How to Find Winning Ideas
With CEO and Entrepreneurship Professor Stephen Golden
Fear of Failure
Students struggle with finding good new ideas. “95% of startups fail in the first three years” is a pretty demotivating statistic to face, especially as a young person trying your hand at entrepreneurship. People often romanticize what it takes to build the next Airbnb, Netflix, or Uber from the ground up. The harsh reality? Most good ideas are a dime in a dozen, and even if you have a good one, an idea isn’t worth much unless you’re willing to work towards its actualization.
This week, we spoke with Stephen Golden, a renowned Entrepreneurship and Innovation Professor at Northeastern, to learn more about what it takes to come up with successful business ventures. If you’ve asked for advice on which entrepreneurship courses to take at NU, chances are someone has mentioned one of his two outstanding offerings: Innovation (ENTR 2310) or Lean Design & Product Development (ENTR 3330).
About Professor Golden
Stephen Golden launched over 500 consumer electronics products and services into the market, working with major retailers such as Best Buy, Walmart, Target, and Staples. He performs the Ready Stage reviews of startups going through IDEA, Northeastern’s student-led venture accelerator, and leads Independent Study offerings for several student-entrepreneurs each semester.
Golden has demonstrated his ability to identify winning products, cultivate them, and successfully deliver them to most major retailers and many top-tier brands.
Golden jumped into entrepreneurship by chance; fresh out of college, he worked in finance and was advised by a friend to join his company as a marketing salesman. After loving the flexibility of his career, Golden quickly became successful with launching products and eventually started his own company for product development, commercialization, and retail market consulting, North River Consumer Products LLC, in 2007.
Design Thinking: how to entrepreneurially think like a user
Golden is a huge advocate of design thinking, an iterative process for adopting the mindset of a user and innovatively evaluating the design of products and services. The main focus is on empathizing with your consumers and assuming their role to understand their point of view. As Golden put it: “If the customer says it’s a bad idea, it’s a bad idea. Go rethink what you’re doing.”
Before settling on one solution, design thinking encourages entrepreneurs to clearly define how their audience experiences their problems, what needs to be solved, and what solutions fit their audience’s criteria.
Design thinking is made up of five core elements:
- Empathize with your users
- Define the problem and understand what your users need and experience
- Ideate for possible solutions
- Prototype and create solutions
- Test your solutions
In his ‘Innovation!’ class, Golden spends the semester teaching methods for how to follow the design thinking framework. It is the same framework he works through when developing consumer products for the retail market. He emphasizes that the elements are not sequential in nature, but rather modular states.
Golden’s “Golden Advice”
Following the design thinking framework is a key step in finding winning ideas. However, Golden was also able to share his specific insights for all student entrepreneurs that hope to succeed. They are as follows:
1) Now (mid-pandemic) is one of the best times to innovate
Ideas often come from every day experienced problems. As of right now in the pandemic, we are faced with a multitude of unprecedented issues and newly-formed crises that demand action. It’s no surprise that hardship drives innovation, and the opportunity to make a high impact is plentiful.
We asked Golden what advice he would give to students looking to build a startup right now, and Golden fervently emphasized that times like these are when we rely on entrepreneurship and innovation the most:
“OMG. What better time to innovate than now? The best innovation occurs when you have catastrophes, these big problems that need to be solved. There are so many opportunities.”
2) Focus on formulating a solid problem statement
An idea is meaningless without a direct, targeted problem statement. Your solution needs to solve a real problem for enough people. Ask yourself: Does anybody care? Is it a problem for enough people? Does it hurt enough people enough?
“Great innovators always start with the problem, never with the solution. The biggest single reason the innovators fail is because they have a solution that doesn’t really have a market need.”
Golden finds problems using the Double Diamond Technique. It’s two diamonds, the left diamond is the problem, and the right diamond is the solution. And we start by saying, we know something’s broken. And then we look at all the elements that are causing that problem. And then we focus back on a single element. And then second diamond, we then look for as many possible solutions as we can, and then focus back on a single solution.
Finding an idea that answers these questions gives it the best chances for success.
