Applied Podcast – Ep. 10

• CSU Institute for Entrepreneurship
• Venture Validator Program
• CSU Entrepreneurship Events

• Online Master of Business Administration
• Entrepreneurship and Innovation Graduate Certificate
• Human-Centered Design Thinking Graduate Certificate

Beren Goguen (00:00):
Welcome to Applied. I’m Beren Goguen. I’m here today with Mark Schreiber, who serves as the K-12 entrepreneurship specialist, where he strives to help schools and students to add more entrepreneurial programs and mindsets into their schools and classrooms. Mark has consulted for the US Air Force Academy, Intel Corp, the American School in Japan, and many other schools and institutions to help bring more design and innovation into classrooms worldwide. Tell us a little bit more about that.

Mark Schreiber (00:29):
Yeah, as we were saying a little bit before, that I was the Director of Innovation and Design at American School in Japan. I helped them launch that program and the program was really about design thinking, human-centered design, building things, making things. But then it gets to the end of that and you want to do something with it, you want to promote it, you want to make it go further, and then you want to have capital that comes back from that potentially. So really, that kind of started everything. And then I’ve got a chance to go to the Air Force Academy there down in the Springs.

Mark Schreiber (01:00):
Right before a giant snowstorm, so I’m glad I got back.

Beren Goguen (01:02):
Oh yeah?

Mark Schreiber (01:03):
It was back in 2019, I guess. It’s this giant spring snowstorm… And got to do that with their CyberWorks program. So they have a big program they’re working on to get more hands-on human-centered design in with their cadets, trying to help them really not just solve a problem that doesn’t need to be solved, but solve something that needs to be solved. And then I continue right now, even to this day, as of just yesterday, working on curriculum to help them get more entrepreneurship and hands-on education into schools.

Beren Goguen (01:33):
How do you define entrepreneurship?

Mark Schreiber (01:36):
I mean, entrepreneurship can be this kind of a sexy Silicon Valley thing, and… I don’t look at it that way. I really see it just as a way of, there’s risk takers that want to step into the unknown and to bring something new into the world, and that’s how I define it more. There’s definitely a business component of it. There’s capital and there’s needs and a whole bunch of things that have to be done. But at the root of it, entrepreneurship is really about taking ground that hasn’t been taken.

Beren Goguen (02:07):
Innovation.

Mark Schreiber (02:08):
Yeah, being innovative, and I think there’s a lot of younger people even that I see that they just do that, right? They’re not afraid because they didn’t learn that they can’t. So it’s just that: Okay, I’m going to do it. It’s going to be messy, but I’m going to succeed. And I think maybe you get bit enough after a while, maybe you stop becoming as entrepreneurial and maybe become a little more safe. But yeah, I think entrepreneurship’s a risky, bold look at something that hasn’t been done and how you can bring it into the world to make it a better place.

Beren Goguen (02:43):
So what would you say to people who say it’s too risky and maybe they’re a little critical of how some people are a little fast and loose with funding and money and things like that. So, entrepreneurship is one of those things that has pros and cons, obviously.

Mark Schreiber (02:57):
Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you definitely see that wild west side of it and it’s like, wow, everything’s the Uber of blank now. So it can’t just be the crazy idea. It’s got to be rooted in the fundamentals. But I would say to the person that says, well, hey, it’s too crazy. It would be, maybe, you need to be a little more crazy to start and then rein it in. It’s not about just… Nobody sprints forever, but to sprint off in a direction, pause, evaluate, sprint off, and maybe you’re zigzagging down the track… [That] is going to be way better than just sitting there planning out on paper and never having even executed it. So…

Beren Goguen (03:36):
Never taking that next step.

Mark Schreiber (03:38):
Yeah. Once again, risk. Bold isn’t dumb, right? Risk is something about… And there’s certain people. There’s people that take ground. There’s people that hold ground. So, I probably wouldn’t compete… And I probably wouldn’t give much thought to the people that would say: Are you just a little too loose? I’d be, well, I need you later, right? We need you later. We’re all on this team. You can’t do it forever. You can’t just keep sprinting down the thing and unchecked.

Beren Goguen (04:03):
Right. You have to have a balance, but you have to have people who are willing to take that risk and to put theirselves out there to try something that might work. It might not, but it won’t work if you don’t try.

Mark Schreiber (04:15):
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. (Music Break)

Beren Goguen (04:28):
So what sets entrepreneurship apart from the broader topic of business? You said there’s obviously overlap with entrepreneurship and business, but they’re not the same. What makes those two things different?

Mark Schreiber (04:38):
Yeah, I think it goes back to that same question we were just talking about with entrepreneurship and that Wild West kind of side of it. The difference to me is there’s the fundamentals in entrepreneurship. You need to be able to have the books reconciled and move forward and have money to fund the things that you’re trying to fund. And you have to scale in a proper way. Business though, I would say, is more the second part, the back end. We have a tool we use called the Business Model Canvas. And it’s just a snapshot of what’s all in a business and has a value proposition and your customer segments and your key markets and your channels and how you’re going to talk to people about it. And then [it] has your revenue streams. But then it also has all your key partnerships and it has all of your… Are you going to make money? And how much money are you spending? And what do you do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? What’s your day to day? The business to me is that day-to-day operations need to get it going. It’s the holistic portion of it. But maybe it’s the aircraft carrier and entrepreneurship is more the destroyer, kind of moves around. But at some point you still need to be able to have them both in the room.

