Photography: Science Museum London

Before an advertising company takes a client’s millions and rolls out its new campaign, it first tests its ideas on a focus group. A small number of people are pulled into a room and, depending on the product and the campaign, used as guinea pigs to discover whether an idea is likely to fly. It’s not an exact science. Focus group members are paid, so biased, they’re not always entirely reliable and when they do have an honest opinion to contribute, that opinion might not be one worth hearing. As carmaker Henry Ford famously said, if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have requested a faster horse. That doesn’t mean that focus groups are useless. But it does mean that there are lots of other tools that you can stuff into an ideas testing lab to make sure that your concepts are sound before you throw money at them.

Perhaps the most used test today is Beta testing, a kind of in-market testing in which a product is released to a limited number of people to play with before general release. In theory, they should come back with usable feedback on the concept and usability, and make suggestions for improvements before general release.

But Beta testing is a late-stage test. It’s the last step before release, when plenty of money and time has already been invested in creating a working prototype. A Beta test in which the most common response is that users didn’t get the idea is one in which something has gone very wrong indeed. It’s also little different to a kind of focus group but one in which users actually get their hands on the product and are asked what they did with it rather than being asked in general what they think of it.

And like any focus group, the most reliable results come from the largest numbers of people which means that Beta releases — like Google’s Gmail — are often used by huge numbers of people. In effect, a Beta test becomes a way of declaring that a release is cautious. It’s often less of a test and more of an excuse for the presence of bugs in a system that its creators know has been released too early.

Your Choice of Two Sales Letters

A more reliable kind of test, and one that’s also easier to easiest to implement online, is the A/B test. Create two Web pages, switch traffic between them at random, and compare the results when users reach the call to action.

The advantage is that you’re getting a true picture of actual responses. You’re not asking people what they think and wondering whether they’re telling you what they think you want to hear. Users aren’t even aware that they’re being tested so you can be certain they’re responding entirely to the options you’ve placed in front of them.

But A/B tests only test as small number of options (usually two) and those options tend to be marketing copy. Offer the same product on two different sales letters written in two different ways, and you’ll be able to count up the number of orders to see which is the most effective. Offer two different products or pitch two different ideas and you’ll need two different pieces of marketing copy. At that point, you can’t be certain whether it’s the copy or the concept that’s influencing the responses.

What you can do though is use the same concept to launch a simple pre-release sales pitch. That doesn’t have to be more than a single page that invites users to leave their email addresses so that they can be notified when the product is ready. Again, it’s not entirely accurate. More people are willing to hand over an email address than hand out their credit card details, but if you have the results of other pre-release pitches you’ll be able to compare results and perhaps even predict final conversion rates if you decide to go ahead and create the product.

Ask the Crowd

All of those tests though take time, and sometimes you want to know right away whether a concept that has you excited really is as good as it feels. You want to ask as many people as possible what they think, whether you should go ahead with it and what the response is likely to be. Social media can be a good place to bounce ideas around. Bad Panda Records, for example, a netlabel that releases regular free songs, recently posted this tweet on its timeline:

thinking of starting to release full length albums. in a new way: free download+buy merchandise and get the cd for free. what do you think?

That was a test of a marketing idea rather than a product idea, and the response wasn’t huge. But as a gentle form of encouragement for a concept that doesn’t cost much to develop and carries few risks, it’s not a bad way to begin. You might not want to try it before throwing millions into production or sharing an idea that others can pick and run with faster than you can but your fans and followers can sometimes make for useful sounding boards.

The best tests though combine all of these approaches. Twitter itself is a useful example of a firm that has grown cautiously, testing the ground before even the tiniest of steps. The original service was used in-house before opening up to a small group of users. It had no features beyond the most basic needed to get the job done, which would have taken time and money to develop, allowing the users themselves to build what was needed. And each development stage, whether it’s sponsored search results, a new retweet method or a promoted trending topic, is first rolled out in a real closed Beta to a small number of trusted users before being made available to the public — a system also used by Google before the company released its instant search results.

But none of these methods is entirely reliable. Every test has its limitations. Each test takes time that allows competitors to reach the marker earlier, and every test skews the results. At best, testing will reduce the risk of failure but the only way to know for sure whether a product is going to fail is to release it.

