Testing and Experimenting in Markets

Testing and
Experimenting in
Markets

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Experimentation and Entrepreneurship

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Learning from Experimentation

The Process of Experimentation

Using Hypotheses to Identify Customers

Ways of Generating Data

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Creating a Hypothesis

Experiments are key to innovation because they rarely turn out as you expect, and you learn so much.”

— Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and CEO

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Chapter Outline

7.1    What Are Experiments?

7.2    The Six Steps of Scientific Experimentation

7.3    Hypotheses and Customer Identification

7.4    Generating Data and the Rules of Experimentation

7.5    Types of Experiments

7.6    The Power of Storyboarding

Learning Objectives

7.1    Define experiments and describe the steps of experimentation.

7.2    Identify and describe the six steps of scientific experimentation.

7.3    Demonstrate how to test hypotheses and identify customers.

7.4    Explore different ways of generating data and describe the rules of experimentation.

7.5    Identify three types of experiments most commonly used.

7.6    Illustrate the power of storyboarding as a form of prototyping and a basis for experiments.

7.1 WHAT ARE EXPERIMENTS?

> > LO 7.1  Define experiments and describe the steps of experimentation.

In Chapter 6, we explored the concept of design thinking and how certain thinking processes help us to navigate uncertainty to find solutions to complex problems. We also described the three phases of the design-thinking process: inspiration, ideation, and implementation—a nonlinear structure that produces creative, meaningful results.

In this chapter, we will explore in further detail the processes that take place during the implementation phase, specifically with regard to experimentation. The implementation phase focuses on early, fast, low-cost testing and experimentation to strengthen ideas and ensure that entrepreneurs are on the right path toward meeting the needs of their potential customers.

The implementation phase also ties in with developing the skill of experimentation as part of The Practice of Entrepreneurship, described in Chapter 2. This involves taking action, trying something new, and building that learning into the next iteration. Experimentation means getting out of the building and collecting real-world information to test new concepts, rather than sitting at a desk searching databases for the latest research. It involves asking questions, validating assumptions, and taking nothing for granted.

In the Entrepreneurs in Action feature, the founders of Parlor Skis began with a hypothesis that people want custom-built tailored skis. They then used experimentation to gauge customer feedback on their vision to build customized skis, and tested the market to ensure they had a viable product.

Over the course of four years, they asked questions and talked to as many people as they could to find out what pleased or bothered their target customer base. For instance, they discovered that their assumption that people would love that their skis were handmade was wrong—people were nervous about quality. The founders were then able to shift their focus to emphasizing the quality aspect of their skis as an effort to reassure their customers.

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ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN ACTION

Mark Wallace, Pete Endres, and Jason Epstein, Cofounders, Parlor Skis

The cofounders of Parlor Skis have taken to heart that every pair of skis is unique

Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/simonkr

Parlor Skis is a custom ski business based in Boston’s “Eastie” neighborhood; it was launched in 2010 in an old funeral home. While many sporting goods manufacturers claim they can give you exactly what you’re looking for, Parlor goes several steps further. Every single pair of skis is one of a kind, custom designed according to a skier’s height, weight, ski style and preferences; the skis are then sawed, sanded, and pieced together. The result is a completely tailored piece of equipment, right down to the graphics and colors that grace the final product.

Mark Wallace and his cofounders Pete Endres and Jason Epstein are all Williams College graduates. The three met on the racing slopes during school. After college, Wallace took to the competitive international racing circuit, while Endres and Epstein found jobs in the “real world.” Still, skiing was never far from their minds.

“We realized that there was a gap out there in the market in terms of a product that was really tailored to the rider,” Mark says. “Integrating people with their product is core to what we do.” Endres, who was also a ski coach at Boston College, elaborates: “When you buy from a ski shop, you are trying to find the best mass-produced product for your skiing style. We custom-make the core of the ski to fit you. Our product complements skiers.”

But it was the input from customers that was most important. Before Parlor Skis earned its first dollar, the three entrepreneurs took their idea through four years of process and product testing. Friends and family sales and “demo days” on the slopes gave the trio valuable feedback to tweak processes and product. “I think that we have built this business in a low-risk way,” Mark reflects, “because we test things all the time. Testing and then tweaking, then testing is a great way to de-risk the business. We have also really controlled our growth, which helps.”

Parlor Skis also holds “shop nights,” where the community is welcome to tour the workshop and talk to the guys face to face. “We are learning about our customers every day,” Mark says. “When I look back at our first customer profiles, I realize that we were fairly wrong about who was going to buy our skis and what they cared about. For example, we thought that people were going to love that they were handmade. [It] turns out this made them nervous about quality. . . . Who knew! That’s why we test.”

By its fifth year in business, Parlor was pulling in small profits, yet the endeavor had already seen some setbacks. “We failed trying to get our skis into brick-and-mortar stores,” recalls Mark, “[when] we thought that they would love the product. It turns out that they don’t understand it and that they wanted a higher margin than we could provide.” Instead, customers were able to find the company through events, or on Facebook—where Parlor Skis first launched—or via the website.

Mark urges aspiring entrepreneurs to climb the summit and take the plunge. “Get out there and do it. Fail fast and cheaply. Then keep going. Always be learning, [even though] that is a really hard thing to do. We all think we are really smart and right all the time; it’s not always true. The flipside of that is people give you BAD advice so you have to know who not to listen to. Basically it comes down to judgment . . . and a bit of luck.”

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS

1. Identify some ways in which the Parlor Skis founders’ collective experience helped them start their own business.
2. In what ways do you think testing and experimentation helped the Parlor Skis entrepreneurs grow their business?
3. Suppose you started a business and your original assumptions about your target customer base turned out to be incorrect? How would you deal with this setback? •

Source: Personal interview, M. Wallace, October 16, 2014.

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Parlor Skis provides a good example of how small-scale experiments also follow the tenets of affordable loss—only putting in what you can afford to lose. The founders made small experiments one at a time, refining their product based on what they learned in each experiment.

Master the content edge.sagepub.com/neckentrepreneurship

Let’s take a closer look at experiments and why they are so important to an entrepreneur. We define an experiment as a method used to prove or disprove the validity of an idea or hypothesis. Experiments need to have a clear purpose, be achievable, and generate reliable results. Experiments guide us toward which customer opinions to listen to, what important product or service features should take priority, what might please or upset customers, and what should be worked on next.¹ They are essential when it comes to trying out new ideas, finding solutions, and providing answers to those “What if” questions.² It is through experimentation that we start to address feasibility and viability discussed in Chapter 6.