Beren Goguen (05:51):
Right. And what was the model that you mentioned?

Mark Schreiber (05:52):
Oh, the Business Model Canvas, BMC.

Beren Goguen (05:55):
Okay. Is that something that is open source and accessible to people?

Mark Schreiber (06:00):
Oh yeah, it’s been around. Long live the BMC. It’s been around for a long time. It’s just an easy way to look at a business and make sure that you have all your components. You could even say, back to the point of entrepreneurship, you could be a little scattered in the entrepreneurship. They’re just trying to… It’s a big ball of wax. You’re trying to do all these things. So to be able to really pull it apart and say, okay, center to the business model canvas, the center square… It’s like a landscape piece of paper with nine squares on it.

Mark Schreiber (06:29):
The very center of is your value proposition, so what value are you bringing? And if you don’t know your value, you probably shouldn’t start your business. That would be…

Beren Goguen (06:35):
So that’s the starting point.

Mark Schreiber (06:36):
Yeah, that’d be your check and balance. And then your customer segments. So who does your pain point, your value prop, map over to and relate to? And that’s that human-centered design. That’s why…

Beren Goguen (06:47):
Right.

Mark Schreiber (06:47):
…we’re also talking about design.

Beren Goguen (06:48):
We talk about that in marketing a lot.

Mark Schreiber (06:49):
Yeah, yeah.

Beren Goguen (06:50):
It’s important. You have to have that from the get-go.

Mark Schreiber (06:53):
And really, once you get that, that becomes your marketing collateral. That becomes your messaging. That becomes everything because you clearly articulate and communicate and then you can look at the cost of how you’re going to sell it. Is it just a physical exchange? I give you a water bottle and you pay me five bucks and thank you very much? Or is it software as a service (SaaS) or is it some other model of revenue lease?

Mark Schreiber (07:17):
What are all these things? Once you have that triad and you go, okay, I think I know how I would do it. Well, then you can start talking about: How do I message to people? How do I market to them? But then the left side of the business model canvas is the other big squares, and that’s your key partners and that’s your cost analysis of… And wow, it’s going to cost me $5,000 per unit to do this, but I’m only getting paid five. Well, [you] probably don’t have a business. So it’s just an easy way to, kind of… a go, no-go check. And to be authentic and honest with yourself. We do… I’m teaching Venture Validator over the Institute for Entrepreneurship starting on Monday. And we do these validator classes, which can tend to be a little bit of a clarity session.

Mark Schreiber (08:02):
Instead of as much about skills… compared to saying… Because everybody brings their little awesome business. This is my baby. Look at this. This is so awesome. Everybody wants it. And then we put it in the magnifying glass and we say, well, let’s ask people: Do they want it? And if they do, why do they want it? And how could you make better features? And if they don’t, then you need to take a step back. So, the business model canvas is really just a way to magnify the good and the bad and make sure that it’s really good before you move forward with it. And back to the point of not just running off with all the money before you have a plan and burning capital. So, really make sure that you have a plan. (Music Break)

Beren Goguen (08:51):
So if someone has an idea that they think has a lot of potential, at what point do they start looking at that business model process? Pretty early?

Mark Schreiber (09:01):
Yeah. You go to the brewery, do your napkin sketch, and then once you have that all done, and you’re like this is awesome, and you go back and you want to drop your $10,000 into prototyping something… You pause. You pull out the business model canvas and you walk through it. And you put everything down in its box and you look at it and you say: Yeah, I think this has legs. I think this could walk on its own, this idea. And then you probably go interview and you probably ask people: Hey, what do you think? And the business model canvas is really just an iterative tool to continue to check yourself of… Is this business going to be good or successful? At least before you spend a bunch of money on it.

Beren Goguen (09:37):
[It] takes some of the risk out.

Mark Schreiber (09:39):
It takes a lot of the risk out, and it helps you to slow down too. Not go half cocked.

Beren Goguen (09:45):
Or miss a crucial step.

Mark Schreiber (09:46):
And oftentimes they’re used in probably not in the banking world as much, but instead of this giant business plan, back in the day of… 60-page business plan with all of your stuff. You can give… maybe you do it in a little bigger than eight and a half by eleven, like a landscape version so people can read. You should be able to put down everything that somebody that was going to invest in your company could look at and say, oh yeah. You could turn your business model canvas into a very successful pitch. You’d be able to communicate everything that you wanted to: What your market segment is. What’s the market share with your customer. Competition. Competitive landscape. All these things.

Beren Goguen (10:26):
That makes a lot of sense because that’s the next step. Right after that is investing and…

Mark Schreiber (10:31):
Unless you’re going to self fund, somehow you’re going to go for some sort of investing and it’s vogue, in a lot of ways, these pitch festivals. And Shark Tank kind of thing. That’s what they’re doing. I could look at any Shark Tank and I could, in 30 seconds after hearing their pitch, write down all the… at least I’d say 60% of the business model canvas. Just boom, boom, boom. They told me it all right there, if they did it right.

Beren Goguen (10:56):
And the investors know if they don’t.

Mark Schreiber (10:58):
Yeah, the investors they…

Beren Goguen (11:00):
…if they’re missing a piece.

Mark Schreiber (11:01):
Yeah. And they’ll ask follow-up questions of different things that are needed. Hey, who’s your competition? You didn’t talk about that. Who’s this? Who’s that?