Photography: hawkexpress

For David Allen life is full of “stuff.” For people who have never heard of David Allen, never tried to read his geek productivity bible Getting Things Done, never wondered how to label a file or categorize their lives, that’s as unhelpful a truism as declaring that work is difficult. But for the followers of GTD, people who have been accused of regarding Allen as a kind of cultic leader (the same kind of leader he himself once saw in John-Roger, leader of the New Age Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness in which Allen remains a minister), it’s an eye-opening revelation. Employ a process that pushes that “stuff” out of the way and what remains will be only the most important elements. Instead of wasting their hours on life’s minutiae, they’ll be able to devote their time to the big things. They’ll get things done.

Mostly though what they’ll be getting done is the process of doing things – and that’s if they can figure out the process. Allen doesn’t just earn revenue from his best-selling book and its sequels. His seminars cost $695 per person, a sign not just that his followers consider his techniques valuable but that they’re so complex they have to fork out almost 700 bucks to figure out how to use them. Allen’s system requires multiple levels of categorization and treatment for every aspect of life from going to the dry cleaners and vaccinating the dog to launching a website and changing jobs. Every task has its moment, sometimes timed to the minute. Every chore receives attention according to its apparent level of importance, but only after you’ve put it through a system that awards it an appropriate priority level.

Getting Things Done, a System Dedicated to Geeks?

43Folders.com, a site dedicated to GTD, has argued that the system is ideal for geeks – people, it says, who tend to be disorganized but “love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world,” who “crave actionable items” but “have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff.” But that’s a narrow definition of a geek. “Geeks” today are more than bespectacled programmers with ponytails, beards and an unhealthy knowledge of Apple mouse designs. They’re specialists, experts in one particular field whether that field is Java programming, gardening or marketing coffee beans. They’re not interested in creating order in their day; they’re interested in seeing the results of their creation.

For followers of GTD, nirvana lies in the process of organization. For geeks, process is the means to an end and nirvana for them is in having nothing left to organize at all.

The difference lies in two key ingredients missing among the files, folders and labels of GTD: creativity and vision.

Every successful business begins with an idea. But ideas are common, successful businesses relatively rare. Between the concept and the IPO, the buy-out and the private Caribbean island lie years of small achievements: websites built and tested, products designed and prototypes checked, clients won, satisfied and retained. Those small steps are the sorts of things that GTD was designed to deal with, organize and prioritize, but while plenty of corporations have invited David Allen to put on his seminars to organize their workforce, it’s hard to identify a list of entrepreneurs who have relied on GTD to build their path to success.

GTD Gets Things Done, Outsourcing Gets Results

That’s because a successful entrepreneur develops a vision of his end goal and is able to maintain it all the way through the process of building success. The same creativity that gives them a picture of what they’re trying to achieve also enables them to see the obstacles that can prevent them from achieving it and the force to push those obstructions out of the way. David Allen has described his system as helping users to find their way through a thick forest in which the trees are “stuff” hiding the items of real value.

“Any email could be either a snake in the grass or a berry,” he explained once in interview with Wired Magazine.

But successful entrepreneurs don’t become successful by picking berries. They build success by having a vision of what lies through the forest to the meadow at the end. There may be “stuff” in the way in the form of emails that need to be answered or dogs that need to be vaccinated but the smart, successful types don’t waste their time writing those tasks down, giving them labels and filing them in special folders. They trust in their ability to achieve success, make an investment — and pay someone else to do it for them.

That’s perhaps the biggest difference between people who focus on getting things done and those who manage to achieve great things. David Allen might be the guru for the type of geek who wants an uncluttered life but a more appropriate guru for a geekpreneur who wants to turn their commercial vision into a functioning business might well be Tim Ferriss. His book The 4-Hour Workweek might have had a misleading title, and outsourcing your dating life to Indian underlings is taking things a little too far, but his approach of only doing the most important and valuable tasks yourself and leaving everything else to paid helpers is a system followed by more successful types than those who use GTD. In fact, it’s a system followed by just about every successful type who has ever turned a one-man concept into a thriving company. The system – if outsourcing can be called a system – requires an investment of time in the form of training, and money in the form of payments to freelancers, but if it means you don’t have to waste time on “stuff” or on organizing “stuff” then it’s more likely to free up the time to not just get things done but to actually do things. And that, after all, should be the result any productivity system.