An experiment begins with a hypothesis, which is an assumption that is tested through research and experimentation. Getting out of the building and testing our hypotheses enables us to gain new insights into our target customers’ wants and needs. However, testing a hypothesis is not just about gathering data—it also involves matching the results of our tests to the original hypothesis and potentially adapting our original assumptions to better understand our customer target base.³

In the next section, we will explore the scientific process of experimentation and its relevance to entrepreneurs.

7.2 THE SIX STEPS OF SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTATION

> > LO 7.2  Identify and describe the six steps of scientific experimentation.

When we hear the word experiment, we may think of scientists wearing white coats working with test tubes in laboratories, or the extensive clinical trials and experiments undertaken by pharmaceutical companies when testing a new drug.^{4, 5} Yet the scientific method is not just limited to scientists and pharmaceutical companies; it is also extremely relevant to entrepreneurs starting new ventures. Experiments can, for example, involve observations of students studying in a library, or employees working on a group project, or consumers visiting a store. They can also involve constructing or formulating products and testing how they perform. In fact, continuous testing is an ongoing requirement for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are by definition experimenters, and that is why it is valuable to understand the process of experimentation—otherwise, the experiments could become disorganized and fruitless.

The scientific process of experimentation includes the following six steps (see Figure 7.1):

1. asking lots of questions,
2. carrying out background research,
3. developing hypotheses,
4. testing the hypotheses by running experiments,
5. analyzing the data, and
6. assessing results.⁶

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FIGURE 7.1

The Scientific Method

Source: Retrieved from http://generalchemistryfordson2013.weebly.com/scientific-method-flow-chart.html

Let’s apply the steps of the scientific method to the initial experimentation process undertaken by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who is also quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Bezos is an excellent example of an entrepreneur who frequently used experiments to test assumptions.⁷

While working at a Wall Street investment firm in 1994, Bezos was surfing online and came across an interesting statistic that claimed that Internet usage was growing by 2300% a year. Bezos reasoned that given the huge growth of Internet users, there could be massive potential for an online business opportunity. But what kind of business would it be?

First, he began by asking some questions: What kind of products would people buy online? What do people buy most from mail order versus going into a store? To find the answers to these questions, Bezos carried out some background research, by going through the products listed in the top 20 mail order catalogs.

From this research, Bezos was able to create a hypothesis that there was a market for standard products (the ones where consumers knew exactly what they were getting) that people would be happy to buy online. While it might seem obvious to us now that books fall into the category of a standard product, books weren’t actually featured in the top 20 list of mail order products at all. When Bezos investigated further, he found that it simply wasn’t possible to compile and publish a book catalog like the typical mail order catalogs he had researched. There were far too many books in print, and the catalog would be too expensive and weighty to produce. This explained why books were not in the top 20 standard products in catalog sales, but Bezos reasoned that selling books online still ought to be a viable idea.

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Credit: epa european pressphoto agency b.v./Alamy Stock Photo

Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, experiments with new business opportunities to test assumptions.

Armed with the data he had gathered from his research, Bezos decided to test his hypothesis and run an experiment to see if there was an appetite for an online bookstore offering the widest selection of books in the world. Bezos’s experiment was as low cost as it could be: rather than seeking investment or partnering with bookstores, Bezos made a deal directly with Ingram Content Group, a book wholesaler that agreed to warehouse and ship the books.

When Bezos analyzed the data generated from his initial Amazon.com book sales, he concluded from the results that he had created a business with tremendous potential. The success of his early experiment led to Amazon becoming the world’s largest online discount retailer, selling a whole range of products—but it all started with books.

Since its inception, Amazon has reinvented itself several times: from the Kindle, the electronic reader, to renting data storage to other companies via its cloud computing services at Amazon EC2. It seems that there is no end in sight for Amazon’s ability to experiment with diverse product offerings. By thinking like a scientist and applying the steps of experimentation, Bezos succeeded in learning firsthand about the value of experiments, their power to produce unexpected results, and their ability to provide an important opportunity for further learning.

While the scientific approach to experimentation is useful to entrepreneurship, keep in mind that you need to think like a scientist, not act like a scientist. Many scientific experiments take a huge amount of time, resources, and precision. As an entrepreneur, you have a goal not to build the perfect experiment but rather to use low cost, quick methods to shape ideas and to make them better through continual iteration. Entrepreneurial experimentation is about acting to learn, rather than getting bogged down in scientific rigor. By taking action and experimenting quickly and cheaply, you will have a better chance of refining your ideas into feasible and viable opportunities.

7.3 HYPOTHESES AND CUSTOMER IDENTIFICATION

> > LO 7.3  Demonstrate how to test hypotheses and identify customers.

As we have explored above, a true experiment involves a clear hypothesis. For example, Bezos’s first hypothesis was to prove there is that market for standard products that people would be happy to buy online. During his quest to validate that hypothesis, he discovered that books had the most potential to be sold online. In doing so, he also created a marketplace for a host of other products.

Similarly, many organizations design hypotheses to test assumptions about certain ideas before carrying out an experiment. One example comes from the sandwich retailer Subway, which is a global enterprise with more outlets around the world than any other restaurant chain. In 2008, as the United States and other countries were hit with a recession, some marketers at Subway suggested a hypothesis that selling foot-long subs at the reduced price of $5 would increase sales.⁸ Yet others were concerned that the promotion would distract customers from purchasing the more expensive items on the menu.

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Credit: Kristoffer Tripplaar/Alamy Stock Photo

Subway foot-long sandwich offered at $5 special rate.

So Subway carried out an experiment: it tested the promotion in some Subway sites but not in others, and for limited time periods, such as weekends. The results showed that the $5 subs did not detract from the overall sales. However, even if the experiment had failed to support the hypothesis—if customers had stopped buying the more expensive items on the menu—it still would have raised many interesting questions: Why were customers not buying the more expensive items? What could Subway do to attract them to the other items on the menu, while offering the promotion? The Subway experiment turned out to be a useful way for the company to define customer tastes and preferences.

Limited, Low-Cost Experimentation

You don’t need to be a wealthy entrepreneur or a marketer at a major sandwich chain to create a hypothesis. We all have the ability to generate a hypothesis and use low-cost experimentation to test its validity. Take a group of MBA students at Babson College, for instance. They had an early idea of creating software or some type of electronic gadget that students could use to “ping” other students when they were being distracting in the class. For example, if someone was speaking too long or spending too much time on Facebook or email, or just not staying engaged in the class, that person would be notified by their classmates through an app.