Beren Goguen (11:10):
I’ve watched a little bit of Shark Tank and it’s pretty interesting. I’ve noticed that they pick up on things like holes pretty quickly and then they hone in on that. And, in a lot of cases, it seems like they want to see some evidence that that person has had some kind of success to show, if someone doesn’t have any capital or they’re pretty much just a self-startup. How do they go about doing that?

Mark Schreiber (11:34):
So, that’s where you’d have to get into investing. And I mean sometimes it could be as easy as mom-and-pop investing to say: Hey, I need $5,000. I want to try this thing out and crowdfunding’s a great way. Kickstarter or Indiegogo, those platforms are great because you’re basically testing out your value proposition right from the get-go. You’re testing out your customer segments. You’re testing out your marketing collateral, your vision and your view. And you can have a rudimentary prototype that… You can actually have a pretty nice-looking prototype that’s smoke and mirrors and you can tell people: This is what it’s going to look like. I’ve built one and it costs me $5,000 and then I’d like… I won’t even launch this thing unless I get $25,000. So you can say: Hey, what’s it really going to cost me? I can’t do this thing unless I get $25,000. There’s definitely a marketing side of Kickstarter. You got to get the word out to people. But if you get it out and if it gets picked up and people like it and you hit a total need and strike a nerve, then you could have a great product.

Beren Goguen (12:42):
So is entrepreneurship really taught in K-12 schools, or do you think that’s not really something that’s being taught?

Mark Schreiber (12:50):
Entrepreneurship, it’s in K-12, but it’s not a class. Typically you’ll have your business class, which maybe goes back to the word-processing days of old. That was the early business class, but it’s going to be a lot of marketing. Your four Ps of marketing, is going to be your spreadsheets, and it’s going to be the business side.

Mark Schreiber (13:13):
Entrepreneurship is not as much in there. That’s what we’re trying to change.

Mark Schreiber (13:18):
It doesn’t have its place, but it has a place everywhere. So that’s one thing going. For trying to infuse entrepreneurship, it really does fit in well. A lot of programs will put it into their ag programs, because there’s just already a entrepreneurial side of any production entity out that’s doing rural farming or whatever your business. You’re doing all these things. So having that entrepreneurial side, so it’s not the ostrich pillow side of things, but yet at the same time, that’s fun. Everybody’s seeing Shark Tank and can you do that? If you have something where you’re building things in your school, you can add that in. But why not in biology and talk about genetics or maybe talk about water quality. Let’s do a product that could test water for lower cost and just help them work through that exercise of this learning that we did, how it can be applied and how it can be put in back into the world to make it a better place. And I think you can go a long ways when kids are just… Check the box, worksheet, where you can really take it off the page and go, okay, let’s do something with this.

Mark Schreiber (14:25):
So I’ll do a lot of guest lectures and usually unpack the business model canvas and help them understand, but it’s up to them to find a project that they can add it into, roll it into that still works with their curriculum and maybe brings a little bit more to life.

Beren Goguen (14:41):
So you could incorporate entrepreneurship in essentially every subject that they’re learning as a way to bring in kind of a real-world component?

Mark Schreiber (14:49):
Yeah.

Beren Goguen (14:50):
To the learning.

Mark Schreiber (14:51):
And you could look at the history of the wallet. So, why is the wallet the shape it is? What cultures have a coinpurse versus a wallet? What do they carry in it? How did it change and evolve over time? And then what would the future wallet be? And you could talk about that and you could just do a unit on looking through history. So you’re still talking history…

Beren Goguen (15:16):
Right.

Mark Schreiber (15:17):
You can bring in all the tie-ins there. But at the end of the day, you could actually have them fabricate and build an upcycled one for a sustainability-minded customer. Or you could have them build one for the wallet of the future. So you could do it in a foreign language class. You could do it in so many different things.

Mark Schreiber (15:35):
I did a unit one time with students where they had to do a lot of skill-based processes, like a shop kind of thing. So, vacuum forming, laser cutting, vinyl cutting, 3D printing… But instead, I had them take a look at a place they want to travel to and pretend like the hotel is hiring them to rebrand their hotel and they want a box of chocolates to go with it, as part of this rebrand. So now they have to make the box, make the chocolates, make the 3D prints to make the vacuum form, to mold the chocolates, to put the logo to all that stuff. And then run a cost analysis on it. How much is this going to cost? And so it can bring things to life a lot easier. And I think it gets people’s, especially students, imaginations going, where it’s not just a: Tell me the five skills you learned and show me you can do ’em.

Beren Goguen (16:28):
Right? Yeah. A lot goes into launching a business or creating a product. People don’t always necessarily understand how much goes into it and all the things that have to fall into place. I imagine learning about that earlier on in your education can be extremely beneficial.

Mark Schreiber (16:43):
I mean, I would love to see it more and more at younger ages just because I think it does get maybe taught out of us, this risk-taking entrepreneurial spirit. Nobody’s climbing trees and that’s great. They’re not falling out of trees. But everybody’s… Risk averse is being taught. And so if risk averse is being taught and we are the innovative creative country and our peers aren’t our neighbors down the road, but across the pond like Friedman said in the world’s flat book… We’re competing on a global scale then. If creativity is American and can be a good thing for us, even as we’re going… if we can keep that going… Then, to me, that just feels like something that can really keep the students doing good things for the world in the future, rather than just replicating what’s been done.

Beren Goguen (17:37):
Right.

Mark Schreiber (17:38):
Especially with the pace of everything changing.

Beren Goguen (17:41):
Encouraging youth to get involved with innovation and creating things and not just studying for tests and memorizing things.

