R&D team is headed up by this guy who's now been, Nest has been bought by Google and he's heading up the next generation of Google Glass whether that will be a glass or an earpiece or whatever, I don't know. But hopefully with his background in design and user research and engineering, we might see something a bit more exciting. And this is a phrase, how many times have you heard this if you're talking to a client or even in your own company? This is just the way they are actually. Yeah, I don't bother, it's fine. This part of the stupidity paradox as Andre discussed earlier is, that's how they are. And Tony Fiddell was someone who was prompting, let's not accept that any longer. Let's get to the bottom of these problems and solve them. So coming back to that problem checklist and the things for that thermometer there, they were all quite valid. It was definable, it was actionable. Well, it was actionable by them because they're very smart and you can make a piece of hardware that talks to the web and what have you. But it doesn't have to be as big a scale as that. It can be very simple. It could be a feature in some of the products that you're making. Make sure you're getting to the root of that problem that you're solving. Has anybody heard of the hat stand effect when it comes to features? You throw so many hats on it that starts falling over and then the whole product becomes complex and crashes over. So avoid the hat stand effect. Yeah, feature creep can be horrendous. So make sure, like Ben was saying, analyse what's relevant, what's a priority for those products. And make sure your client understands that as well. It might be that they're telling you, I want this, I want this, I want this. When in fact you know the problems that exist with their users aren't those at all. Sorry, this is for students. Apart from the last one, does anybody, apart from our Drupal events, does anybody go to any other hackathons and design jams or anything like that? A couple. Design jams are really good because it's all about posing a problem and using techniques that investigate how to solve it. And they're actually crafted in theory, which work. So there are quite a few that are happening here and the loads in London. Hackathon is more about hardware and developing something, maybe a product at the end of it. But design jam is more conceptual. It's literally playing around with ideas from the problem first upwards. This is a sweet spot that I use quite a lot for our students in terms of, I was getting a bit hippie with this because I wanted people to create social enterprises. But also this is very valid for problems anywhere. So what the world needs, try and combine that with something that you're passionate about and hopefully you've got skill in. And then there you go, you've got your business mission. All right, it's a bit simple, isn't it? But bear that in mind. You might be passionate about something. You might volunteer for something, actually. And that might be solving something that the world needs. I will quickly run through finding solutions. So have you seen this map before? So we've gone through the problems into finding what problem is and what you can do about it. But finding those solutions can be the fun part. And don't show this to a neuroscientist because this is dramatically incorrect. This is something that a lot of people just use in terms of defining creativity. And it's normally a mix across both. I quite like this definition of the world, having Kirk and Spock as Spock is your more logical, analogical reasoning part of the brain and Kirk is the gungho emotional one who doesn't mind throwing a punch here and there. And he acts on emotion whereas this side works on logic. And we could go into a whole discussion about that, but maybe that's not. But they have both of their uses in terms of finding solutions. And what I urge people to do, have you ever heard of divergent and convergent creativity and thinking? So divergent is all about being out there first and ideas come very quickly and rapidly when you're not constrained to anything. So one of the techniques I like to do is remove legal barriers, laws of physics, anything and just go mad. So if you've got your problem statement, now you can start to go mad with any idea that you possibly want. And then you bring in the rules afterwards. And that's where some brilliant ideas have come from. Google used to do, I think it was 25% of any person's time could be spent on a personal project but using the rails that Google has. And you've had things like Gmail come out of that and some of their other products. But giving people the space and the creativity to go a bit mad and then strap on the rules later is a nicer way of ideation. That is a real word. It pains me to say that sometimes. But ideation, the ideation process should start with divergence rather rules, rules, rules, slap those on first. And I urge you all to do that. And this was my point here about being playful as well. Just go with it. Some people feel uncomfortable with that because it's not within their nature. They might be more one side of the brain than the other. But it can be fun. Look at things differently. Any white and gold in here? All black and blue? Yeah, I think it might be the colouring of this slide. But try and see things differently, that mindfulness thing. You might be working with a client and trying to show them your product and you really can't see why they're not getting what you've made and that feature and what it's doing for them. It might be about stepping back and just understanding more about them and their real problems. I doubt that happens too much, but seeing things differently. Deconstruct, bring it back into its simple component parts and use your imagination as well. Go mad. Just really on that divergent phase. No laws apply. So go mad from there. The ideation part tends to be the most fun part. Once you've got your problem established, it's really easy to start solving and to badly paraphrase Einstein again. He said if he was given an hour to solve, to create something, he would spend 55 minutes off that hour understanding what the problem is first and then five minutes solving it. Now he's also quite a smart man, so five minutes solving it. It might differ for us. But he's a smart guy. I take his advice and analyzing the problem first is the key step to getting forward to some of those solutions. And experimenting as well. Play with experiments. Test your hypothesis. Look at your riskiest assumption about your next product. We assume that people will do this because test them, go out, ask people, create mock-ups, be a prototype guru. You don't have to create the end product. People know the story about Dropbox in terms of their first prototype. Maybe not. So they couldn't sell their product because nobody could understand it or people would make an assumption. Doesn't that already exist? So they weren't able to sell this product which we probably have all used at some point recently. So they created a video. It's just a simple prototyping technique. Create a video which shows you exactly how the product will work and it showed you. You could sync your files. Simple. All right. They checked in a few internet references and some geeky things that people liked. But after the launch of that video within, I can't remember the specifics, but it was something like after 48 hours they had 40,000 sign-ups and that got them the benchmark that they needed to then get the investment to turn that product into a reality because investors and users just weren't understanding it the very early stages of their prototypes. So experiment. Put products out there and see how they go. It's a bit like A-B testing on multivariant but you can do it even more rough and ready and it's actually quite enjoyable. It's also good for your marketing because you can show people stuff as well whilst you're doing it. And there's quite a few innovation agencies that we work with locally who are very good at this. I think that's it from me. So sorry about the impromptu, unprepared talk that hopefully had some relevance to what you're doing. I'm not David Axe Mark. I haven't found it's my sequel. Am I a co-founder of Drupal Camp London? Of course. Definitely are. Not anymore. I've been kicked out. I have absolute newfound respect for you after that speech. He did that within like five minutes prep so that was incredible.