Rather than invest time and effort in developing the app or the software, the students obtained a professor’s approval to conduct a quick, low-cost experiment. They used about $15 to buy fabric at a discount store, and then purchased some wine corks. With these materials they created yellow flags similar to those used by referees in American football. Each student was given a few flags at the beginning of the class and was allowed to throw them someone perceived to be distracting or unproductive in the class.

The hypothesis was that classmates “calling out” classmates would be a distraction. However, the exact opposite happened. Because the students knew they could be flagged, the flags actually served as a deterrent. In fact, the professor reflected at the end of the class that it had been one of the most engaging class discussions she had experienced in the entire semester. Not only was the experiment cheap, but it also generated an unexpected outcome, which led to many other interesting questions in need of testing to find answers.

Testing Hypotheses With Potential Customers

One of the most important parts of an experiment is customer engagement in your product or service. Involving real customers in your experiment is a great way to test hypotheses, as it provides you with immediate feedback on how your product or service is received. It is also an excellent way of making connections with people who may buy your product or service when it is fully launched.

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For example, Parlor Skis spent several years integrating people into their product development process by holding “demo days” on the slopes, and “shop nights” when they opened their doors to people in the community and talked to them face-to-face. Similarly, Jeff Bezos built up a customer base by running an experiment to test Amazon.com, and was able to gauge the success of the experiment by analyzing the responses from real customers.

But how do entrepreneurs know which types of customers might be attracted to their products or services? To find out, entrepreneurs need to gain a deep understanding of the different types of customers. Typically, there are six different types of customers: end users, influencers, recommenders, economic buyers, decision makers, and saboteurs (see Figure 7.2).⁹ Let’s take a closer look at each of these types.

FIGURE 7.2

Six Types of Customers

Credit: AP Photo/Chris Jackson

Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge is an example of an “influencer.”

End users: these are the customers who will actually use your product. They will buy it (or not), touch it, operate it, use it, and tell you whether they love it or hate it. Gaining a deeper insight into the needs and motivations of end users is essential in the experimentation period, as their feedback will help you refine and tweak the product.

Influencers (or opinion leaders): Sometimes the biggest influence on the success of a service or product comes from “customers” who have no involvement in it all. Celebrities, journalists, industry analysts, and bloggers with a large following have the power to influence our purchase decisions. For example, famous celebrities have tremendous influence on fashion; a dress worn to the Oscars by a movie star can launch a designer’s career. Make a list of all the outside influencers you would like to target and ways in which you can reach them, for example via social media or by attending events where your target influencers will be present.

Recommenders: Popular bloggers, experts in an industry, or CEOs of major corporations carry a lot of weight when they evaluate your product and tell the public about it. Their opinions have the power to make or break your reputation. For example, a games blogger who recommends a new game could do wonders for a new product.

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Economic buyers: These are the customers who have the ability to approve large-scale purchases, such as buyers for retail chains, corporate office managers, and corporate VPs. Economic buyers have the power to put your product on the shelves, physically or virtually. Connecting with economic buyers brings you one step closer to the type of end-user customers you want to have the opportunity to buy your service or product.

Decision makers: These are similar to economic buyers, but they might have even authority to make purchasing decisions as they are positioned higher up in the hierarchy. The ultimate decision makers do not need to be CEOs—they could also be “mom” or “dad,” who have the power to approve purchases for their family.

Saboteurs: These types of customers can be anyone who can veto or slow down a purchasing decision—from top managers, to friends, spouses, to even children. Identify your saboteur customers and find out what’s putting them off. You might learn a lot from their feedback.

Let’s take a look at how Zappos founder, Nick Swinmurn, involved real customers to test his hypothesis that enough people in the market would be prepared to purchase shoes online.¹⁰ First, Swinmurn approached local shoe stores and persuaded them to give him permission to take pictures of their shoes to put online, in exchange for buying each pair of shoes at full price should an online customer purchase them. His experiment brought him in contact with shoe retailers and enabled him to build up a relationship with them, even before putting the products online.

Credit: ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

Zappos.com founded by Nic Swinmurn

When customers started buying the shoes from ShoeSite (whose name was soon changed to Zappos, a takeoff on the Spanish word for shoes: zapatos), Swinmurn took the opportunity to interact with them through customer support, handling returns, and taking payment. By having such direct interaction he was able to observe real customer behavior, which made him better able to meet customer needs and demands. In the end, Swinmurn had proved his simple hypothesis with a small-scale experiment by observing real customer behavior. Yet Zappos grew to be anything but small-scale; ten years after its 1999 inception, it was sold to Amazon for a reported $1.2 billion.¹¹

We could say that the marketers at Subway, the students at Babson College, and Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn used the “test and learn” approach to experimentation.¹² Test and learn is a quick, cheap way to generate knowledge about what works and what doesn’t. It allows you to put your ideas and hypotheses to the test and generates results that help you to make tactical decisions.

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ENTREPRENEURSHIP MEETS ETHICS

The Rights of Research Participants

Credit: MARICE COHN BAND/Newscom

Leanna Archer with her hair product.

Before beginning testing and experimentation, the entrepreneur must consider some ethical concerns related to market research and the rights of research participants. Most notably, people participating in experiments have the right to informed consent; the right to be treated with dignity regardless of racial or ethnic background, sexual preference, or socioeconomic status; the right to privacy and confidentiality; and the right not to be deceived or harmed as a consequence of research participation. In addition, there are legal requirements for testing of food items and personal care products that come into contact with the human body, as well as regulations on the use of animals in product testing.

As long as the researcher is able to conduct the market research ethically and laws are followed, research doesn’t have to be expensive. For example, entrepreneurs may enlist a group of people to try out free samples of a product in exchange for submitting an evaluation or attending a focus group afterward. There are also many laboratories that perform testing for regulatory compliance, with various price structures to suit different budgets.