Photography: .nele

Creative ideas tend to be unpredictable. They come in a flash, while you’re in the shower, as you’re waiting for the lights to change, in the middle of a dull conversation at the office party. If those moments have anything in common, it’s that they’re usually times when you’re far away from your iPhone’s note-taking app, or even a pen and paper. In theory, that shouldn’t matter. Good ideas should stick around while bad concepts fade away, but the idea itself is only one part of a creative process that leads from inspiration to IPO. You also have to figure out whether your bolt from the blue really is as revolutionary as it looks, whether there’s demand for it, and whether there’s a real way to make it work. Psychologists and gurus have produced creative models to guide entrepreneurs through that process, entrepreneurs themselves have invented their own… and some of them might just be helpful.

Creative models have actually been around for a while. One of the oldest was created by Graham Wallas, a Fabian and social psychologist who wrote The Art of Thought in the 1920s. Wallas, who isn’t known to have actually brought any products to market himself, described creativity as a four-step process made up of Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification. Creative thinkers begin by defining the issue, he says, then they lay it aside for a while, a new idea pops out, then finally, they check to make sure it’s all going to work.

It’s a model that includes a mixture of rational analysis and spontaneous inspiration, an approach that’s turned up frequently ever since. The Creative Problem Solving Model, for example, which was developed in the 1950s and taught at the Creative Education Foundation, has a six-step model that’s been conveniently shortened into the acronym “OFPISA.” That stands for Objective Finding, Fact Finding, Problem Finding, Idea Finding, Solution Finding, and Acceptance Finding. It all sounds very rational but the problem and idea-finding stages actually involve the kind of blue-shy thinking more usually associated with creative types.

Successful Creativity Requires Imagination and Evaluation

In general, says Paul Plesk, author ofCreativity, Innovation, and Quality and founderof DirectedCreativity.com, earlier creative models tend to suggest that creative ideas are gifts from the heavens, while newer models imply that it’s possible to squeeze out the inspiration in an act of directed free will. Just about all the models though agree that the creative process should combine analysis with imagination and evaluation — and that thinkers have to take action too.

And perhaps that’s where these models first run into trouble. While it’s easy to find lots of great concepts growing and doing well in the business world, it’s much harder to spot the ones that developed according to a set model. The sources of inspiration for the biggest successes are often accidental (such as penicillin mold growing on a tray of bacteria, and ruining it), or imitative (such as Facebook, which was either inspired by Harvard’s own face books that showed students’ photos, or a copy of an idea described by Mark Zuckerberg’s classmates.)

In practice, the concept will often be a result of need while the process of implementation will be inspired by chance. Inventor James Dyson, for example, felt the need for a different kind of vacuum cleaner when he realized what professional cleaners have known for years: that conventional types just don’t work. As they suck up dust, the dirt clogs the bag and they stop sucking. The idea of using cyclonic separation to pull out the dust though, came from the cyclones that Dyson already had installed in his Ballbarrow factory.

Having created one reasonably successful product, Dyson should have had a model to copy in order to create his next one. In his case though, that model didn’t work. Manufacturers refused to take the new machines and Dyson had to produce the vacuum cleaner himself – a model that worked fine for the vacuum cleaner, which is now the highest-selling model by value in the US, but which failed when used to develop a washing machine. While the implementation process was sound, the idea of using two drums instead of one wasn’t, and his concept had to be abandoned.

Twitter Has Millions of Creative Thinkers

That might suggest that there’s a limit to the degree to which you can model a creative process that leads to success. Getting it right once doesn’t mean that you can follow the same steps to achieve success the next time, and that’s particularly true of the latest model pioneered by smart entrepreneurs. Twitter’s growth has been revolutionary not only for its speed and the way it’s changing the way strangers meet and communicate, but because it provides perhaps the only example of a crowdsourced creative model. Addressing a NESTA innovation conference in London recently, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, described the company as followers rather than leaders, paving the paths already created by the site’s users. Other commentators have suggested that Twitter’s founders invented the bat and ball, left them in a park and returned a week later to find that the world had invented baseball. The new retweet feature, for example, was produced in reaction to the way that users were sharing information rather than as a planned feature of the site handed down to an eager market.