Mark Schreiber (17:50):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Beren Goguen (17:51):
What would you say is the biggest barrier for more young people becoming entrepreneurs?

Mark Schreiber (18:17):
I think we’re moving in that direction with more portfolios and things that value students uniqueness instead of standard. When you have standardized tests and everything should be standard… And I think there’s a place for a foundational level of learning. But if you’re hiring, I’m hiring, we’re probably hiring somebody that has an edge that’s a little different that really can do this one thing that I… that’s going to help our company or it’s going to be a good thing. So I don’t want standard. I want standard-plus. So, I think a barrier is just that students… Part of it’s just the grade system. We have A’s, B’s, C’s. So students want to know, well, what do I do to get an A? And we give ’em a rubric and they get an A. And that’s great, but there’s no rubric in life that says that this is an A, especially in entrepreneurship. The A, that’s a glass ceiling that needs to be blown through. You need to go someplace totally different. So, I think that’s the rub that’s a bit hard and that’s a big barrier, is just because we’ve told students that this is how you get the A.

Beren Goguen (19:24):
Or score higher on a test.

Mark Schreiber (19:25):
Or score higher on a test. And that’s the value compared to creativity. And to be devil’s advocate of my own thing here, is, it’s really hard to evaluate creativity. I can evaluate on a test when I norm it out.

Mark Schreiber (19:43):
You didn’t study. You studied. So there is truth to that. But I think if that’s all we say, it’s not that plus then that’s a big barrier.

Mark Schreiber (19:54):
And that’s maybe back to the business question. Entrepreneurship isn’t just running off on your own thing and just being as creative as possible and spending all the money and never producing anything… and yay. That was really fun. It’s about having that rooted, especially with a team of people that can help execute it and make it work and continue it on to scale it, to bring better… hopefully good to the world through what you’re making or service you’re providing. So I think if we can get students to realize that, hey, there’s more to it than just the grade or just the check. And that’s why these even new styles of businesses out there that aren’t nonprofit and aren’t for-profit instead of nonprofit… What are they? B Corp. So you can actually say: Hey, I’m starting a business that actually has more than just the bottom-line financials. It’s financials plus good. I think when we do that, that helps students to go: Oh, I should do something different than just get the A. I should get the A plus, or I should get the A because I can then move on to do these other things.

Beren Goguen (21:09):
The education system has kind of evolved to favor the more objective side of things. You have the test [which] is very objective. The answer is right or wrong. And that adds up to a score. And then there’s this subjective side, which is maybe writing a paper or doing a project or something creative… is harder to give a grade or a number value to that. And so it seems like we’ve moved a little too far toward the objective side and the test side, and we’ve de-emphasized some of the creativity and the critical thinking and that side of it maybe?

Mark Schreiber (21:45):
Yeah. Yeah. I think objective, subjective is part of it. But I also think it’s product versus process. So we value the product. Everybody wants the shiny thing at the end and it. It’s nebulous and hard to grade the process. How do you grade a process? But the process is the biggest thing. When you and I… I assume you would know how to ride a bike. When we learned to ride a bike, our parents didn’t just focus on holding us all the way along and we never learned to ride a bike. They let us crash. And they didn’t want us to crash. They didn’t purposefully wobble us as we push down the way. They wanted us to succeed. So, we want students to succeed, but we’re not willing to allow them to fail along the way. And you learn from failure and that’s where you learn best. And that’s what entrepreneurs have to learn, too. I think… I’d have to look up stats, but so many entrepreneurs have just… It’s their serial business and they failed on how many of the other ones, and then this one is the golden star that they all get to talk about. But if you look at their Wikipedia page, they have many failures along the way. Typically.

Beren Goguen (22:58):
How can entrepreneurship be more accessible and have better diversity?

Mark Schreiber (23:04):
Once again, I think having a purpose when we just build things and we’re like, wow, it’s just so fun to build things. Some people aren’t going to feel included in that. That’s just not where… They want the relational. So when you say: Hey, let’s look at the sustainable development goals, which the UN just put out, right? Well now, not just maybe five, 10 years ago, but they have hunger… big issues… poverty, access, equality… all these things… clean water. Well, if you give that to a group of students, there’s going to be some students, boys and girls of all different races, that are going to just latch onto different ones and they’re going to find that passion, drive them forward. And that’s going to help them want to actually do something. And I think entrepreneurship comes from solving problems that you see.

Beren Goguen (23:50):
Right.

Mark Schreiber (23:51):
So, if you never have any problems or you don’t see any problems, or you only see them from one way and you realize that, wow, in who I am and my circumstances and my upbringing, my culture, I look at things a lot different than the rest of the room that I’m sitting in here. I think maybe I should do something about that. I think that helps bring inclusivity because they realize their own power in their own culture and their own understanding of how they view the problem that other people aren’t viewing it in that same way.

Beren Goguen (24:26):
Right. So that’s probably where the leadership component can come in and say, I’m really good at these things. I have this knowledge, but I need to pull other people in who are good at these other things, who have this other knowledge that I don’t have. I can’t be the expert in everything. And so pulling the people together.

Mark Schreiber (24:43):
Yeah and I think that once again, our education… And this happens in a lot of rooms and in some rooms it doesn’t. But as we try to educate students, helping them to see that they’re powerful, that they have a unique something they bring. And maybe it’s not leadership. That’s just not who they are, who they want to be. But this other person over here, she’s really good at leadership and she’s bringing this. And maybe there’s somebody that’s just the idea person and they just love what they’re doing and just generate ideas all day long.

