【英文版 03】Determining Your Dominant Risk

Some creative ideas fail because creatorsmisunderstand the dominant risk of their product. In the last session, wetalked about the first pitfall for innovators: underestimating the three kindsof creative brilliance.

大家好，欢迎来到创意思维课。今天，我会带大家了解一下第二个导致创意失败的因素，那就是创意者们常常会错误估计自己产品的主要风险。在上节课中，我们谈论了第一个创意思维陷阱，也就是我们往往会低估三种不同创意人才的作用。

So, you're probably asking yourself right now,"What if I want to be a creative and have an idea? How can I know if itmight be a big idea appropriate for its time? And how can I make sure I getenough producer skills that I stay competitive when competition arrives?"

因此，你很可能就会开始问自己了：“如果我想要成为一名创意者并且我也有一个好点子的话，我要怎样才能知道现在是这个创意实施的正确时机呢？我又要怎样判断自己是否拥有足够的生产者才能，并在竞争中能保持足够的竞争力呢？”

The second way we'll break down the problem ofgreat ideas and teams failing into a smaller problem is this: many creatorsfail to prioritize the dominant risk of their product. You can't predict thesuccess of an idea, but researchers and investors have sophisticated ways ofassessing the risks of an idea. A simplified way to think about this is tothink about two types of risk: market risk and technology risk.

为了回答这些问题，我们可以将“创意以及团队为什么会失败”这个大问题转化成一个小一点的问题来回答，那就是创意者们应该如何正确地判断出自己产品的主要风险呢？我们或许无法预测一个创意能否成功，但是对于研究人员和投资者们来说，他们却能够用成熟的评估手段去判断一个创意的风险，但是他们的判断方法有些复杂，可能对我们来说并不适用。因此在我们的创新过程中，我们可以用一种更简单的分析方法，那就是从创意的“市场风险”和“技术风险”这两个方面出发，来分析创意的主要风险。

An idea with significant technical risk meansthat it's not certain whether the technology needed for that innovation exists.Market risk simply means that you're not sure if there are enough people whowant to use your product for it to succeed as a business.

如果你不能确定自己的创新产品是否拥有足够的技术支持，那么你的创意很可能具有较大的技术风险。而如果你不知道有没有足够的人对你的产品感兴趣，那就意味着你的创意面临的是市场风险，因为只有拥有足够多的用户，你才能打造出一项成功的业务。

Your idea may have both technical and marketrisk, but usually one type dominates. Today, the basic technology buildingblocks for most products are available for little to no cost. This haseffectively reduced the technical risks for many founders, which is great. Butthat also means that market risk has grown relatively greater than technologyrisk and requires more of our attention.

当然，你的创意可能同时面临技术风险和市场风险，但是通常只有一种风险类型是最主要的。如今，大多数产品所需的基础型科技，都已经能够以免费或者以很低的价格获得了。因此，对于大多数创业者来说，他们所面临的技术风险已经大大降低了，这是一个很好的消息。但同时，这也意味着市场风险会比技术风险更加重要，因此我们需要花费更多的精力来对市场风险进行判断。

Webvan pioneered the grocery delivery market.Webvan was the brainchild of an already very successful entrepreneur, BordersBooks co-founder Lewis Borders. If you weren't there at the time, Bordersbookstores were ubiquitous in American cities. But Lewis Borders saw Amazon,which Jeff Bezos founded in 1994, coming to compete with his bookstorebusiness. And he decided to switch gears to a new idea.

现在，我要给大家讲一个故事，这个故事是关于历史上第一次尝试生鲜配送业务的网站，Webvan的。Webvan是由路易斯·博德斯（Lewis Borders）创建的，在这之前，他已经创立了博德斯连锁书店（Borders Books），并且大获成功。如果你觉得这个名字听上去有些陌生的话，你可能不知道，在当时的美国，这个书店在每一个城市都随处可见。但在1994年，在杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）创立了亚马逊（Amazon）之后，博德斯的书店业务开始面临来自亚马逊的竞争，因此，他决定将业务重心转向另一个方向。

In 1999, Lewis Borders launched Webvan. Itlooked promising. Webvan quickly raised nearly 800 million U.S. dollars infunding and then another 375 million from its IPO within months of launching.  Webvan was on an exciting trajectory. WhenWebvan started out, they spent tons of time, lots of energy and many resourceson developing novel technologies. They built robotic conveyor belts andcarousels, they built integrated shipping docks, inventory managementalgorithms and state of the art delivery management algorithms.

于是在1999年，路易斯·博德斯创建了Webvan。一开始，这个网站看上去很有前景。Webvan在创立之初就很快就获得了近8亿美元的融资，在成立几个月后，Webvan进行了IPO上市，并再次筹得了3.75亿美元。当时，Webvan的发展速度令人兴奋。在Webvan刚刚起步之时，其创始人们花费了大量的时间、精力和资源来进行先进技术的开发。他们打造了机器人全自动传输带，建立了一体化的综合运输站点，并且还开发了库存管理算法以及最先进的运输管理算法。

They made the bet that new technology wouldlead to a better product and more success. They weren't wrong, but it wasAmazon and Wal-Mart who would learn from their experience and later build thesetechnologies. What Webvan didn't understand early on is that their dominantrisk was not a technology risk. It was a market risk. Customers weren't yetused to buying things online, and no one had yet proven that customers wantedto buy fresh items like groceries online. Webvan didn’t totally ignore theissue of market risk, but they didn't do a good job of assessing it. Instead,they used a mass market strategy that advertised the quality and selection ofWhole Foods, the pricing of Safeway and the convenience of home delivery. Thatis to say, Webvan went after three markets at the same time. The high-endmarket, the price sensitive market and the convenience market. Their strategyended up being too broad, which made it difficult to attract a loyal audiencein any of these three markets. Webvan filed for bankruptcy just two years afterit launched, and its founders’ failure to recognize their market risk was amajor contributing factor.

他们坚信，全新的科技能够打造更好的产品、带来更大的成功，他们的想法并没有错，但最终，是亚马逊和沃尔玛（Wal-Mart）从他们的尝试中获得了经验，并打造出了那些科技，获得了成功。当时的Webvan并没有意识到，自己的主要产品风险并不是技术风险，而是市场风险。因为那个时候，消费者们还没有习惯于在线上进行购物，尤其是在线上购买生鲜产品。当然，Webvan并没有完全忽略他们所面临的市场风险，但是他们没能很好地对此进行评估。相反，他们采用了广泛市场营销策略，一方面，他们宣传了优选天然食品的高品质，另一方面，他们又宣传了西夫韦公司（Safeway）提供的低廉价格，同时，他们还对送货上门的便利性进行了宣传。也就是说，Webvan的宣传同时针对了三个完全不同的客户群体，也就是高端市场客户、价格敏感客户以及追求便利的客户。然而，由于这个营销策略过分宽泛，没有针对性，所以他们没能从任何一个市场中吸引到忠实的用户。在仅仅创立了两年之后，Webvan就申请了破产，而它失败的主要原因，就是因为其创始人没能正确地判断出Webvan所面临的主要风险类型。

For most innovators, it's more important toassess market risk than technology risk. So this podcast won't spend a lot oftime discussing technology risk. Instead, I'll focus on teaching you how toassess and reduce your market risk.

对于大多数的创新者而言，评估市场风险往往比评估技术风险更加重要。因此，在我们的课程中，我不会花太多时间讨论技术风险的相关问题，更多时候，我会集中为你们讲解如何评估并降低创新过程中的市场风险。今天就讲到这里，谢谢你们的收听，我们下次课程再见。