The system was created quickly — in less than two weeks — and was influenced partly by co-founder Jack Dorsey’s experience writing software for a dispatch firm and partly by boredom with the project they were supposed to be working on. Certainly, the site has come a long way from its less-than-visionary beginnings and, with a billion dollar valuation, it’s developed into the kind of success that gets everyone in Silicon Valley dreaming.

But it’s not a model for a creative process that’s going to be easy to copy. Put an idea out there to see what people do with it is usually going to deliver not millions of people to do the creative thinking for you, but stasis, confusion and failure.

Perhaps the best creative model then is the one that lies at the heart of every commercial success from the light bulb to microblogging: have a good idea and implement it.

Photography: quinn.anya

You should be able to spot a creative type from a mile away. In Mad Men, the AMC show set in a 1960s advertising agency, that’s not so easy. Both the executives and the creative staff wear suits. Both chain smoke as though it were going out of fashion. And both have similarly dull offices where the only creativity-sparkers are bottles of Bourbon and a sofa with a dent shaped like a secretary. Compare that to today’s attitude to creativity. Software firms like Google are famous for stuffing offices with giant rubber balls, lava lamps and idea boards. Sofas have been replaced with beanbags. And not even the CEO wears a suit. Without the right toys and bags of freedom, it seems, those creative employees just aren’t going to be churning out the ideas to keep an innovative company in business. In fact, the need for a child-like environment is just one of a number of myths about creativity that are not only wrong but which can actually hold a firm back.

Here are several more.

Brainstorming is the Best Way to Generate New Ideas

Whenever a firm is looking for a new direction, a new product or a solution to an aching problem, the temptation is often to call together a bunch of heavy-thinkers for a brainstorming session. By bouncing ideas off each other, the best option should quickly emerge. Or so the story goes.

In fact, creativity just doesn’t work like that. Psychologists have found that putting people together in the same room produces fewer and lower quality ideas than allowing people to do their thinking alone and in private. One study found that the number of new ideas actually fell by half when people are asked to think together.

And instilling a sense of competition makes the situation even worse. When employees feel that their careers depend on producing better ideas than their colleagues can create, they tend to keep their thoughts to themselves and pick holes in concepts produced by others.

In general, the best ideas come from people who are passionate about their work, and allowed to mull them over in private.

Deadlines Generate Creativity

And with plenty of time too. Another myth concerning creativity is that tight deadlines spark the best ideas. Not true. According to Keith Sawyer, author of “Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration,” tight deadlines can increase productivity but if they have any effect on creativity, it’s to dull innovative thinking. Ideas need time to emerge, he says.

Teresa Amabile, who runs the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and whose research program specializes in creativity, agrees. She found that time pressures stifle creativity because they don’t allow people to fully engage with a problem. Worse, not only did the stress limit creativity before the deadline, but they continued to drag down creative thinking for another two days afterwards.

In fact, says Amabile, the best predictor of a creative day is a happy day before.

Good Ideas Must Come from Creative Types

Perhaps the most prevalent myth concerning creativity is that there are certain creative types. They dress funny, read comic books and have jobs in design, copywriting or fashion that require plenty of out-of-the-box thinking.

If you want a new idea, it’s the Creative Department you want to call, not the mail room.

But that’s not true either. While some individuals are clearly more creative than others, there’s no shortage of creative thinking right across organizations. The best way to judge whether someone is likely to produce a creative response to a problem isn’t by looking at their job title but by seeing how my much they enjoy what they do.

In general, the people who are most engaged by their work and feel the closest connection to the company are the people most likely to put in the extra brain work to come up with new ideas.

Disorganization Is the By-Product of Creativity

And if the title on the office door isn’t always the best sign of a source of creative solutions, neither is the mess inside the office. To many people, creative types are often a kind of manic genius: slightly bi-polar and incapable of dealing with the day-to-day tasks — like cleaning. So their offices are disorganized, their desks buried under piles of books and notes, and if they have a task manager, it was lost years ago.

Not only is that a stereotype, it’s also completely wrong. Creativity needs the space for ideas to grow and develop — without distractions. Working in a disorganized space though can sometimes generate its own diversions. Instead of thinking about the next step in the process, you can be tempted to turn your mind towards tidying up a pile of papers or picking up the trash on the floor. A clean, comfortable space can often deliver so much more.