Mark Schreiber (25:16):
When they realize that I don’t have to be everything. I have to be enough. I have to be that baseline plus and then plus this edge that I bring. And then I need others and I can’t just do it by myself. Then, I think, that’s where things start to shine. That’s where people really can make better value to the world, better businesses. Because they’re not just trying to lone ranger, doing the whole thing by themself all the time.

Beren Goguen (25:40):
So from an education standpoint, I imagine projects where students are collaborating as a group are really beneficial for that.

Mark Schreiber (25:47):
Yeah, collaboration’s huge and it’s hard. But I would rather students be a little frustrated and have to figure out what resilience in a group is and what a good conversation is about and how to have constructive criticism instead of just blast every idea down, and how to be quiet when you don’t want to be quiet, and listen to the room and invite everybody in and all those skills.

Mark Schreiber (26:14):
Those are bigger, I would say, than a lot of the actual knowledge that they’re learning. Those are the things that need to be done and to be done in a way that can be, well… At the end of the day, it’s just a grade I could say. I guess it’s not cutting your teeth on the real thing. This is practice.

Beren Goguen (26:34):
Right.

Mark Schreiber (26:34):
If we could actually treat some of these times as practice where they can have that ability, even in a rubric or even in your standard, the ability to fail and to learn and grow from that collaboration, I think that’s great because otherwise people come out going: I hate groups. I hate collaborating. And I go, well, you guys don’t all have the same passion. You’re just thrown together into this group. But what did you learn about interpersonal? What’d you learn about yourself? What did you learn about how you could communicate better?

Beren Goguen (27:08):
And those are the skills they’re going to have to use when they get into the workforce. They’re probably going to use those way more than some of the other things they’re learning.

Mark Schreiber (27:14):
Right? Exactly. So collaboration’s key, and it’s hard. And even… I am going to class after to this teach design thinking and they have to be in groups. And I’ve got computer science majors with natural resource with health and wellness, exercise sport science, apparel-merchandising, all in these same groups from way different cultural backgrounds and experiences and even different goals. And yet they have to all work together. And some of… I get a lot of emails, sometimes, even at the college age, right, of saying: Ah, this is so hard. Well, it’s like, hey, it’s a class, you’ll get through it. But let’s learn from it. Instead of just focusing on this is the process, it’s human centered, you need to start with you. You’re human. They’re human. Let’s figure it out. (Music Break)

Beren Goguen (28:26):
Tell us a little more about design thinking and how that works.

Mark Schreiber (28:30):
Design thinking is also called human-centered design. It was out of IDEO, D-School at Stanford. It was a part of that, and they coined the phrase. But it was basically thinking like a designer. So, did you ever have the Microsoft Zune? Did you ever know the Microsoft Zune? It was paired up against the iPod back in the day.

Beren Goguen (28:50):
Yeah, I heard about that.

Mark Schreiber (28:51):
Okay. Microsoft made it. It was an MP3 player. It had 128 megs of RAM or something. And it had all these amazing, sweet tech specs and nobody bought it. Well, people bought it, but not that many people bought it. And then Apple had it, and they had a sleeker design. But they had their tagline: “A thousand songs in your pocket.” So it didn’t matter, all the tech. Everybody just was like: Oh, what can this do for me? That was human-centered design. And they’re just designers. So, because they understood [that] some people cared about all the tech specs, but most people just wanted to know: How does this help me? Oh, I’ve got a thousand. I don’t carry around CDs or tapes or whatever. I’ve got ’em all in my pocket. Great.

Beren Goguen (29:34):
And how is it packaged? What does it look like? That was a big…

Mark Schreiber (29:38):
Right.

Beren Goguen (29:38):
…thing for Apple. They won, basically.

Mark Schreiber (29:39):
Yeah, still is. Their boxes… How many boxes of Apple do I have? I should throw ’em away.

Beren Goguen (29:45):
People just love Apple products. They have for a long time.

Mark Schreiber (29:49):
Right. But I think they understood design inherently just because that’s what they did and their iterations… And you can watch some interesting YouTube documentaries on just their iterations. They have a place where they have all these old Apple products and you can see how they’ve evolved over time and what the different use cases for ’em. But human-centered design is really starting with the human process. That value proposition still paired with the customer person, the persona, the segment of who and why they need it, and really communicating that to them. Human-centered design takes you through a process that starts with empathy. So really putting yourself in another person’s shoes and seeing what they see. And once again, that’s back to that value of every student, every person, to say, look, you’re looking at this a different way. How do you see this problem? They go, well, I see it like this. I see it like this. Now you can start to either niche down or you can go, well, maybe we need to expand our vision of how this products or service is going to help people. So you start it with your empathy for the problem for the person, and then you move into defining the problem, testing the problem, prototyping, ideating, they’re all in there. So kind of walking through a process, and at the very end, you basically are using rough prototypes for paper and tape to use them for feedback to get more empathy. So it’s this big empathy loop. So instead of taking a thousand dollars and building one and seeing that people don’t really like it,

Mark Schreiber (31:26):
I can build it in 10 minutes with construction paper and tape and markers, and I can show you a rough facsimile of it, and we can look at it together and you can say, tell me about this. And they tell you, oh, what’s that do? And they can ask questions and you can hear, and you can really start to understand them more because you’re talking through this object.

Beren Goguen (31:45):
So a more agile process.

