Semester Reflection

This is my final post and the semester is closing out. This has been the most difficult semester that I have had all 4 years of college. I have had to balance 20.5 credits, writing a thesis, and working 20 hours a week outside of class. It has taught me a lot about budgeting my time to accomplish the most. I am also excited to see how I can adapt and work on a normal schedule that is not so full and I can focus on a task with all my time and effort.

Speaker

Yesterday I went to the awards dinner for the engineering senior design projects. They had a PSU alum give a speech about the importance of globalization and innovation. I forget his name but he is current the president of ADT, a sector of Tyco electronics. His advice was to get out of your comfort zone and travel to different countries as often as you can. He said his experience working in a multitude of different countries like japan, Israel, and Spain were the main reasons he was able to excel in global corporations. Another piece of advice that he gave us was to try to do everything typical of the culture that you are trying to live in. This will help you relate to their cultures and connect on a better level. This advice was inspiring and really made me want to travel outside of the US to work.

Google

I have posted a blog previously about a very innovative company. But I was recently watching a show on the Google workplace environment. And I really liked their moto above taking care of everything that their employees needed. They will do your laundry, provide all your meals, or the coolest idea I thought was themed sleeping pods. Whenever the employees get tired they can take naps in these pods. Here is a link showing an example of the pods. http://www.inspiredesignblog.co.uk/images/Google_Office_Zurich-1.jpg

Reflection Project

When I was reflecting on the semester and what I have learned for our final project, I was amazed on just how much I learned about entrepreneurship. Coming into the class I thought it was just people who had good ideas could become entrepreneurs. I have learned the importance of finding the right market and all of the background work that is involved. Being an entrepreneur is more of a lifestyle than just a class you can take.

Innovative Company

When looking for companies to work for I came across a very interesting one; IDEO. This company consistently ranks in the top 5 every year for most innovative. I found a very interesting youtube clip of the company rebuilding a shopping cart. It is posted at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwd-yk6VHXU.

New Inventions

Looking around for cool new inventions on the internet I came across one particularly interesting one at http://www.inventionreaction.com/new-inventions/Transcend-Goggles. The invention is a set of ski goggles with GPS included which gives realtime results such as temperature, elevation, and speed displayed inside the goggles. As a skier I thought this was really cool because there was never an easy way to see how fast you were going.

Idea competition

Reflecting on the Idea presentation on class Tuesday I noticed how similar a lot of the ideas were to existing ideas. But I realized that people were focusing in on little details that made their idea unique. Whenever I thought of new businesses I always thought they had to have a radical new idea to sell and become successful but the real value is doing a service the best way even if a service already exists

Restaurants

Recently brainstorming for the most recent project I was thinking about the restaurant business and amid coming up with ideas that were all used I came upon one that I thought was really a great idea to save money and is good for the environment. The article can be found here: http://www.greenlodgingnews.com/content.aspx?id=3498. Ideas such as this one seem to have no real downside and would be very easy to raise money to implement.

Going for the A

As this last project wrapped up and we start the final project the talk in class today was about taking risks and not settling for a safe project. This talk has very moving and I hope me and my group can find an unconventional idea that we can really put a full effort into. Also the talk on value proposition I think was a good way to start brainstorming ideas and find out what is important to people and makes a successful business venture.

Lion Cash Talk

Last week Chris from LionMenus came to talk to our class on the story of starting his own business. The story was very captivating as he took us through the roller coaster ride that he had been on through running his own company. I found the part about how it tore apart the partners who he said were his best friends for years. This was interesting to me because I have a group of friends who have been talking about starting a business for a long time and the advice he gave about setting guidelines for how to handle things in the beginning because people change was very interesting and valuable advice.

Inspiration

I know most of the blogs are focused on events that happen outside of class but Ryan's presentation on leadership really motivated me. It is normal to hear teachers talk about ethics, leadership, and morality, but to hear real stories where these words are more than just words made it real. The interactive exercise with the classmates also gave you some inspiration as just talking about goals that you have and the things you value the most was uplifting and motivated you to actually do them.

Reflection

I have realized that it takes more than an idea to become successful in the crash and burn scenario. Hearing all the classes and some of our teams ideas really seem like they could be very successful. However without properly marketing them and finding the right target customer they are pretty much worthless.