Leanna Archer started her entrepreneurial venture when she was only nine years old. Archer used her grandmother’s homemade hair care products and received numerous compliments on the softness of her hair. Motivated to investigate starting her own hair care business, Archer obtained her grandmother’s recipe, which used only natural, nonchemical ingredients. Her parents provided funding, and Archer began experimenting with different ingredients. Once several prototypes had been created, Archer sent samples to neighbors to get feedback. With the success of her trials and with family helping with bookkeeping and other administrative tasks, she launched the Leanna’s Hair product lines. By the time she was ready to graduate from high school, her company was bringing in a six-figure income and the story of her “teenpreneurial” success had been featured in Forbes, TIME, and INC Magazine, among other international publications.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS

1. How would you go about finding out what kinds of testing are required for an entrepreneurial product or service?
2. If your product or service was suitable for nonprofessional testing in people’s homes or at a focus group, whom would you recruit to participate in your test? Explain how you would choose your best customer types to participate.
3. How would you ensure that the participants in your experiments are treated ethically and have their rights protected? •

Sources

Al Smadi, S. (n.d.). Ethics in market research: Concerns over rights of research participants. Retrieved from http://wbiconpro.com/Marketing/Sami.pdf

Entrepreneur Media Inc. (2016). Small Business Encyclopedia: Market Testing. Retrieved from Entrepreneur: http://www. entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/market-testing

Snepenger, D. J. (2007, April 5). Marketing Research for Entrepreneurs and Small Business Managers. Retrieved from Montguide: http://msucommunitydevelopment.org/pubs/mt9013.pdf

Tumati, P. (2010). Market Research Tips for Startups. Retrieved from Go4Funding: http://www.go4funding. com/Articles/Market-Research-Tips-For-Startups.aspx

For example, because the promotion took off in the test stores, Subway was able to roll it out to all of its stores; the students at Babson were encouraged to further test or modify their “flagging” idea after their experiment gleaned some surprising results; and the feedback Swinmurn gained from real customers and retailers through his low-cost experiment allowed him to grow his idea of an online shoe store into a hugely successful business.

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One of the major benefits of testing hypotheses is the real-time data it generates. Entrepreneurs operating a startup will be far more likely to gather evidence and data from conducting simple, low-cost experiments. Experimentation can be used to produce real and current data as we will explore in the next section.

7.4 GENERATING DATA AND THE RULES OF EXPERIMENTATION

> > LO 7.4  Explore different ways of generating data and describe the rules of experimentation.

Organizations have traditionally relied on large amounts of historical data to gauge customer tastes and preferences. Direct mail, surveys, advertising, and catalogs are just a few of the methods that larger companies use to gather data about their customers.¹³

Yet not all of these methods are reliable, especially in terms of advertising, where it is almost impossible to observe direct outcomes and acquire reliable feedback. As the 19th-century retail giant John Wanamaker once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.”¹⁴

Even the greatest volume of data and complex data systems don’t necessarily provide all the answers. Consider the experience of the century-old department store chain JC Penney. When Ron Johnson, known for his successes with Target and The Apple Store, became CEO in the fall of 2011, the company possessed a huge amount of data on its customers. While it wanted to modernize the Penney brand, it had no way of predicting how the public would react to big changes in the customer experience. Less than 18 months after Johnson’s initiatives to get rid of clearance racks and coupons and replace them with boutiques and “fair and square” everyday pricing, JC Penney had suffered big financial losses, and Johnson was fired. Despite all the data JC Penney had on its customers, it turned out that people did not like the new changes. Furthermore, Johnson did not call for testing of his new ideas before they were implemented. The problem with data is that they serve only to provide insights into past behaviors—they cannot predict how people might react to new products and innovations.¹⁵

But what about when the data are lacking altogether? Often, when there is insufficient or nonexistent data, people tend to use either their intuition or their experience to make decisions. The problem with intuition is that it is often unreliable and doesn’t provide the knowledge or evidence to support the feasibility of an idea.

Similarly, we can’t rely wholly on experience and conventional wisdom—in fact, many innovations challenge what we thought we knew or what we thought we wanted. For example, when the nationwide pet specialties retailer Petco faced competition from big box stores, it came up with a new pricing strategy to price products sold by weight for an amount that ended in $0.25. This challenged the conventional wisdom that all prices should end in $.9 ($5.99 etc.), yet Petco’s new pricing strategy led to a huge increase in sales.¹⁶

Fear of failure tends to discourage some organizations from experimenting at all. Experiments can be perceived as risky and sometimes requiring a trade-off between short-term loss and long-term gain, and nobody likes the idea of failing. Yet not all organizations have shied away from experimentation. Scott Cook, founder of tax software firm Intuit, says he cultivates an organizational culture of experimentation where failure is completely acceptable. Cook reasons that failure is key to creating evidence, which he believes is far more productive than using intuition.¹⁷

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Entrepreneurial experiments are different from analytical experiments involving big data. Unlike major corporations like JC Penney, smaller organizations and especially startups usually do not have the resources to fund data systems analytics, nor may they even have existing data to rely on. In this sense, how can entrepreneurs get the data they need that doesn’t exist?

Recall Parlor Skis, featured in our Entrepreneurship in Action feature. The business was founded on an idea of making customized snow skis. As this had never been done before, the founders had no data to rely on, and so they spent four years testing the market and experimenting with their product to get to know their customers better. This is how they identified customer needs in order to satisfy them. In short, Parlor Skis built up their own data with very little up-front investment and conducted low-cost experiments to shape their idea into a scalable and viable business model.

The point is that unlike larger organizations, entrepreneurs do not need expensive systems or large amounts of cash to generate the data they need to gauge customer needs and preferences. Small-scale experiments do not need to be risky or expensive. Entrepreneurs have more freedom to experiment, as they have a lot less to lose in the beginning than larger organizations do.

The essential thing to remember about experiments, large or small, is that all results must be taken into account, even if they fail to support the hypothesis and contradict original assumptions. Ignoring data just because they tell us what we don’t want to hear is detrimental to the success of any venture.

The goal of experimentation is not to conduct the “perfect” experiment but to see it as an opportunity for further learning and better decision making. Failure is also important, for if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.¹⁸

YOU BE THE ENTREPRENEUR¹⁹

Canadian entrepreneur Andrew Reid, founder of the software company Vision Critical, discovered a big problem with how many companies conduct their market research. While many companies used business intelligence to monitor what customers did and how they did it, they never wondered why customers acted the way they did. Reid took this idea and developed customer intelligence software to gain insights on customers by using cloud-based, real-time customer feedback.

Reid had attended the Vancouver Film School and had seemed headed for a career path opposite that of his father Angus Reid, who ran an extremely successful market research firm. Although Andrew knew nothing about the business world, he was determined to start a new market research company using online communities.

What Would You Do?

Though there is no one best or perfect way to conduct an entrepreneurial experiment, there are a few “rules” based on the information we have provided in this chapter so far. Table 7.1 shows some rules key to learning through experimentation.