Mark Schreiber (31:47):
And so design think really the two big components of it, I would say would be empathy and prototyping. And prototyping is this really low fidelity crafty prototyping that starts conversation. And I like to say it this, I’ve had the best conversations with a lot of people sitting in the front seat of the car, driving down the road. We’re not looking at each other and we’re not having this standoff staring thing. We’re actually looking at something else together and we’re having just a conversation and there’s enough to keep my mind kind of going and we can really talk. When you give somebody something that obviously looks like paper and tape, they can rip it apart all they want. And they’re not ripping you apart. They’re just really giving constructive feedback because you’re like, well, yeah, obviously we both think this is dumb looking, but here’s the process. Here’s my thought.

Beren Goguen (32:36):
What’s working here?

Mark Schreiber (32:37):
What’s working? What’s not working, working? And they can tell you and go, oh yeah. And then you can update it, rip off some tape, put another sticky note on, put another symbol on, give it back to ’em. What do you think about this feature? Oh yeah, I like that feature. So just a lot. You can do a lot with the rapid prototyping feature.

Beren Goguen (32:53):
I imagine there are some pretty good tools to do prototyping, like 3D prototyping models with computers and things now

Mark Schreiber (33:00):
There are, but once again, you’re looking at it, if you put it across an axis like XY axis, you wouldn’t want to spend so much time on 3D design because your time versus your realness. So if it takes me a lot of time to get to really real well, that’s great. That’s my minimum viable product. I need that some point. But at the beginning, I want the arc to go an inch over in time, like an hour over in time, and I want it to go straight up the graph to as high amount of realness as I can

Beren Goguen (33:32):
Okay

Mark Schreiber (33:32):
Because that last little eking out that last 10% of realness is going to take me a really long time, but I can crank out a ton of realness in two hours or two days. So there are some things we could do 3D design, I could ask some AI bots now to take my product and turn it into something cooler looking right, or I could put it on a cool background. I mean, I think I could smoke in mirrors a lot of it, but the goal of it is to not trick people, but instead to get feedback for things that you can then change and not worry about it. You didn’t spend so much time on it that you don’t care about

Beren Goguen (34:11):
There’s no sunken cost fallacy.

Mark Schreiber (34:12):
No sunken cost.

Beren Goguen (34:14):
And the hands-on probably helps too.

Mark Schreiber (34:15):
Yeah, it’s not. So if I spend months on this thing and you tell me that you don’t like this feature, that feature took me two weeks. What are you saying? You don’t like that feature,

Beren Goguen (34:27):
Yeah.

Mark Schreiber (34:28):
Right? Compared to like, oh, that’s a sticky note. Lemme throw it away. You’re right.

Beren Goguen (34:31):
Yeah.

Mark Schreiber (34:32):
Okay. 20 people told me they don’t like that feature. You could hand them and say, press the first button that you think is the coolest, and you could just map it and you could just quantitatively knock down every time. And if nobody ever presses that other button, maybe that’s not a button they would need in the real world. So then you would make it. And there’s a lot of great tools out there that can even make smoke and mirrors kind of apps that once you get a basic idea, you can just do a PowerPoint on your phone and when I touch this text box, send it to page three and then run it on my phone or on a computer when people are touching things, it acts like an app air apostrophes, but it’s not. It’s just PowerPoint running back to home. Click over here, click there. So I can see where

Beren Goguen (35:21):
Are you talking about Adobe XD? Well, something similar.

Mark Schreiber (35:22):
Well, we could do Adobe XD, but why? I mean we could just do PowerPoint.

Beren Goguen (35:27):
Sure

Mark Schreiber (35:28):
There’s actually one called Uizard that’s an AI version. You type in 250 characters of what you want your app to look like and how it to function, and then it builds it for you.

Beren Goguen (35:37):
Really? Wow.

Mark Schreiber (35:38):
Yeah. In 30 seconds you had about six or your seven screens that are all linked together, and they have little arrows and maps that go, if I click this button over to this screen, just like XD,

Mark Schreiber (35:51):
Those are kind of your Wizard of Oz prototypes. You can do these ones to see what works and then you can change it.

Beren Goguen (35:58):
So to sum it up, it’s essentially about understanding the human element first at the start and then quickly getting feedback so that you can iterate faster.

Mark Schreiber (36:10):
Yeah. So start with empathy and then give them something so you can gain more empathy and continue to rotate through until you think you’ve gained enough empathy to spend more time on it. And once you go, yeah, I think there’s a lot of people that want this. I mean, you could even do one crowdfund it, and that’s your more additional empathy. If only two people click on your families at home for this book or product or board game, but every college student funding level is just cranked off the chart, then your user and you’ve struck your cord.

Mark Schreiber (36:48):
So, it’s just, it’s just a great feedback loop that, like you said, doesn’t take any sunk time.

Beren Goguen (36:54):
So it sounds like schools might want to consider adding some design thinking elements to the learning.

Mark Schreiber (36:59):
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Design thinking is once again, another easy thing to weave in. And it’s well used in corporate world. It’s very vogue, but also very useful. And it’s not magical, but it’s something that helps linear, maybe non-creative or people that aren’t feeling creative people to have a system and structure and a sequence to walk through to make them have more empathy and more feedback and more understanding. So you can put it into, once again, any class as looking at an artifact from the past, or you could look at a culture through it. They could do it remote with texting each other, but they also can learn some really great skills of just having to interview like, man who interviews anymore when my students undergrad have to go out on campus day five of class and talk to strangers.

