A Fresh Start (up)

Just a quick post to get your opinion on something that always interests me: innovation. So I would like to know which technology or business model in the tech sector you’ve found the most surprising / interesting / innovative this year, and how it is likely to impact the sector.

My choice is 23andMe, which is, as most of you know, an Internet based service allowing you to read and understand your DNA thanks to your saliva. I heard about them of course because of Google’s investment in this startup, and I find it really interesting because it broadens widely the perimeter of “search” and then the mission of Google of making all the information of the world accessible. The idea of “Googling your genes” was already mentioned in The Google Story from David Vise, and even if a lot of people read it already, I will probably review it on Tech It Easy soon.

Anyway, please let me know your choice for the most interesting technology / business model for 2007, as an “end of the year” gift

My way back to France was hectic (3 late planes, 2 missed connections…), and obviously I caught a cold… But fortunately Christmas was great, even if almost every person in my family welcomed me with a warm “bonjour l’américaine!”….

So I take the chance of having a blog to wish happy holidays to everyone I might have forgotten

I will be in France until I finally obtain my visa to go back to California, and in the meantime I will be writing my thesis about “Internet: a way to democratize contemporary art?”, so I’ll keep you posted, even if I know that I haven’t blogged much lately. If you have any insight on the topic, do not hesitate to contact me, especially since I am looking for people to interview in the sector (gallery owners, museums, artists, net artists…).

The letters of the pictures are made with butterflies’ wings, and is the courtesy of http://www.butterflyalphabet.com/

I am still a bit obsessed on how companies manage their innovation processes and how they make it fit with their culture. In this context, I recently read an HBS case about Intel research. The “Intel lablets” particularly attracted my attention and raised general questions about the management of innovation. If you want to read my thoughts about these questions on innovation, it’s here on Tech It Easy.

This is it: I’m leaving L.A. on Sunday! It is of course a good occasion to step back and think about the results of this exchange and what has surprised me in general.

Having already been a B-school student, I thought that this Exchange would be valuable mostly for the international experience rather than for the content itself. But, apart from the obvious things (discovering life in a US university, having the occasion of meeting people with very different backgrounds due to the “aggregator” role of universities…) I have really enjoyed spending a term in an MBA program because:

• The courses are much more practical than in Masters program: for example, when dealing with innovation, professors don’t say basic things like “you have to hire creative people” but on the contrary explain all the stages of an innovation program and the different tools to foster innovation based on real companies’ experience because their audience has already dealt with practical problems and want practical solutions.
• The courses are much more interactive: all the students have on average 5 years of professional experience, so it’s usual that they have already been confronted to some situations that we talk about in class and can bring their experience to the discussion.
• People are not here only to enjoy parties and get drunk like in B-school: they have paid a lot to be there and want to make the most of it. Therefore they are really open to networking, and are most of the time delighted when you ask them questions. I have had particularly interesting discussions with people having worked previously in the Internet sector (Yahoo!, AOL, Google…) in senior positions, which is a unique opportunity to understand the career development in this sector. I was afraid that this difference in terms of professional experience would prevent me from being really integrated, but it wasn’t the case: American people really admire Europeans having learned English and ready to bring their knowledge to a US university, so they welcome any insight. I must anyway acknowledge that my year of internship has been really useful in this context, at least to better understand some particular management problems that can’t be considered from an empirical point of view (like resistance to changes, that I have experimented during my internships).
• I have gained a lot of knowledge about the corporate environment in general thanks to a lot (and I mean A LOT) of case studies. Having to read 2 entrepreneurs’ stories every week plus having a guest speaker every 2 weeks gives a better understanding of entrepreneurship than some PowerPoint slides saying “you have to be able to take risks”. Same thing in my course “Technology Management”: I didn’t know anything about the hardware or biotech industry, and now I understand what are the big challenges, and how to compare the different tech industries. Even in the Internet one, I got a more managerial and broader view to analyze the sector. MBA students have most of the time (like in most jobs) been focused on details and come there to get the whole picture on what they’ve done and where they’re going.
• This exchange has also had an unexpected effect. I have been having fun during 3 months  with people that I could have met during recruiting processes, in suit and ties, asking me “what do you think that the company should do if competitor X enters the market with a price lower by 28%? how will the operating margin be affected?”… It has allowed me to clearly acknowledge that after 5 years of professional experience, these people know a lot more than I do, but that it doesn’t mean that I don’t have a chance to impress them by showing some maturity and an organized reasoning, because I have shown during group meetings that I was up to the task.

And I will finish this post with  a quote that I will remember forever mentioned by my Entrepreneurship professor:

“Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

So simply let your music play!

I had some thoughts a few weeks ago about what this blog was going to become. If you see this post, you will think that these thoughts weren’t worth it! But anyway, my friends found this video of me (made in Vegas, of course) quite funny, so I share it with you in a “stupid interlude”!