In the next section, we will take a look at the three most commonly used experiments that are used today to help us to generate future data.

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RESEARCH AT WORK²⁰

Utpal M. Dholakia, associate professor of marketing at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, and Emily Durham, founder and president of Houston-based consulting firm Restaurant Connections, collaborated on an experiment to explore the effectiveness of social media on marketing. They set out to assess just how much influence businesses had on consumers when they set up dedicated online pages designed to attract “fans” by sending them messages and posting offers.

The first step to finding the results they needed was to partner with a bakery and café chain called Dessert Gallery (DG), based in Houston, Texas. Everyone on DG’s mailing list was sent a survey asking for opinions of DG. Out of the 13,270 people who were sent a survey, 689 responded.

The experimenters then launched a Facebook page that was regularly updated with news, promotions, and reviews, and sent a Facebook fan request to everyone on the mailing list. Three months later, the same survey was re-sent to the original people on the mailing list. This time, 1,067 responded to the survey. Some of the respondents were Facebook fans, some were not Facebook fans, and some were not on Facebook at all.

When the experimenters analyzed the three groups, they found that the customers who had completed the survey twice and were Facebook fans happened to be DG’s best, most frequent, and most loyal customers, as well as the best in spreading positive word of mouth.

While this experiment shows promise in just how effective social media can be for certain businesses, there is more work to be done. For example, another study shows that out of 50 Zagat-rated Houston restaurants, Facebook pages showed an average of only 340 fans, even though these were highly successful restaurants with thousands of customers. Still, the experiment suggests that Facebook can be a useful tool for some businesses when it is used effectively.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS

1. How would you describe Dholakia and Durham’s hypothesis?
2. Do you think the two experimenters used the most effective approach to test their hypothesis? Why or why not?
3. Choose a particular kind of business that you imagine you are starting. How would you use social media to test a reaction of your target audience? •

TABLE 7.1

The Rules of Experimentation

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7.5 TYPES OF EXPERIMENTS²¹

> > LO 7.5  Identify three types of experiments most commonly used.

A recent study has shown that entrepreneurs who launch new businesses and new products tend to use at least one of the following three forms of experiments (Figure 7.3): trying out new experiences; taking apart products, processes, and ideas; and testing ideas through pilots and prototypes.²²

Trying Out New Experiences

Entrepreneurs who try new experiences such as going to different countries, working for multiple businesses, or learning new skills are more likely to generate new business ideas. For example, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs spent several months in an ashram in India, and attended calligraphy classes when he was a student at Reed College in the early 1970s. At the time, Jobs could not have predicted that his calligraphy experience would have any practical application in later life, but it very much influenced the typography on the first Apple Macintosh computer. As Jobs put it: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”²³

Similarly, entrepreneur Kristin Murdock could never have predicted that her unusual interest in collecting dried cow manure—also known as “cow pies”—would lead to a successful business. When they started to fall apart, she used a glaze to hold them together and was pleased with the otiose (moo) result. Then she had an idea to put a clock inside a cow pie and present it as a joke gift; she gave these to a few of her friends and relatives with funny messages such as “You Dung Good,” or “Happy Birthday, You Old Poop.” While many of Murdock’s friends thought her clocks were disgusting, they caught the eye of the singer and television presenter Donny Osmond, who was a friend of one of Murdock’s relatives. The clock was featured on the Donny and Marie show, and Murdock became inundated with orders for her creations. The cow-pie clocks went on to make millions of dollars, and Murdock expanded the cow-pie brand to a line of greeting cards. She jokingly refers to herself as an “entre-manure.”²⁴

FIGURE 7.3

Three Types of Experiments

Source: Figure is from page 149/ibook of The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). P. 141 Kindle edition.

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Credit: BOB EIGHMIE/KRT/Newscom

An example of a cow pie clock.

The point is that exposing ourselves to diverse experiences broadens our mind, which improves our ability to make connections and expand our knowledge, and helps us become more innovative.

Taking Things Apart

As the story goes, at a young age Jeff Bezos attempted to take apart his own crib with a screwdriver; Google founder Larry Page was fascinated by what lay inside power tools; and Michael Dell disassembled a brand-new Apple II just to see how it worked. By taking the computer apart, Dell was able to find ways to enhance it, which eventually led to setting up his own company, Dell Inc.

Erin McKean, founder of the news discovery app Reverb and the online dictionary Wordnik.com, also applies her entrepreneurial experimentation to dressmaking and fashion creation. She observes, “Taking things apart and putting them back together again symbolizes the inquisitive, creative, disruptive entrepreneurial mindset, with an additional dose of ‘I can do it better’ arrogance.”²⁵

The point is that experimenting by exploring how things work, and deconstructing ideas, can also lead to different and better ways of doings things. Taking apart products, processes, and ideas often generates questions and triggers new ideas about how we can make our products or services work better.

Testing Ideas Through Pilots and Prototypes

The third type of experimentation, testing ideas through pilots and prototypes, is probably the most relevant to the types of experiments entrepreneurs conduct today. A pilot experiment is a small-scale study conducted to assess the feasibility of a product or service. Pilots and prototypes are not the same thing—in fact, a prototype, at least in its crude version, is often created before the pilot testing.

As we found in Chapter 6, prototyping is an essential part of the design process. You may remember the IDEO designer’s attempt to understand clients’ requirements for a new surgical apparatus to operate on delicate nasal tissues. He used a whiteboard marker and a film canister taped to a plastic clothespin to make a crude but effective prototype, which led to testing ideas to see what worked before the product was developed and launched. Prototypes can come in the form of basic models, or sketches that inform others and communicate what our ideas look like, behave like, and work like before the real product or service is launched.²⁶

Entrepreneurs have different ways of testing their ideas: many of them, like Zappos founder Nick Swinmurn, launch their products and services quickly to the market and then use feedback from their customers for further testing and development; others first carefully test ideas through pilots and prototypes by conducting a range of experiments. This is the approach Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman took before launching Rent the Runway, a business renting designer dresses initially online, followed by bricks-and-mortar locations.²⁷

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Fleiss thought of the idea to rent designer dresses when she noticed her sister, who was an accessories buyer at Bloomingdale’s, struggling to find something to wear for a wedding. It occurred to Fleiss that if her sister, who had a successful well-paid job, couldn’t afford a designer dress, then there wasn’t much hope for anyone else. She also thought about the problem from the designer’s side. How were designers going to get young, fashionable women to build their brand when the dresses were so far out of their price range? Fleiss teamed up with her Harvard Business School friend Jennifer Hyman to find the answers to those questions and to investigate the following hypothesis: there is a market for women who want to rent designer dresses online. Now all Fleiss and Hyman had to do was to test their assumptions.