A Good Idea Comes Fully-Formed

That development is vital too. Light bulbs only appear over people’s heads in cartoons. For the rest of us inspiration is a process. It begins with a concept that looks promising. Then excitement settles in and then the creative process takes over, looking at the possible problems during implementation and the potential for the idea to work in areas beyond solving the immediate problem.

As long as the atmosphere in an organization is collaborative rather than competitive, the idea is then shared, flaws pointed out and new potential identified. The final result might look nothing like the original concept.

Twitter is perhaps the best example of this. The original idea was to create a platform that would allow for the public access of mobile text messages. That it’s become so much more is the result of allowing users to develop the site in whatever direction they wanted, from trend-watching to live chatting. The users checked all the boxes for creativity: they felt engaged with the product; they were passionate about it; they working alone or in virtual teams rather than real groups; they had time to think about their ideas without deadlines getting in the way; and they were collaborative, not competitive.

While the myths about creativity might be destructive then, the best thing about innovation is that when the conditions are right, there’s little you can do to stop it.

Photography: jek in the box

What could you do in fifteen seconds?

Watch a slow-motion replay of the 100 meter Olympic final?

Describe in full all of Microsoft’s contributions to the advancement of computer science?

Get the idea behind Phillip Glass’s “4′ 33″”?

Or achieve all of your life’s goals, find perfect contentment and live happily ever after for the rest of your days?

According to Al Secunda, a motivational speaker and author of “The 15 Second Principle,” it is actually possible to do the last one. (He didn’t mention Microsoft.) Dedicating just fifteen seconds each day to a goal you really want to achieve will remove the blocks, build the momentum and provide enough power to get you exactly where you want to go, he argues.

Fifteen Seconds… More or Less

There is some method in his madness. The actual amount of time dedicated, he explains, doesn’t matter. The fifteen seconds is a minimum, an amount that no one could possibly begrudge. What is important is that it gets you moving. A goal stops being a dream when it’s acted on – if only for fifteen seconds – and starts to become a plan.

Secunda, who fills his book with stories, compares the principle to starting a car:

“Let’s say that you own an old sports car and you discover that the battery is dead. Your mission is to jump start it. The most difficult part of this task is getting the car to begin rolling forward from its stationary position. Once you get the car moving from zero to one mile an hour, it will be much easier to increase its speed. This, in turn, helps the engine to turn over so that when you put the car into first gear the engine will start.”

Or to put it in more relevant terms, if you have an idea for a business or a product, just the act of doing something about it — listing what you have to do, deciding how many people you’d need, calculating the amount of capital you’d have to raise – may be enough to start the process that will take you right through to the end.

It’s nonsense, of course. Much is made of the power of the blank page to scare away writers and planners, but entrepreneurs and creative types tend to know where to start. It’s not the beginning that’s tricky. It’s the middle bit, the part where the unseen problems start to pop up, the excitement has worn off a bit and the doubts had time to reappear. To put it in Secunda’s terms, it’s as though you’ve given that old sports car a hill start, trundled down the road for a few minutes but stalled while waiting at the first set of traffic lights. You know you can start pushing again but you’re not too sure which way to go so you decide to stay parked on the side of the road for a bit until you’ve had another look at the map.

And there the car remains because there’s a difference between taking action and continuing to take action. When Secunda tells us that we should go easy on ourselves if we skip a day, he’s spoiling us and missing the real contribution his idea can make.

If you Can Do it in Fifteen Seconds, it’s not Worth Doing

The only thing that could be done in fifteen seconds and that would be worth doing is developing a routine. Fifteen seconds is nothing, not even spread over a lifetime. But devote half an hour a day to writing music, designing a new vacuum cleaner or coding an iPhone app, and eventually you’ll find you’ve created a symphony, a working model or a piece of software that could become the backbone of a new business.

But only if you keep doing it and that’s the biggest problem with the book. GTD is demanding. Reading it is tough, let alone putting all of its methods into practice. “The 15 Second Principle” tries to reassure us that everything can be achieved with minimal effort, no sacrifice and no disruption to our normal, achievement-free routine. Secunda even goes as far as finding someone to blame when things do go wrong. Instead of encouraging grown-ups to take responsibility for their actions, he grants them an invisible twin called Pat.

