HTE diary: Art of Decision (3)

Oh, last two blogs we talked about how to make a decision, by finding ideas and how to choose the perfect one. However, there is another process that is also a good tool for making a decision, that is how to evaluate the "quality" of that idea.

I accidentally learn how to think like this in during HTE class, when we have a discussion about a business model. Business model is a schematic diagram that you draw for your company about how to get a resource, how to transform it, and who are going to pay for it. Other class calls it business value chain, it is the way that money flow. One of the most important thing for the business organization is knowing their business value and knowing how to create it. For example, at the very first years of Google under the organizing of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, even they gain millions of users but the company doesn't have that much benefit, because their is no business model there.

Once Eric Schmidt comes to Google and restructures the business model of the google by adding AdWords, a small blog of ads on google pages, this tool becomes the most powerful source of benefit of google and help google becomes one of the most biggest company (in revenue) in IT world.


Okey, now let's talk about how we can adapt the business model to evaluate our ideas.

The keywords are "input-process-output".


Input is what is the raw materials that we need for this idea. How to find it.

Output is the goal of our idea. What you get. it is equal to input+value. And value is the most important thing in this process. It is what you would earn from this idea.

Process is how you could transform input to output, including how much does it cost (in term of money, time, intention, people involved).


In my opinion, potent idea is what you can figure out three of these. It is useless to choose how to do it when you don't even "know" how to achieve it. At least you should know what you would gain from doing it, to make sure that it has a possibility to success, right?


For example, I'm thinking about production a short animation and send it to the competition during this summer break. The topic is "miss you miss you so much" which I considered it as easy (I'm so emotional), and what I would gain from winning the event is free air ticket to wherever in the world  I want (US!). I might ask my friends to help me about animation technique. Now I have everything ready, emotional feeling-animation technique-free ticket.

This is qualified idea.


However, considering my priority list, friends and relationship is in the second priority. I still have tons of ideas in my mind and some of that relates to my top priority, academics. Therefore, I throw away this animation idea and move to next idea, evaluate it and consider it with my priority list. This is the way I come around with a great idea for this summer. How I make a decision.




ps. So complicated. -_-