But before launching the website, Fleiss and Hyman ran three experiments to test their idea. In their first experiment, they purchased one hundred dresses from top fashion designers, and offered them up for rent on the Harvard University campus, having let the students try them on in advance. The results of this pilot were encouraging: not only did the dresses rent, but they were returned in good condition. This experiment proved that there was a market for women who wanted to rent designer dresses and who would return them in good shape.

In the second experiment, they offered the dresses for rent on the Yale campus. This time prospective buyers were allowed to see the dresses but not try them on first. Even though not as many women rented the dresses as in the first experiment, the pilot was still considered a success.

Credit: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty Images

Rent the Runway, founded by Jennifer Fleiss and Jennifer Hyman, makes designer dresses more affordable for everyone.

In the final experiment, Fleiss and Hyman took photos of the dresses and offered the dresses for rent to New Yorkers through PDF photos and descriptions only. This was a test to see if women would prefer to rent the dresses from a store versus online. It turned out that approximately 5% of women showed an interest in renting the dresses online, which was enough for the founders to launch Rent the Runway: an online service renting designer dresses at only one-tenth of the cost, which the New York Times called “a Netflix model for haute couture.”²⁸

Launched in 2009, Rent the Runway attracted 600,000 members and 50,000 clients in its first year. By carrying out very few thoughtful experiments, Fleiss and Hyman had managed to create a hugely successful business. Furthermore, they didn’t need to go down the traditional market research route and use methods like surveys. Their experiments allowed them to get immediate hands-on feedback from the participants, as well as knowledge about their buying behavior. This gave Fleiss and Hyman the opportunity to enlist early customers in the Rent the Runway model, and eventually launch the website with an established customer base. By starting small, the two businesswomen were able to realize their vision without huge financial costs and waste down the road.

These examples demonstrate that you don’t need to run a whole range of complex, expensive experiments to get the answers you are looking for. The more questions you ask, observations you make, and people you involve, the more powerful are your data. Keep it simple and inexpensive, but also look for patterns across your data to draw accurate conclusions.

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As we have learned, Fleiss and Hyman, Swinmurn, the founders of Parlor Skis, and the IDEO designers have all used some form of prototyping to experiment and test their ideas. Let’s take a look at one of the easiest and most powerful forms of prototyping: storyboarding.

7.6 THE POWER OF STORYBOARDING

> > LO 7.6  Illustrate the power of storyboarding as a form of prototyping and a basis for experiments.

Storyboarding is an easy form of prototyping that provides a high-level view of thoughts and ideas arranged in sequence in the form of drawings, sketches, or illustrations (see Figure 7.4).

Walt Disney animator Webb Smith has been credited with developing the idea of storyboarding in the 1930s by pinning up sketches of scenes in order to previsualize cartoons and spot any problems or inconsistencies before the animation goes into production.²⁹ Since then, not only has storyboarding become standard for movies, commercials, documentaries, and advertising, but it is also becoming popular as a business and management tool for explaining projects or products to employees, clients, customers, stockholders, and others.³⁰

What does storyboarding mean to the entrepreneur? A storyboard provides you with a better understanding of your own idea and how it interacts with customers. It is a way of compiling your thoughts and ideas into one visual, easy-to-understand, logical document or set of documents.³¹ Often, it is helpful to draw a storyboard before interacting with customers or other stakeholders because it can bring clarity to the idea, better tell the story of the idea, and highlight the potential value it brings to customers. While there are no hard and fast rules for storyboarding, there must be a clear sense of what needs to be accomplished and an effort to maintain the flow or sequence of thoughts and ideas.

FIGURE 7.4

Storyboard

Source: Retrieved from http://www.fastcodesign.com/1672917/the-8-steps-to-creating-a-great-storyboard

Credit: ©iStockphoto.com/Rudimencial

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Remember the old adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Because of the visual element, storyboards have a way of getting the main message across very quickly. It is also more likely than a lengthy, detailed, written document or speech to provoke reactions, discussion, and feedback from the people who are viewing it. As long as your storyboard flows well and is interesting and interactive, you can expect it to generate ideas and further questions.³²

Storyboarding requires that the customer be at the center of the story. It is a way for you to draw the idea in action, which generates further questions for additional experimentation.

Basic storyboards are simple and inexpensive to create, and they do not require any artistic training or talent. They can be rough, hand-drawn sketches, or simple PowerPoint slides. If you are sketching on a piece of paper, separate your page into quadrants, and then you can start to fill in each one. Your goal is not to create a work of art but to communicate: to use visual imagery to make your entrepreneurial idea more understandable.³³

The problem–solution–benefit framework (see Figure 7.5) provides a basic structure for storyboarding. In this structure, there are three main questions to keep in mind:

What is the problem your customer is experiencing?

What are you offering as a solution to the problem?

How will your customer benefit from your product/service offering?

Let’s apply these questions to the Rent the Runway example we described above.

The problem: Many women (even those in well-paid jobs) cannot afford designer dresses to wear to special occasions. “I want to wear a designer dress, but they are very expensive, and I would probably wear it only once.”

The solution: Give women access to designer dresses by creating an online business renting designer dresses for one-tenth of the original cost. “I get access to the latest dresses, but I get to rent for the night rather than buy!”

The benefit: The rental model gives many more women the opportunity to wear designer dresses, which they could have never afforded before. It provides designers with an opportunity to build their brand because their dresses are being showcased by a larger demographic of young, fashionable women. “This service would let me feel like a movie star for my fancy party that’s coming up next month.”

FIGURE 7.5

The Problem–Solution–Benefit Framework

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Another version of a storyboard (Figure 7.6) uses a four-quadrant framework. The storyboard illustrates an idea for a new entrepreneurship course. The idea is for faculty members to create an Introduction to Entrepreneurship course for first-year college students with the goal of creating, developing, operating, and launching a new business.

This storyboard shows a before-and-after scenario. The upper left quadrant shows a traditional classroom setting, with a professor standing at the top of the class, lecturing students on the theory of entrepreneurship. One student is sleeping; another student is hoping a friend will text him to give him something else to do; a third student doesn’t understand the theory that the professor is teaching. The problem is that students are not engaged during the entrepreneurship course.