“If you ever look around your own life and say, ‘How in the world did I ever get here?” perhaps the answer is that Pat got you there,’” he writes.

That’s not a new trick. Ask a three-year old who spilled juice on the floor, and you’ll be unlikely to hear a Washingtonian confession. The buck will be passed firmly to someone with a more imaginative name than “Pat.”

There is a price to be paid for using Secunda’s 15 second principle successfully, and it’s the determination to do it even when you don’t feel like it – and those moments will come. It’s not true that starting is difficult, but restarting when you’ve already finished the fun bit, certainly is.

That doesn’t mean that the Secunda’s book is completely useless though. He provides a good example of how stories can illustrate business ideas, and the long list of testimonials from everyone from Deepak Chopra to Jacqueline Bissett shows not just that such endorsements are important, but that they’re a powerful way for the endorser to spread his or her name.

If you can get a sackload of people to endorse your product, you’ll be giving them some valuable exposure, and winning an opportunity to win the same in return. Collecting them shouldn’t be too hard, but it will take you more than fifteen seconds a day.

[tags] gtd, productivity [/tags]

Photography: Paul Keller

For businesses, it seems to be all the rage. Identify your core competencies and outsource everything else to a company far away, ideally in India. Customer service units are famous for it but outsourcing has also come to include production units as well as backroom accountancy departments.

Even individuals can do it. Tim Ferriss has built himself a career teaching people how they can outsource their lives until there’s little left to do but eat and sleep — and there are plenty of people in Mumbai who would be willing to do to both of those for you too.

The result is that anyone watching CNN could be forgiven for thinking that the entire US economy is now located somewhere south of the Himalayas.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that. Even as call centers are filling up with South Asians learning to talk like Canadians, jobs are flowing back to source countries. In November 2007, InformationWeek reported that 20 percent of its top 500 companies had taken back offshored tasks in the previous year.

America – Europe’s India
Much of that trend is likely to be a result of dissatisfaction with the quality of the work but just as jobs flow out of the United States and into the sub-continent then back again, so new work is pouting into America from foreign companies. A report by Prof. Matthew Slaughter for the Organization for International Investment notes that the number of jobs at US subsidiaries of foreign — usually European — companies had risen from 2.6 million in 1987 to 5.4 million in 2002. And many of those jobs came with pleasant European standards such as four-week vacations.

That sort of insourcing though is really another form of outsourcing. It would certainly look that way to a European. The same could be said of the type of insourcing described by Thomas Friedman in “The World Is Flat.” Explaining how UPS has moved from basic parcel delivery services to a general logistics company that makes international business easier to manage, Friedman reveals that UPS doesn’t just bring broken computers back to the company for repair. It repairs them itself under Toshiba’s supervision and ships them back to the computer firm’s customers.

Again, for Toshiba, that would be a simple form of outsourcing. For UPS though it’s precisely the opposite. Fixing silicon isn’t the company’s forte but it does it because it can and because it’s in everyone’s interests: Toshiba’s customers get their machines back faster; Toshiba can focus on production and design rather than repair; and UPS gets to supply an extra service.

Insource or Outsource?
For entrepreneurs and small business owners though, this mixture of inward and outward job flows, of insourcing within the business and outsourcing to other firms, is fairly confusing. When should you outsource and when should you keep the work close to home?

The criteria usually quoted for a job that can be outsourced include significant wage differences between the source company and the outsourced firm; work that is easy to set up; and perhaps more importantly, work that is repeatable so that once the system is in operation it doesn’t need constant supervision and re-training.

There are other factors to consider as well though.

Logistics, for example, could be one reason either to pass the work to someone else or keep it to yourself. The workers at UPS’s Louisville hub tasked with resoldering chips are unlikely to be cheaper than those anywhere else. But by allowing UPS to do work that was essentially mundane, Toshiba was able to cut out some of its logistics, speeding up repairs.

That could only work though because the outsourcing cuts effort rather than adding to it. It also works because customers don’t really care who fixes their computer as long as it comes back like new. (Similarly customers do care if the customer service person has an accent so impenetrable they can’t understand a word they say.) While Toshiba will get the blame if UPS doesn’t do the job properly, it’s not the sort of work that the company has to do.

