A proper understanding of the unmet need.

If you have children you will be familiar with that child telling you “I need a chocolate chip cookie!” And one translates that to mean that the child is hungry and tests the idea by giving the child a banana or some spaghetti.

Sometimes incorrect needs-statements just jump off the radio and stick in my throat like a three day old, dry, stottie.  On the Today program on BBC Radio 4 this morning, Dambisa Moyo, author of  “Winner Takes All” said “Sixty percent of the population of Africa is under the age of 25.  They need job creation.”  She is not the first to say it.  It is something often said about the unemployed anywhere, not just Africa.  But I feel that it is an inaccurate reflection on the need.

Yes, I do respond to the world like this all the time.  I hear or see, I experience an event and I feel an emotional punch and spend a moment in my local minimum, my dip in the road which is filled with “how dare they” or “that is amazing”.  Then, thankfully,  I think a little about what are they really saying and are they stating the truth, or a truth.  Are they at least being helpful?  In this case, I don’t think that they are being helpful.

Do people need jobs?

People need to eat, they need to care for their children and elderly, in our world they need to educate their children.  People need food, shelter and hope.  Jobs?  They may even need love and singing or craft.  Jobs?  A job is one solution, one way of delivering money to those who want it so that they can use it to buy what they need.  When “more jobs” is the solution then “no jobs” is the problem.  And that one metric, that inaccurate definition of the unmet need, closes down all other solutions.

Humans develop this type of shorthand to discuss all kinds of issues and end up a side stream. Then they spend so much time talking about a particular popular solution to a need, that the underlying need is not addressed directly.  The solution is measured – it becomes the metric – and we drive that metric, we police the numbers of that one measure and forget to think.

It is not deep thought that is needed.  Rather, we need simple thinking.  The sort of thinking that I read about somewhere.   It says that, if an alien landed in a part of town where young men are hanging out on the street seemingly unhappy and it asked why?  Tell the alien that it’s because there is no work and they alien looks at the peeling paint, cracked roadbed, weed grown garden… no work?  There is a lot of work.  There are many jobs to do.

There is a feature of entrepreneurial thinking, of design thinking that makes working as an academic very powerful.  Solve a problem or making a product that people need.  How do you train yourself in noticing what people need?  Sometimes we will be told that people need things or we need them and presume that other people do too.   Sometimes we have to simply be present and notice things.

This article charts the Biodesign process at Stanford University.

The immediately useful part of the article is the section under Finding Needs.

Unmet needs, not better solutions.  In software development I used to say that a user should tell me what it is that they want to do, not how they want to do it.

“Develop me some software that fetches the sales totals and litres pumped from the petrol pump and displays it in a sales window“ would be the request and is possibly the solution… but, if the need is that “the system should reduce fraud or drive-offs” then I want to know the latter.  I could develop a solution more powerfully if I was told what that unmet need is.

What flows from Finding Needs in the University context?  It leads to better research and more useful research which, besides having the obvious benefits of looking good on the Impact section of a grant application, could lead to the kind of product that is more easily commercialised.

If I was a bird, flying swooping diving and my beak was just slightly ajar, sometimes I would serendipitously scoop in an insect.  And I would like it.

But I am a human. This morning, while cycling to work I think I breathed in a gnat or other little insect that is more wing than body.  If I were not so picky I would think mmm…. food that I didn’t have to hunt or gather; just move through the fresh outdoor air and open my mouth a little.  It was not just about being in the right place at the right time; I also had to be receptive.

What did I do? Fpthptthpt.  Of course.

Entrepreneurs are people who make hay when the sun shines, who find problems and likely looking solutions for them.  And an inventive mind likes nothing better than a really crunchy problem to solve.  Then I come to a little phrase from Stanford Biodesign: Needs Finding, they teach people to find needs?  On this website the phrase “Before Biodesign fellows start prototyping or testing, they spend three months on clinical observation, asking questions, identifying needs, analyzing markets and brainstorming concepts.” leaps out.   What have I received?  What nano concept has flown into my brain?

When the rain came down, came down yesterday I was en route from the Faculty of Medical Sciences buildings to the Business School and I was drenched down to the skin inside my soggy socks inside my squelching shoes.  My jacket’s arms, my trouser legs, my knees were wet but my hair was dry because I had been wearing a hat.  I left a trail of wet footprints across the foyer on the shiny floor downstairs and, though I felt uncomfortable, I was warm enough because I had been on the move.  Half an hour later, writing up my meeting with Martin Cox, I felt the cold start to creep up my legs.