The second part of the story board (the upper right quadrant) suggests a solution to boost student engagement by separating them into teams, and loaning each team $3,000 (funded by the college) as startup money for the new ventures.

In the third (lower left) quadrant, the students armed with the money organize their businesses into different function units. While they are given the freedom to create their own ideas, they are encouraged to think about how their product or services satisfies a human need. They sell their product; but they also suffer from challenges, setbacks, and great victories—as depicted in the zigzag graph illustrated with happy and unhappy faces.

The final quadrant, on the lower right, shows the outcome. Students pay the startup money back to the college, and the remaining profits go to charity. What are the benefits of this idea? The students are much more engaged because they acted in order to learn. They were given the opportunity to build something real, practice entrepreneurship, and get a taste for the real entrepreneurial experience.

This storyboard generated lots of questions that needed to be answered before the course could be rolled out. Early questions are listed in Table 7.2.

FIGURE 7.6

Storyboard of an Idea to Boost Student Engagement

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MINDSHIFT

Create a Storyboard and One Simple Experiment

By this point in the book, we are sure you have at least one idea, if not hundreds, floating around in your mind. We hope you’ve developed a practice of writing down your ideas. Now it’s time to take one of your ideas and draw it in action using a storyboard format. The simplest format is the four-quadrant version depicted in Figure 7.6—the storyboard to boost student engagement.

Artistic talent is not required. Simply focus on visually representing the four aspects of your idea: problem, solution, organization, and outcomes/benefits. As you create your sketches, questions will probably arise related to your idea. Once you’ve completed the storyboard, write a list of all the questions that you have, now that you have envisioned your idea in action. It’s okay if you have a long list. As a matter of fact, the longer the better.

Once you have your questions, identify the top three questions you want to answer first, and develop an action-oriented experiment to answer each question. Be specific: What’s the question the experiment is designed to examine? What do think you’ll find (i.e., what is your hypothesis)? Next, conduct the experiments. What did you learn? How will you build this learning into the next iteration?

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTIONS

1. At the outset of this exercise, how did you feel about being asked to create a storyboard? Do you think people with artistic training or talent have an advantage in storyboarding? Why or why not?
2. Is your list of questions longer or shorter than you expected? How easy or difficult was it to translate your top three questions into experiments?
3. What did you learn from this exercise that surprised you? •

The list of questions can go on and on, but it’s amazing how many questions come from simply drawing the idea in action. It is likely the list would have been much shorter if the idea was simply being discussed rather than sketched. But in this case, each question represents a need for an experiment.

Depending on the result of each experiment, the original idea may change slightly and for the better. This is the point of experimenting. Once most of the questions have been answered, then a pilot course can be built and rolled out to all students.

This class is actually being taught today at Babson College, and has been since 1996. Many experiments have been conducted over the years to better refine the course. Most recently, this course has been combined with the organizational behavior (OB) course, and is known as Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship. It is taught by an entrepreneurship faculty member and an OB faculty member.

TABLE 7.2

Early Questions Generated by Storyboarding

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The idea is that as the venture grows (entrepreneurship), so do the individual and team (organizational behavior). As you can see from the original storyboard, the intention to combine two courses was not in the original design, but the idea has evolved and grown over the years to become even more innovative and inclusive. Local charities have also benefited from the student startups and have received over $400,000 in donations since 1999.³⁴

In the next chapter, we will explore the concept of evaluating opportunities through the medium of business models. •

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SUMMARY

7.1    Define experiments and describe the steps of experimentation.

Experiments are mechanisms for testing the validity of a hypothesis. The starting point of an experiment is the hypothesis—the assumption to be tested—but the formulation of the hypothesis itself begins with asking questions and conducting background research to identify the right questions to be explored further.

7.2    Identify and describe the six steps of scientific experimentation.

The scientific process of experimentation includes the following steps: asking lots of questions; carrying out background research; developing hypotheses; testing the hypotheses by running experiments; analyzing the data; and assessing results.

7.3    Demonstrate how to test hypotheses and identify customers.

It’s critical that when testing hypotheses, entrepreneurs need not actually develop elaborate, extremely robust experiments; the goal is to think like a scientist, not to emulate one perfectly. The type of customer to be targeted must also be carefully weighed. Customers differ in terms of their levels of consumption, rate of adoption, and ability to influence. Furthermore, many factors influential to the perception of a new product or service need not stem from actual customers but could instead come from critics or celebrity endorsements.

7.4    Explore different ways of generating data and describe the rules of experimentation.

When experimenting, entrepreneurs should build on learning, including recently acquired information (positive and negative) into future experiments. Again, a scientific mentality should be adopted, but not to an extreme degree. Data should be well tracked, and many questions should be explored; but cost and experiment duration should be kept to a minimum whenever possible. Finally, all possible stakeholders should be the focus, both in terms of consideration and interaction.

7.5    Identify three types of experiments most commonly used.

The three most commonly employed types of experiments areas follows: trying new experiences; deconstructing products, processes, and ideas to better understand how and why they function; and conducting trials and pilots.

7.6    Illustrate the power of storyboarding as a form of prototyping and a basis for experiments.

Engaging, simple, and effective in communicating a point or position—storyboards exemplify the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. Inexpensive and easy to make, storyboards are also great tools for eliciting questions from the audience or getting them involved in the creative process.

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KEY TERMS

Decision makers  184

Economic buyers  184

End users  183

Experiment  179

Hypothesis  179

Influencers (or opinion leaders)  183

Pilot experiment  190

Recommenders  183

Saboteurs  184

Storyboarding  192

CASE STUDY

Marissa Mayer, Yahoo Inc. CEO

In 2013, Fortune magazine listed Marissa Mayer in the #1 slot on their prestigious 40 Under 40 list, ahead of well-known Internet tycoons such as Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Ben Silberman (Pinterest), and Kevin Systrom (Instagram). In 2014, Fortune magazine listed Mayer as #14 on its Most Powerful Women in Business list, and #18 on its Most Influential Women in the World list. Yet, by 2015, her star quality seemed to be getting tarnished.

Hailing from the farmland of central Wisconsin, Marissa Mayer had a typical small-town American upbringing. In high school, she was active in extracurricular activities, where she demonstrated leadership abilities as captain of her school’s successful debate team and pom-pom squad. She continued in her upward trajectory of success at Stanford University, where she initially studied to become a doctor but earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in computer science.

Mayer’s successes coming out of college opened many doors of opportunity. Despite receiving 14 different job offers from a variety of prestigious organizations, Mayer chose to accept an offer with a computer startup company called Google, which at the time was still in its infancy. When Mayer joined Google in 1999, she was only the 20th person hired by the company, which had been incorporated just a year previously.