3) Be willing to take educated risks
Entrepreneurship is centered around innovation and risk-taking. If you never challenge the boundaries you’re given, you will never develop an innovative spirit. As Golden said:
“I think most people get comfortable and are afraid of change. But, great and innovative spirit is about adapting and advancing.
I don’t consider myself a great innovator, but I’m not afraid to take a chance. I launched the number one selling digital camera in the world (Polaroid). And, that was my product that I put together and was very proud of. And I also lost a half a million dollars on a company that was really bad. You have to continuously learn from it. So long as you’re willing to take educated risks, you can be successful. ‘Educated’ is certainly key.”
4) Surround yourself with bright people
One of the best ways to motivate yourself to become better and work harder is to surround yourself with good role models. Have people around you that are doing the things you want to do and get their help; learn from them. Not only will you be better able to motivate yourself in the right ways, but you will be surrounded by inspiration for new innovations. As Golden said:
“Most innovation is enhancements on existing solutions.
Surround yourself with some very bright people. Find the brightest possible people that you can get on your team. You can’t do it alone. Learn to listen to them and have a healthy dose of criticism. Also, be inclusive of everybody involved. The more diversity that you have on the team, the better, so long as you respect what the other folks have to say.”
5) Rethink your education track
As a current professor at Northeastern and a finance major who became immensely successful in the marketing industry, Golden shares a unique perspective on what students should do once they’ve developed a solid educational foundation:
“Step back and rethink. When your advisor tells you to take, for example you’re a CS major, so they say ‘take all CS courses,’ branch out and say ‘no, I want to take an art,’ or ‘I want to take a literature course.’ It just gives you a different perspective. Students shouldn’t just tick the boxes. You need to think strategically about your education.
Your education is like buying or building a house. Colleges say, ‘here’s a general contract.’ The first thing we do when we build a house is we look for a great location. The second thing we do is we build a foundation; my foundation was in finance and accounting. And then back half of your time at school, think about what you’re going to put on top of that foundation. You can do anything! Do the typical stuff the first three years, and then during the last stretch of your education, break the rules. The more you do that in your education, the more well rounded you will be. It will undoubtedly make you a much better innovator.”
6) Make sure you have the five elements:
In ENTR 2301, Golden also talks about the five elements that are critical for success and innovation. Here are the five questions that you must ask yourself:
- Is it accessible?
- Is it affordable?
- Is it demanded?
- Does it create negative environmental issues?
- Is it being pursued by the right leadership?
Golden sees these five elements as the quickest way to evaluate the viability of an idea:
“If you craft a problem statement with a really effective approach, and the five elements are available, then you have a reasonably good chance of being successful.
I can look at a an innovation and very quickly run through that little to decide whether it has a possibility of being successful or not in the first couple of minutes. You see this on Shark Tank and other shows, first couple of minutes, I can tell you right away, this is a good chance. And it’s just simply going through that five element checklist, right? It’s not really isn’t rocket science.
All the stats kind of have to align. And once they do, the next thing you need to think about is differentiation.”
7) Be aware of the costs associated with building something
Costs can make or break your product! Students especially will do the work to further an idea in the retail market space only to discover just how expensive prototyping and iterating is way down the line. Even once you’ve created a viable product, creating enough to sell is a whole bridge to cross.
Managing costs are just as important as making sure there is a need. Golden has seen this play out time and time again in his Innovation class.
“The cost of building and its impact are things students don’t take into consideration because they haven’t been exposed. You can have some really cool technology. But if it’s too expensive for kids, it’s not possible for them to work on it. The components need to be affordable.
I think that a big miss for for students is the overall cost of starting a business. They just end up, when they come into the ready stage of IDEA, thinking ‘Yeah, I got it, I got it. I’m going to employ 4 million these things.’ And I ask ‘how are you going to get them from your prototype to the end customer?’ Many haven’t really thought through that. So that’s a big issue.”
Concluding Thoughts
Golden left us with these final thoughts on ideas versus opportunities:
“Everybody has ideas, it’s all about the opportunities. Ideas are really easy. Finding a good opportunity is really, really hard. And so what we do in both of my classes is we begin with the problems that we focus on what’s broken, the fix for the very definitive statement. And great innovation always starts with the problem, never with the solution.”