Martin is the Head of Enterprise for the FMS.  I had met the business development managers who work with him last week.  They have each and every one of them deep and intense experience in industry, patent writing and filing, and IP development into products.  They are based in the Medical Sciences building and are, like Richy Hetherington and his team, in the right place.

I gave him the results of my interviews thus far.  These are that Postdocs are time poor and they they feel it would disadvantage them to be too interested in business studies, or to do this at the expense of research time, or to seem to want to leave the fold and not pursue the golden high road or defect to the dark side.  It was when I mentioned that I want to get non-traditional business in to talk, that Martin got excited.  He says that if there is a talk on patents or business skills that it seems like just more work.  If the talk were more unexpected or wacky he said that researchers are more likely to come and listen.

I don’t call it that, i.e wacky, because… because I not sure why not.  I call them crossover people, like people who study economics and then start-up a beer brewing company (I am trying to contact James Watt of brewdog).  And I like the plan that says that, even when I get an absolutely core bio-tech person in to talk, the focus can be on the less traditional part of the person’s life.  That these are then memorable bits of narrative that make me remember the rest of the business story.

For instance, at a talk the other morning – very very early – it was Women on Board – Jane Atkinson of Sembcorp spoke about her experience starting in and progressing through the male dominated steel business.  She told a story about being stalked quite soon after starting work in a steel plant when she was 22 years old.  Because of this, very unexpected, story I remember every other related detail of her business history.  She packed a lot of story into the time that she had available, but she could have given me a lot more detail – I would have remembered it all.  All the other speakers have faded from my mind.  If I went online and checked a bit of their histories it would all come flooding back, but none are as fresh as this.

I waited for the sheeting driving crowds of raindrops whipping past my office window to slacken. And stop.Then it was time to get home get all my wet things off and get dry.

I never did understand why I need to eat roughage.  Naomi explained it to me.

Food is digested in the stomach but roughage is not – these undigested carbohydrates pass through the small intestine (where sugars and glucose and fuel is absorbed into the body) until they reach the large intestine.  This is where most vitamins and minerals and some medicines are absorbed and without roughage to help travel the stuff through the system and slow it down, this absorption cannot happen.

The large intestine is also home to trillions of ‘good’ bacteria that feed on the undigested food that enters it.  And why is that good?  Because the good bacteria produce vitamins K and B12 and assist with absorption of other water soluble vitamins and keep the bad bacteria in check and they soften the roughage so that it can pass out of the body.

So my question is:

Is it possible that I could become malnourished even though I consume the right amount of vitamins – if I did not take in roughage along with the vitamins?  That roughage is the delivery system, the train.  Without roughage the vitamin c would simply whoosh through and – as the scietists put it – I would just pee it out?  WIth roughage, such as eating a whole orange, everything moves though the system at a more decorous pace giving time for the parcels of vitamins to be handed over to the body?

 OK… more than a question.

Interview with another Scott Shane workshop graduate

Today’s interviewee currently works on determining the effects that ingesting pesticides has on bee memory.  I got baby honey bees to walk over my fingers and while he had the comb out I saw a bee emerge – just the front half – struggling out of its egg.  I saw a bee hatch.  I never thought I would ever get to say that.  I got to confirm all the factoids that I have ingested about bees.  I have luckily not been holding any wrong ideas but there were some things that I did not know.  Wasp and bee and bumble bee venom is all the same(ish).  The reason why monoculture is bad for bees is that pollen has very few calories and when there is a variety of flowers for the bees to feed on they get nectar too i.e. kilojoules.   A comb has honey bee eggs in the centre and around its perfect replicating hexagonal edges a wide band of honey; when the baby bees hatch they crawl outward and eat the honey.

Pier is in his first contract post doctorate and has no experience with commercialising.  He also did not have an idea that he wanted to commercialise when he attended the Scott Shane workshop.  His father ran his own business and Pier feels an affinity for working for himself.  He wants his ideas to come to fruition, to get out into the world.

Shane stressed the importance of building up contacts, saying that if you want to spin out a company in the future work on your contacts now.

