Tweet What You Eat

The Idea
Use Twitter to lose weight by tweeting to track what you eat; get motivational messages and tips via Twitter.

Origins

A friend at my gym today had an electronic device to measure Body Mass Index (BMI), and another guy said, "I wonder if they have a cell phone app that does that." The phrase "Tweet what you eat" popped into my head.

How It Works

Freemium model: customers sign up via a website and enter basic body information (to get recommended daily calories) and their Twitter handle. Every time they tweet an item with "#calories" and a number as well as "#tweetwhatyoueat," the website adds that amount of calories to the tracking. When the number of calories is higher than recommended for the time of day or the total calorie count for the day is high, the user gets a tweet back with a message warning about intake. Premium members get the ability to enter any item and have the site automatically calculate calories as well as adding custom motivational messages, integration to update automatically other dieting sites and health sites and advanced tracking. Gold members get individualized advice from trained dietary and fitness professionals.

Resources Needed

Software programming expertise

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (If Any)

Network effect in that people see #tweetwhatyoueat and think of that site first as the source for free health tracking.

Middle East Telemedicine Service

The Idea
Build a "telemedicine" presence for wealth patrons in the Middle East through reverse outsourcing (providing services to foreigners through employees in the U.S.).

Origins

I saw a photo essay in CNN on Iraqi immigrants who live in El Cajon, California working relatively menial jobs even though many used to be physicians and attorneys in Iraq. This community seems tailor-made for an outsourcing community, as many of these residents would likely be thrilled to have their old, more respected professions back.

How It Works

Starting in Bahgdad, deploy a set of nurses and advertise "second opinion" services to the wealthy. Starting with Skype and building through an infrastructure that would allow x-rays, tests and other critical information to be transferred easily and quickly to the U.S., offer medicine services through Iraqi doctors living as immigrants in El Cajon, California. Once the service has been established in Bahgdad, deploy the model to other wealthy cities in the Middle East such as Riyahd, Saudi Arabia, Amman, Jordan or Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Resources Needed

Software programming expertise, Arabic fluency, knowledge of Middle East cultural and business practices for primary care medicine

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (If Any)

Deploying a stable, trusted community of Iraqi Arabic speakers in a community in the U.S. in conjunction with a nursing and sales staff in the Middle East would be hard to set up but also hard to replicate. Establishing a stable business and reputation with Iraqi immigrants possibly translates successfully to other insular immigrant communities such as Persians in Los Angeles; Iraqis, Lebanese and Yemeni communities in Dearborn, Michigan; and Jordanians, Palestinians, and Syrians in Patterson, New Jersey.

Market Research Service for Home Improvement

The Idea
Offer manufacturers market share and market basket analysis based on scanning Lowe's, Home Depot and Menard's receipts and deriving market share from these receipts.

Origins

At PPG, I used the Paint Consumers Research Program. We employed a giant consumer survey to gauge what brands consumers bought in home improvement. The data were inaccurate and variable, and I often wondered why we couldn't just get market share directly from the retailers.

How It Works

Employ individuals using a service like Amazon's Mechanical Turks to go to the parking lots of various Lowe's, Home Depot and Menard's locations at assigned times to take cell phone photos of customers' receipts for a small fee. Use pattern recognition or just plain data entry to enter the items on the receipt. Collate the results in market share reports to be presented to manufacturers online. Sell to home improvement manufacturing market research departments.

Resources Needed

Software programming expertise, market research expertise, start-up capital to collect the first few months of data

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (If Any)

The longer the business collects a consistent set of accurate data, the harder it would be for a competitor to present value in comparison. Manufacturers want to see market share, in particular, over a period of time to see if it is increasing or declining. In order to increase switching cost and increase "share of wallet," the company could introduce other services over time such as matched sample testing for new programs (comparing the results at specific stores where a new product came out, for instance, versus similar stores without the new product).

Technical Documentation Translation Service

The Idea
Use off-the-shelf translation such as Google Translate combined with human editors to translate technical documentation into foreign languages for software and hardware companies.