An entrepreneur at heart, Mayer made contributions to Google in the early days of the company that were prominent, far-reaching, and in many ways foundational to the overarching success the company has enjoyed. She started out as a programmer writing code. Over time, however, she became increasingly involved in leadership roles that allowed her to experiment with policy strategies that proved highly successful. For example, her leadership and example led to clearer communication between executives and floor-level employees, and to the development of a mentoring program that has since been replicated at numerous other tech companies.

During her decade-plus stint with Google, Mayer became known for “her work ethic, eye for detail and vision” (Marissa Mayer Biography, 2016). Her perfectionism led her to experiment and research until she had found design, market, and policy solutions that met her unusually high standards. For example, Mayer once “wanted to test out 41 shades of blue for the toolbar on Google pages to see which one appealed the most to the user.” While such fastidious decision-making processes have surely caused anxiety among some of her colleagues over the years, they seem to have ultimately served her—and the companies she has worked for—very well.

Like all entrepreneurs, Mayer has always kept her eyes open for new opportunities.

In a 2008 interview . . . she seemed to [already] be looking ahead to her next act. “I helped build Google,” Mayer said, “but I don’t like to rest on [my] laurels. I think the most interesting thing is what happens next (Marissa Mayer Biography, 2016).

What happened next caught the attention of Silicon Valley and the rest of Corporate America in unprecedented fashion. In July 2012, Yahoo Inc.—the search engine giant and competitor of Google—hired Mayer to be its new CEO. With the hire, Mayer became one of only 20 female CEOs in the Fortune 500. And at only 37 years of age, Mayer became the youngest of all Fortune 500 CEOs, male and female.

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Yahoo hired Mayer for her entrepreneurial vision hoping she could turn around a troubled company that was facing “a lack of innovation” and “a culture problem.” Innovation and culture building were two things Mayer had excelled in at Google, and she immediately went to work. Her immediate shake-up of Yahoo included a line of executive firings and several new hires to replace them.

With her new leadership team in place, Mayer began leading Yahoo in a series of substantial investments and acquisitions. However, one decision made before she came on board was the sale of over $7 billion dollars of Yahoo stock to the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba in order to increase Yahoo’s cash reserves. With added capital for experimentation and expansion, Mayer spent her first year on the job overseeing the acquisition of over 20 smaller companies. The company’s highest profile, and most expensive, move was to acquire the hugely successful microblogging company Tumblr for a price of just over a billion dollars. Ever willing to demonstrate her entrepreneurial capacity for flexibility and experimentation, Mayer pioneered a new path for Yahoo with her nod to acquire Tumblr—a move that “analysts hailed . . . as a shift in industrial strategy” (Riggins, 2014).

After only 22 months at the helm, Mayer was able to announce an 84% profit rise from the previous year. Observers commented that Yahoo’s decision to place its future in the hands of a young and gifted math and science whiz from Upstate Wisconsin had been touched by King Midas. And Marissa Mayer, worth an estimated $300 million, was goldenly compensated for her leadership as well.

Given such accolades, it was a shock to many when, in the summer of 2014, Mayer was forced to announce Yahoo’s lowest quarterly earnings in a decade. By the end of 2014, analysts were questioning not only Yahoo’s financial viability but also Mayer’s leadership.

She may be a woman of power, but she’s been heavily criticised [sic] for her lack of support in helping other women break through the glass ceiling of her industry’s heavily male-dominated hierarchy. Meanwhile, her cold, calculated style has continued to chase some of Yahoo’s most talented engineers into the arms of rivals like Google and Facebook. (Riggins, 2014)

No stranger to ambition and audacity, Mayer was known for following a personal working style that includes the following two principles: “a) work with the smartest people she can find, and b) go for a challenge that makes her feel like she’s in over her head.” As impressive as it is for a woman under the age of 40 to have taken over one of the most prominent tech companies in the world, Mayer faced the risk of being blamed for Yahoo’s demise. Nevertheless, if the company were to be sold, she would take with her a severance package valued at over $150 million.

Critical Thinking Questions

1. Marissa Mayer’s early successes were rooted in her proficiency as a student in math and science. Why are subjects like math, statistics, logic, and critical thinking essential to product experimentation and market hypotheses?
2. How might you apply the “Rules of Experimentation” to discovering and developing your own entrepreneurship and leadership skills?
3. Data generation is critical to market research and product experimentation. What “Data” might you begin collecting to better prepare yourself for a career in entrepreneurship (journal writing, subscribing to a professional journal or blog, asking questions of entrepreneurial role models, seeking out a mentor, etc.)?
4. Marissa Mayer’s executive opportunity at Yahoo came about because of her outstanding work at Google, and skilled marketing of her own career along the way. In what ways are you currently expanding or contracting future opportunities for yourself based on your present performance as a student, employee, entrepreneur, networker, friend, and human being. Secondly, how are you marketing your own career to achieve future success?

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Sources

Carlson, N. (2014, December 17). What happened when Marissa Mayer tried to be Steve Jobs. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html

Forbes (Online). (n.d.). The world’s 100 most powerful women. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/power-women/list/#tab:overall

Fortune Magazine (Online). (n.d.). 40 under 40 2013. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/40-under-40/2013/

Fortune Magazine (Online). (n.d.). The most powerful women in business. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/most-powerful-women/ginni-rometty-1/

Goel, V. (2015, December 5). Yahoo board is quiet on any shake-up plans. New York Times.

Goldman, D. (2016, March 11). Marissa Mayer is in the fight of her life. CNN: 11:49 AM ET. “Mayer is battling for her job on multiple fronts: the public, customers, in vestors and potential buyers.”

Hare, B. (2013, March 13). How Marissa Mayer writes her own rules. CNN. Retrieved from http://www. cnn.com/2013/03/12/tech/web/marissa-mayer-yahoo-profile/

Marissa Mayer Biography. (2016) .Retrieved from http://www.biography.com/people/marissa-mayer-20902689

The Richest (Online). (n.d.). Marissa Mayer net worth. Retrieved from http://www.therichest. com/celebnetworth/celebrity-business/ceo/marissa-mayer-net-worth/

Riggins, N. (2014, July 3). Marissa Mayer: Queen of Silicon Valley. World Finance: The Voice of the Market (online). Retrieved from http://www.worldfinance.com/home/featured/queen-of-silicon-valley/