Pier felt the lack of information about start-ups (the focus is on university spinouts in the course).  He now wants the same level of detail – but he wants it about starting up one’s own business.

He has hatched and he is crawling toward the edge of the comb and he hopes to find honey there.

This morning I cycled on an urban road, between houses in Jesmond, passing builders perched like chameleons on a scaffold two floors up.  One threw a brick into a metal skip parked in the road near us.  BANG GONG.  I was shocked and startled.  My son looked back to where a cloud of dust had been raised and was drifting up from the skip and said “there is smoke”.  I corrected him, I said that it is dust but then my head compared the properties of smoke “suspended particulate matter” and this fine dust which is… suspended particulate matter.  Very very fine grit.  One comes from heat, calming down from a more excited state and the other is roused from sleep in the bottom of a metal skip and flies up, excited.

Today’s Scott Shane course graduate interviewee said

What he would really like, in addition to the workshop, is a module that teaches how to deal with finance on a day to day basis.  What the terms mean and how it all ties together.  So that when he meets accountants and they try and out-mystique him he can see through their flummery and get better results.

This echoes yesterday’s requirement for nitty gritty business teaching.

Today I interviewed a senior lecturer in genetic medicine who attended a previous Scott Shane worksop at Newcastle University.  This is a series of follow up interviews.

Fact. The hair sheath – that blobby bit that one sees on the end of a hair that falls out of, or is pulled from, the head – contains enough human tissue so be cultured into stem cells.

Lyle ran a bio research consultancy before joining Newcastle Uni working in designing stem cell lines.  (With semantic magic I have just shrunk this man’s double digit years of success into a single line) What Scott Shane taught overlaps with what Lyle has been involved with and has done.  Lyle has patented and developed and he is currently spinning out.  He attended the workshop to see what others (other universities) are doing in terms of the IP development processes and commercialisation.  He found it interesting to see how IP is handled in the case studies used.

He differentiates postdocs {and what needs to be noted here is that all the people who are being discussed are working at a very high level, have been picked from a high achieving pool – already the best of the bunch}  into a. Pure researchers who just want to pursue knowledge, do not want to interact with the real world if at all possible, and are fantastic and amazing at what they do, b. Communicators whose technical skill is less specialised but who know how to convince and facilitate and co-create, who know how to sell that which they do.  These are entrepreneurs.  And c. The group who are doing postdoc because they want to defer going out and getting a real job, and hope they never have to decide. These are managed according to their personalities, are given activities to direct their skills towards.  In this group are the people who work to a high level of skill when given clear targets and another group who are better communicators.  Again it is the communicators who are more inclined to being entrepreneurial.

There has been no new interaction between staff as a result of the workshop.  {This is a lagging opportunity!}

Postdocs (and academics) should be encouraged to see that it is not just cutting edge science and discoveries that will lead to a good business, that often a better way of doing what is already being done can deliver a good business which is quicker to market and has lower start-up costs.

He says that there is an urgent requirement for a module that teaches the nitty gritty, nuts and bolts “this is how to set up a business”.  A module that teaches all the way from partners and formal business structure and getting funding, filling in forms, sources of funding, legal stuff, taxes.

I am reading a paper called “Instilling the Entrepreneurial Spirit in Your R&D Team: What Large Firms Can Learn from Successful Start-ups”.  Is this a large firm problem?  Certainly the University is a large firm.  Are individual teams under their PI’s successful small start-ups or subdivisions of a large organisation?  If they are classed as start-ups sitting loosely within the large organisation i.e. the Uni, there must be a creative dissonance, a stable creative dissonance, between the two that produces good results.  It seems more likely that it is as with the case presented about the large firms in the paper above i.e. that large firms develop bureaucratic processes that slow things down, develop unofficial no-go areas, have fewer opportunities for knowledge sharing between co-workers from different organisational silos.

And in another aside: is it possible that successful start-ups are frustrated by what they find in large companies when they follow the promise of expansion?  Spaces like Ignite100 or The Alchemists assist small fast growth companies into becoming big companies using best practices from… from where exactly?  Are the best practices coming from the big ß to the à small?  Their websites imply that the big companies are the owners of best practice because after all the big company is, you know, BIG.  But I would hazard that the big has as much to learn here.