Beren Goguen (37:56):
It’s not just for journalists.

Mark Schreiber (37:58):
No. And coming out of pandemic and just the space that was created in so many different ways. It’s a skill that they need to reengage in and text and screens and everything. Those are great. I think there’s great tools in there, but this is another thing, why lean into the things that we’re doing all the time, lean into things we’re not. So making students, making yourself just actually talk to people and have a follow-up question, right? Listen, not to respond, but to understand. I mean, that could go so many great ways just in culture and politics and everything else, if we would just listen and understand instead of to respond and to give our opinion across. And that’s what design think is all about, is about really trying to understand somebody else from their point of view, which pushes your cultural view of everything. And you can start to go, oh yeah, I see it from a totally different way. Get out of your echo chamber a little bit. Oh, so much. Yeah.

Beren Goguen (39:14):
So then tying design thinking into entrepreneurship, what does that usually look like? I imagine entrepreneurs can really benefit from understanding design thinking.

Mark Schreiber (39:24):
Yeah, I think it’s just the missing piece that is there. And we’ve talked about it around it all the time, but if you went back to just entrepreneur, even engineers, they’ve got this great technology, it’s going to solve everything. We’re going to make a bunch of ’em. Well, if you don’t know who you’re making it for or why they would want it, at least maybe it’s going to be great, but maybe you’re missing the boat completely. Or maybe you could hone it down and make it actually better for a whole bunch of people that you wouldn’t have made it for before. So tying that design thinking human-centered focus into entrepreneurship really helps just make better ventures. It’s called We do venture validator, the College of Business because we’re trying to validate your idea, and we’re going to do that through interviewing and really listening to other people to see does this idea have legs or not? So when they’re paired together, I think they’re just real powerful and strong and helpful.

Beren Goguen (40:22):
So it’s getting into a little bit of the user experience area of something. It’s great to have a problem that you’re trying to solve, and maybe you even have the solution, but if people can’t understand how to use the solution, it’s not going to work.

Mark Schreiber (40:35):
Exactly. Yeah. UX, user experience, ui, user interface, all those things are part of there. And I think you can use that as a prototype and not have to build out the whole thing, but instead just build out parts of it to kind of get unique feedback. And maybe you’re going to find one totally different marketplace and your customer’s, not always your buyer. There’s video we show about Owlet baby monitors, which was a thing. These, I think they’re grad students, they were in Pitch Fest and they did it for a class project and they said, Hey, what if we use this technology, this cool technology to monitor bio signs instead of using the pulse ox things, we’ll use like a Bluetooth one and we’ll sell it to hospitals and the cords and won’t be tangled and it’d be awesome.

Mark Schreiber (41:28):
They went to hospitals and they talked to a bunch of the nurses, and the nurse was like, yes, I would love that super pain point. I hate those things. The tape sticks off. Nobody wants to pulse ox on the cords and whatever. And then they went to the buyers, the administrators of the hospital, and they’re like, we don’t want it. No, we don’t want it because it costs too much. And we already have this system and to replace that. And so though it was a need for the nurses or perceived need, it wasn’t for the hospital, they could have ran off and made this thing that all the nurses wanted and nobody would’ve bought it because they missed one little component.

Mark Schreiber (42:07):
So instead they pivoted and they struck that out and they said, well, who else could be our buyer? Well, looks like parents, parents would like it. What if we did it for monitoring babies, for SIDS and for all those things. Then they mocked it up, they put it on a website and it leaked out, and they got 500 emails in their inbox and overnight because all these news agencies picked it up that they had this wireless baby monitor that was going to be able to help tell you if your baby was breathing or well, right or not. And then they went,

Beren Goguen (42:39):
Which is something all parents worry about.

Mark Schreiber (42:41):
And they struck this giant cord of parents, and parents are like, you just give it to me. I’ll test it right now. I can’t sleep at night. I’m anxious, bum, my baby’s over here. They did all these things. So you’ve got to find who that is and just by interviewing and asking, and not just building it to build it, but building it because there’s somebody that needs it, not just needs it, but that will buy it. So you can test all that stuff out

Beren Goguen (43:09):
And it’s having an impact, possibly saving lives,

Mark Schreiber (43:12):
Right? Yeah. I mean, Intel did one on a car seat in the back that would wirelessly tell you if you left your child in the car because you get busy and you’re running around errands, you’re usually by yourself, and you just happen to take your toddler. They go to sleep, and heaven forbid you lock ’em in the car. And that’s happened. People have had to break windows and keep babies safe. And now in a lot of automotive, a lot of cars now, they’ll have a little rear passenger ding when you open the door, it goes, ding, ding, check the rear seat. You’re like, oh, wow. But that took a while because why did the car manufacturers want to put it in there? It’s a complex thing, but you’ve got to look at it from all these different archetypes, personas and needs. And then as you do that, that would be super expensive if you ran the numbers of trying to actually make something for all these things compared to just having these easy to use prototypes and bring ’em out. That way

Beren Goguen (44:15):
It’s easier for people to get on board when they can really see and touch something

Mark Schreiber (44:21):
Yeah.

Beren Goguen (44:21):
As opposed to a PowerPoint.

Mark Schreiber (44:23):
Yeah. Oh totally.Yeah, exactly.