But customers might feel differently about buying a Toshiba computer that was actually designed and manufactured by Lenovo. Or watching a Tom Cruise film in which the star had outsourced the acting — but not the stunts — to a stand-in (although then again, maybe not.) There are some tasks — in particular, those tied closely to the company’s core field — that the firm has to do itself. Tim Ferriss might be an expert on outsourcing, but even he does he insources his own interviews… to himself.

One general rule then will be to understand not just what you consider to be your core competencies but what your customers consider them to be too.

And finally, outsourcing has to be cost-effective. Wage differentials might be attractive but if the productivity levels are significantly lower or the time and expenses involved in managing the outsourced work much higher then you would still be better off following InformationWeek’s top 500 companies, and follow the new trend of bringing the work back home.

[tags] insourcing [/tags]

If you are wondering if there is already a market for what you want to offer and in case there is, get to know more about it (price, quality, etc.) you can’t trust only on Search Engines, instead we suggest you use Stumbleupon as you will probably find what you want to find if it matches your interests. The good thing is that the site doesn’t need to be search engine optimized or high quality, if other users recommended it you will find it.

Pros of using Stumbleupon for Marketing Research:

• Find websites you never saw when doing the same search on search engines: search engines sort the websites by relevancy (and they have to be optimized), so if you do a search for “web design firm” you will find a list of websites that just have got lots of links pointing to that page, this doesn’t mean they are quality websites. When using stumbleupon and using the search function, you will find webpages that users like (lots of value, this means that the website is either really high-quality or has something that people love) and that are relevant with what you were looking for.
• Read what people think of a website: this can be seen on the reviews of webpages, this will help you learn what you should and shouldn’t do when creating the website for offering your product/services. You will also be able to check the user’s age, gender, etc. to see how they react to different things and find different patterns.
• Find other people who are looking for the same thing you are: when you check the review’s page, you will see all the stumblers that reviewed a website and you can as well check all the reviews that users made. You may find out that another stumbler is reviewing all the businesses in the niche you want to target and that he might be working into it (possible business partner).
• Find what you look for: if you use other tools to do the research, you might find websites that were designed and optimized to be found by using that tool, on Stumbleupon you won’t find Stumbleupon optimized pages as it is impossible. It will just list what is relevant and people like at the same time.
• More Reality: using Stumbleupon would be like making a public poll to lots of people, you will get the real thought of people on the topic of your desire.

Cons of using Stumbleupon for Marketing Research:

• Relevancy: you can eventually get some webpages that don’t fully match what you were looking for, this doesn’t happen much though.
• Time: it takes more time than with search engines, just some more seconds, but if you do this 100 times a day you will notice the difference in time.
• Toolbar Install: You need to install a toolbar and register, some people just hate installing them and others think they are all adware.
• Incorrect Reviews: some reviews might be wrong or might be spam.

Which buttons you will be using?

To do the market research we will only be using some buttons:

• Stumble: the button on the left, after clicking it you get shown a new page. We will use it to browse new websites after we have checked one and what people think of it.
• Reviews of this page: this will show you what people think of this website on Stumbleupon and if you like the review of the user you can even see more sites he reviewed.
• Channels: this will let you change between websites, images, videos. The most important we will be using here is the search function.

So, what’s next?

You don’t need to know anything else to do market research using Stumbleupon, just follow these simple steps:

1. Click on the search button (channel), and type the main keywords for what you want to research, for example I will type “web design firm”. The first website I got was a company providing web design services (just what I was looking for), there I was able to check all the company info including how much they charge per design and what it would include.
2. With the same website open I then clicked “Reviews of this webpage” button, this showed me what people thought of this company, some of the reviews I found useful where: “great price/quality” and “their web design speaks for them”. This made me learn to things I definitely needed for my web design company.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 until you don’t find any more websites of the topic you are looking for. Making the search “web design firm” in Stumbleupon showed me at least 15 new web design firms I had never seen before when doing the same search on search engines. You can as well, combine this with search engines: just make a search for “web design firm” on Google and then check if it was submitted to stumbleupon and if someone has reviewed it.

Extra research

As I said previously, what you can do to make a better research on the market is check the user’s profiles that reviewed websites inside your niche to see their age, their likes and dislikes and try to find a pattern that applys to all of them. This will help you a lot when creating your website to offer your product/services as you will know much better who you have to target.

That’s all what you need to know! It wasn’t hard, was it?