Origins

I wish I had this service whenever I got a technical question from a non-English speaker using our English-language instructions at ANY of my past companies.

How It Works

Take technical documentation from a Website of a software or hardware company that clearly has business around the world but has documentation only in one language. Do a sample translation of the first page or two (by yourself or with the help of translators from Guru.com or Odesk.com) and send it to the client, quoting a price for the full translation.

Resources Needed

Knowledge of a particular hardware or software domain and editing skills.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (If Any)

A slight advantage would accrue to the first mover in this space by developing a proprietary set of good translations of particular technical terms. Overall, this model is easily replicated and therefore does not convey much sustainable competitive advantage.

Best Practices for Sports Teams

The Idea
"The Corporate Executive Board" for sports teams: offer best practices research to professional sports team General Managers and/or Directors of Operations to deal with strategic problems in hiring, marketing, venue management, government relations, corporate relations, operations and other issues.

Origins

Tom Monahan, CEO of the Corporate Executive Board and my former boss, had this idea years ago but never executed on it.

How It Works

Sports teams pay a membership fee and get access to strategic studies as well as an archive of past studies. The membership at large determines the hot topics such as "Marketing During the Recession" or "Strategies for Salary Caps" or "Best Practices for Working With Architects for New Venues." The membership includes attendance at one of several annual meetings around the world at which the company would present the research and sports team executives would network with each other.

Resources Needed

Consulting experience, a core of "charter members" to get the program started, possibly sports management education or experience.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (If Any)

This type of program operates on a network effect: once enough sports teams of various types are members, it is hard for a competitor to gain a foothold because it is always more attractive for a new member to join the larger group with the well-managed team GMs as its clients. Otherwise, the new member does not get the advantage of expertise from the industry leaders.

Consumer Capacity Alert Software

The Idea
Provide a software platform to industries with capacity management problems that would easily enable them to alert potential consumers to last-minute deals when their capacity allowed it. For example, a movie theater could provide last-minute tickets at deep discounts when the theater had empty seats.

Origins

Monica and I went to the movies the other night on a Monday night. Even though it was right after the Academy Awards and the movie had won an award (Argo), the movie theater was half empty. I reflected that I would come to the movies more often if I could come at the last minute for $1.

How It Works

The software needs A) an easy way to indicate the scheduled events (movies, flights, cruises, shows) and the capacity still left, B) an easy way to set up last-minute pricing, and C) a way to alert consumers about the availability and to allow them to sign up instantly (and a way to monitor when capacity was full). Ideally, the software would target a particular market such as movie theaters first but be structured as a platform that could be adapted easily to other markets.

Resources Needed

Software programming experience, some knowledge of capacity pricing

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (If Any)

The platform nature of the product would make it easy to expand inexpensively into new markets. Saving the ongoing data (by making it a cloud service or otherwise feeding data back to the central database) would provide competitive advantages in the information about how changes in price affect demand based on the particular date and time and/or characteristics of the product and/or customer.

Robotic Remote Picker

The Idea
Substitute human warehouse pickers (individuals who pick from the warehouse shelf) with robotic pickers operated remotely by a human.

Origins

In my job, I have heard warehouse managers complain about the vicissitudes of managing U.S. workers in the distribution center: attendance problems, on-time arrival, union rules and other workforce management problems. Some show interest in solutions solely because they provide leverage in negotiating with employees.

How It Works

Using the Crown motorized pallet jack or other similar interfaces that already allow for remote operation, build a robot that sits on the "standing area" part of the walkie-rider and has two robotic arms that reach out to grab items from the pick location. Build a software interface to see the pick locations and the front of the forklift in a remote screen. The concept is to have a remote, low-wage worker replace a high-wage warehouse worker by piloting the robot and pallet jack from their computer screen.

Resources Needed

Supply chain management experience, robotics expertise, software and machine vision expertise, capital investment for the robotics development required.

Sustainable Competitive Advantage (If Any)

A distribution center that tries the robotic warehouse worker could upgrade to an automated guided vehicle and eventually to a completely autonomous robot. The significant technical barriers would prevent competition, and the high switching costs would prevent customers from switching to another solution.