04 de February de 2019
Manuel Juanes, the Co-Founder and COO at Smartmee Soluciones Ágiles, led a practical session within the framework of the EAE Entrepreneur Experience, with the participation of students of EAE's Master in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, among others.
After the presentation, the lecturer at EAE emphasized to the students how hard it is to find a team with which to develop your entrepreneurial ventures, before explaining how his life changed in 2013, when he left his job and created a technological startup in the health sector. That bad experience as an entrepreneur taught him a great deal because "since then, I haven't made any more mistakes". Juanes currently combines his investment activity with his teaching duties at various business schools, including EAE.
In the workshop, the EAE lecturer explained the meaning of entrepreneur, highlighting the third definition listed in the RAE dictionary: "People responsible for the management and supervision of work in factories: establishments, offices, premises, , etc.", adding that you have to apply this attitude every day and not only in business. "All human beings are entrepreneurs on a daily basis: 30% depends on chance, 20% on getting money and the remaining 50% on how well we do it".
Juanes also used the definition of entrepreneurship coined by the US speaker Jim Rohn, who described entrepreneurship as the capacity to turn dreams into reality regardless of the obstacles. On this road filled with obstacles, the lecturer at EAE underlined the importance of being "Responsible Entrepreneurs to ourselves, our customers, our partners, the team, investors, society and the planet".
In the Workshop for Responsible Entrepreneurs, participant develop tools that enable them to generate value for their customers. Juanes advised the students not to fall in love with an idea and to be objective and strict, as well as controlling risk as much as possible. To do so, it is necessary to carry out a good diagnostic process and plan (establishing indicators and systematically evaluating). Then, if things do not work out within the set deadline, you have to be reasonable and close things down. In addition, he emphasized the importance of developing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). In this case, he gave the example of the creator of Dropbox, Drew Houston, who launched a homemade video with the initial functions offered by the platform and, within a week, he got 75,000 orders for an unfinished product.
The lecturer on the Master in Entrepreneurship and Innovation also recommends using the Lean Process, a methodology closely linked to agile product development that enables the hypothesis to be validated, learn a lot with a little investment, and fail quickly and cheaply.
Within this context, he also discussed the Jobs To Be Done methodology, an approach to working used as an innovation lever, detailing its main features (according to T. Ulwick) and establishing three key aspects: the situation, the motivation and the result. "When, in a certain situation X, I want a motivation X to achieve result X". With this work methodology, Juanes set an objective, customer satisfaction, to give a practical case study for the EAE students: setting up a physical activity centre for young people.
To take part in the Workshop for Responsible Entrepreneurs, the EAE students applied the Jobs To Be Done methodology to group projects from which they came up with some interesting project ideas. "You have to create a functionality and combine it with something emotional and social to make the proposition really strong", concluded Juanes, "before then going out and testing it, striving to provide a solution for people's needs".