Beren Goguen (44:26):
What type of career paths would use design thinking? Is it every career path or

Mark Schreiber (44:31):
Yeah, I think anybody can. I think it should be right. It’s hard to answer. Yes. I also want to hesitate a little bit because it’s a system that helps people be creative, but also the more I’ve gone through it, I think there’s just people that are a little more creative. There’s people that are a lot more creative. And so it comes back to the collaboration question. Would you entertain being in a room with people that are really good design thinking, but that you’re just got to understand the system and you’re going to be working on the backend of it after the ideas? That’s fine, but I think everybody can do it. When you’re looking at new products. OtterBox, they started out with phone cases and now they have coolers and they have medical supply coolers, and they have all these different things. They’re still doing phone cases, but they have to continue to pivot and change, and you can’t just sit on one thing

Mark Schreiber (45:31):
And not innovate or your company is going to go away. So I think any company that wants to survive should probably use design thinking.

Mark Schreiber (45:38):
So where in the company, and is it every seat in the company? No, but I think it definitely needs to be something. And I think having everybody in the room understand that there is a process that’s going to help us examine in a rational way without our heart and without just the bottom line money, but in a rational way of what are we doing and how does this help people and why would they want it? And if they want it, they’ll give us money, which will allow us to build more things so that we can help more people and a good cycle at the end of the day. And we have to make money, but money’s not bad. Money helps us do things for people, but

Beren Goguen (46:17):
It’s not everything,

Mark Schreiber (46:18):
But it’s not everything. So if people can understand that there’s a system that really does value people and people’s thoughts and that our company is going to use it, that’s really helpful for everybody.

Beren Goguen (46:30):
If you had to pick one industry or sector or vertical that really could use more design thinking, what’s one that you would say?

Mark Schreiber (46:40):
Education. No, probably true. It’s probably true. We could, I mean, I think education, healthcare, anything that’s just entrenched in the ways that it’s been done and is really hard to change. So you’re not going to just go radically change a hospital because we’re already doing pretty good and maybe pretty good’s good enough when you’re, you want the best plus,

Beren Goguen (47:06):
And hospitals are extremely risk averse.

Mark Schreiber (47:07):
Yeah, extremely risk averse. But if you’re trying to do it for yourself, that’s exclusive, and so institutions of higher learning can become exclusive. Hospitals can become, we’ve got the best treatment. We’ve got whatever. In the 1970s, 90.04 plus percent of kids that got leukemia died, right? And there’s certain hospitals that did fairly good at saving them with the new techniques and treatments, but it wasn’t until they used, they set up cog, which is a childhood oncology group that actually started to disseminate and use knowledge together where they said, okay, what’s your gold standard? Okay, now we’re going to use that everywhere and we’re going to try the gold standard plus gold standard plus and continue to build it. Now they’re at 90 plus percent of kids make it right. But it took something as bad as our kids aren’t surviving childhood cancer. That’s what it took to do it. So I think I would hope that in a risk averse environment that has a system like this that has a low barrier of entry and a real high ceiling of what you can do, I would hope that at least the thoughts could be put out there to see what the gold standard plus could be.

Mark Schreiber (48:28):
So yeah, I think hospitals, big business, but anything that’s risk averse

Beren Goguen (48:33):
And with a lot of bureaucracy.

Mark Schreiber (48:34):
And with a lot of bureaucracy, which takes a long time to turn an aircraft carrier, but there’s ways why not Intel. I worked with Intel, they used to have a free agent Nation is what they called it. It was this little pocket of you working 50% doing your job, but you can go free agent on the other 50% and pick up projects that you’re gifted for, set up for, but also can just have a chance to try some new things.

Mark Schreiber (49:02):
So we’d have people that were in different groups and they’d come in help the foundation side of Intel, which is what I was helping with their curriculum. And they’d come and bring their expertise and knowledge to these things, so why couldn’t, and that it’s a company of 500,000 people, so they’ve got some bureaucracy and some systems, which you need systems, otherwise it all blows up. So can you find some little pockets of innovation and allow it to happen with still having the aircraft carrier go in the right way? And I think those little pockets could really help move things along.

Beren Goguen (49:33):
If someone listening is really wanting to learn more about design thinking, entrepreneurship, any of the things we’ve talked about, what should they do?

Mark Schreiber (49:41):
Yeah, I think the easiest way is just to go to biz.colostate.edu, That’ll get you to anything, community entrepreneurship, K12 entrepreneurship. It’ll get you into the least into the right zip code to start digging around. And there’s summer programs, there’s community programs, there’s accelerator programs, there’s incubator programs, there’s connected rural or urban programs. There’s so many different things out there. And if that’s not on the page, there’s a contact information for somebody that can get you to somebody else in Fort Collins or Colorado, at least that we know because this ecosystem’s big and it’s not real competitive turf war right now. It is been very friendly and very much like, Hey, we know this system works to get passionate people expressing their passion through business and solving problems that are out there. We know that this is important, so how can we arm each other? And so the conference I was just at had CU Boulder and CSU and we were both presenting, talking about how do we help youth entrepreneurship? Yep. So go on there. It’s probably the easiest way.

Beren Goguen (50:56):
Thanks for being here.

Mark Schreiber (50:57):
You bet. Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.

Beren Goguen (51:10):
Thanks for listening to this episode of Applied. If you’d like to learn more, consider visiting CSU Institute for Entrepreneurship, which offers programs like the Venture Validator and the Student Venture Accelerator. For those seeking postgraduate continuing education, be sure to check out CSU Online graduate certificate in human-centered design thinking links to both are in the show notes.