cf Authentic Demand, Customer Development, Demand-side

the actual customer-desire aspect of a business model and operation; cf customer discovery, compelling vs status quo; cf Customer Demand (more)

Cedric Chin: A Demand-Side Mystery. This week's Commoncog piece is free; next week's piece will be members-only: Vanguard as a Demand-Side Mystery — This is Part 3 of the Understanding Customer Demand series. At the end of the Part 2, after we walked through the Jobs To Be Done framework, we explored the setup for a mystery together. The two frameworks (Sales Safari and JTBD) that we’ve explored together actually rests on a common premise: both frameworks assume that demand is a function of pain — a customer only becomes a customer when they experience some lack in their lives; something that they want to make progress on. (more)

*Open Source Practitioner • bullish on kindness. (more)

alternative to product-market-fit, model from The Heart of Innovation

The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business is a book by American business historian Alfred Chandler, published by the Belknap Press imprint of Harvard University Press in 1977. Chandler argues that in the nineteenth century, Adam Smith's invisible hand was supplanted by the "visible hand" of middle management, which became "the most powerful institution in the American economy". Chandler uses eight propositions[3] to show how and why the visible hand of management replaced what Adam Smith referred to as the invisible hand of the market forces: (more)

Alfred DuPont Chandler Jr. (September 15, 1918 – May 9, 2007) was a professor of business history at Harvard Business School and Johns Hopkins University, who wrote extensively about the scale and the management structures of modern corporations. His works redefined business and economic history of industrialization. He received the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (1977). He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.[1][2] He has been called "the doyen of American business historians". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_D._Chandler_Jr.

Cedric Chin: Becoming Data Driven in Business: A Series. What does it mean to be data driven in business? Most people think being data driven means looking at charts on a daily basis. Or they attempt to use data in their orgs, and then fall into one of the many traps that come with the territory. How do you actually get good at using data for your operations? And how do you build the mindset and the organisational capabilities necessary to do it? (more)

Cedric Chin: Process Behaviour Charts: More Than You Need To Know. This week’s Commoncog post is for members only; next week’s post will be free. Process Behaviour Charts: More Than You Need To Know (members only) — We last talked about process behaviour charts in Part Two of the Becoming Data Driven in Business Series. In that piece, I introduced the idea from Statistical Process Control (SPC) that the way to become data driven is to first understand variation, and the secret weapon that SPC practitioners have is the process behavior chart (more)

Cedric Chin: The Deming Paradox: The Human Costs of Operational Rigour (rigor). This is an investigative note, and only nominally part of the Becoming Data Driven in Business series. (more)

‘The everything app’: why Elon Musk wants X (Twitter) to be a WeChat for the west. Daily life in Chinese cities is nearly impossible to navigate without WeChat, to the extent that being barred from the country’s super-app has been likened to a “digital death”. (more)

Cedric Chin: The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail. The Heart of Innovation: Why Most Startups Fail — This week's essay is a summary of the 2023 book The Heart of Innovation, and gives us the answer to the mystery we set up about Vanguard in the previous instalment of the Understanding Customer Demand Series. (more)

Cedric Chin: Vanguard as a Demand-Side Mystery. At the end of Part 2, I presented you with the setup for a mystery: The two frameworks that we’ve explored together actually rests on a common premise: both frameworks assume that demand is a function of pain — a customer only becomes a customer when they experience some lack in their lives; something that they want to make progress on. (more)

Erlend Sogge Heggen: Group Convergence. Groups as both a formal ActivityPub spec and general concept deeply invigorate me. I previously wrote about group-to-group following (FEP-d36d) as the missing glue layer to successfully transition /r/rust to the threadiverse. (more)

Game Engine https://godotengine.org/ Godot is completely free and open-source under the very permissive MIT license. No strings attached, no royalties, nothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godot_(game_engine) (more)

Charlie Stross gave a keynote at USENIX with predictions for the 2061 future (assuming no Collapse, Singularity, or other Black Swan-s). Lots of opportunities for Huge Invention in there. (more)

First book from the Hieroglyph Project (more)

A promising non-hydrocarbon fuel source. (Alternative Energy) http://www.fuelcells.org/ (more)

Biogas typically refers to a gas produced by the biological breakdown of organic matter in the absence of oxygen. Organic waste such as dead plant and animal material, animal dung, and kitchen waste can be converted into a gaseous fuel called biogas. Biogas originates from biogenic material and is a type of biofuel. (more)

Green hydrogen (GH2 or GH2) is hydrogen generated by renewable energy[1] or from low-carbon power.[2] Green hydrogen has significantly lower carbon emissions than grey hydrogen, which is derived from fossil fuels without carbon capture. Green hydrogen may be used to decarbonize sectors that are hard to electrify, such as cement and iron production. Green hydrogen can be used to produce green ammonia, the main constituent of synthetic fertilizer. It can also be used for long-duration grid energy storage,[3][4] and for long-duration seasonal energy storage.[5] As of 2021, green hydrogen accounted for less than 0.04% of total hydrogen production. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_hydrogen