California Investment Network


Recent Blog


Pitching Help Desk


Testimonials

"As soon as I put in my proposal, I got offers from four different investors within 48 hours! The funding process took less than 2 weeks. I now have the funds to partner with a digital marketing agency and scale my e-commerce business! 10/10 will certainly recommend this site to other entrepreneurs."
Asela M - Mystic Phoenix Fortress LLC

 BLOG >> August 2017

A Theory of Difficulty [Education
Posted on August 15, 2017 @ 04:44:00 AM by Paul Meagher

In David Perkin's book Making Learning Whole (2009) he has a chapter called "Working on the Hard Parts" in which he stresses the importance of mastering difficult skills and knowledge in order to get to the next level of performance. One of the exercises he has his students (teachers-in-training) do is to devise a Theory of Difficulty (TOD) for a given domain of skill/knowledge. The TOD is supposed to help these teachers-in-training to come up with a better curriculum for learning that skill/knowledge.

It may be useful to think about the TOD associated with successfully starting a particular line of business.

Imagine that instead of you starting your business, you have to teach someone else about how to start your business. Your TOD might start with these two questions:

  1. What makes starting my particular line of business difficult?
  2. What would the person have to learn in order to overcome those difficulties and be successful?

If I am starting a bike rental business the difficulties I would face in doing so are different than if I am starting a software development company. There are different things I have to be good at and master. A TOD for starting a business can't really be specified in abstract terms. David Perkins is critical of TODs that are overly general and often gives his students this feedback:

Please think about this some more and give us a theory of difficulty that is more specific to your topic. Give us one that doesn't sound like something that could be said for a hundred other topics. There are alot of topics that are complicated or commonly boring or initially unfamiliar or packed with points to remember. Please get specific! You see, theories of difficulty afford much more leverage if they target the particular learning challenges for that particular thing. ~p. 102

It is arguably much easier to come up with a TOD when there is established knowledge for the domain. In the case of starting up a particular line of business in a particular place, there may be no rulebook unless you are starting a franchise that provides ample guidance on these matters. Your TOD is subject to revision as you learn more about how to succeed in your particular line of business. You may learn, for example, that alot of your bike rental clients are coming from tourist accommodation owners advising tourists on what they can do. Now your marketing approach needs to change to target these accommodation owners. The particulars of what makes marketing your business challenging has changed.

When an entrepreneur starts a business they probably already have an implicit TOD about the challenges of starting that business. Perhaps it would help to be more explicit so that assumptions about where the difficulties lie are clearer and more subject to testing, revision, and hopefully mastery.

Permalink 

The Control Revolution [Books
Posted on August 10, 2017 @ 03:47:00 AM by Paul Meagher

It has been a busy summer at the farm with little extra time for reading or writing, but last night I had the opportunity to peruse a couple of books that I picked up from local university libraries.

The first book is The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (1989) by James R. Beniger.

The book won the 1986 award for the Most Outstanding Book in the Social and Behavioral Sciences by the American Association of Publishers and NY Times notable paperback in 1989.

In this book Beniger argues that:

... society is currently experiencing a revolutionary transformation on a global scale. Unlike most of the other writers, however, I do not conclude that the crest of change is either recent, current, or imminent. Instead, I trace the causes of change back to the middle and late nineteenth century, to a set of problems - in effect a crisis of control - generated by the industrial revolution in manufacturing and transportation. The response to this crisis, at least in the technological innovation and restructuring of the economy, occurred most rapidly around the turn of the century and amounted to nothing less, I argue, than a revolution in societal control. ~ p. 6

So part of his argument is that a control revolution hit us around the turn of the 19th century (1870 to 1930) with the development of a host control technologies like telegraphs, railroads, bureaucracy, primitive computing, electricity, etc... The revolution however is by no means over - it is neither "recent, current, or imminent" - which I take to mean it is ongoing - it keeps (r)evolving. When Beniger wrote the book sometime before 1986, control technologies associated with new computing and networking hardware/software (aka "information technology") was becoming pervasive and was causing another "revolutionary transformation on a global scale".

One industry where the evolution of control technologies is having a profound effect is agriculture. Many current developments in control technologies are discussed in the recent book Precision Agriculture Technology For Crop Farming (2016) edited by Qin Zhang.

In the first chapter, "A History of Precision Agriculture", David Franzen and David Mulla itemize some of the innovations that had to happen before we could get to the stage of commercially available precision agriculture. These innovations include the development of a Global Satellite Positioning (GPS) network, advances in computing power for mapping, variable rate spreaders to control how much nutrient is provided in a specific area, robotics so that tractors can drive themselves, drones so that mapping can be combined with ariel sensing, developments in sensing technology for all agriculturally important soil characteristics, and the list goes on. There are no signs that precision agriculture will be a fad and there is evidence that it is being adopted faster in some areas like tractor driving before other areas like nutrient management.

It seems that Beniger's book is a good lens for understanding our current state of technological innovation and what might be expected in the future. Alot of innovation is associated with improving control, distributing control, localizing control, centralizing control, and sharing control so the control perspective might be used to evaluate the potential impact of new innovations on society (economically, environmentally, socially).

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are spawning a new revolution in societal control. To understand these issues the control perspective that Beniger offers is useful.

Permalink 

 Archive 
 

Archive


 November 2023 [1]
 June 2023 [1]
 May 2023 [1]
 April 2023 [1]
 March 2023 [6]
 February 2023 [1]
 November 2022 [2]
 October 2022 [2]
 August 2022 [2]
 May 2022 [2]
 April 2022 [4]
 March 2022 [1]
 February 2022 [1]
 January 2022 [2]
 December 2021 [1]
 November 2021 [2]
 October 2021 [1]
 July 2021 [1]
 June 2021 [1]
 May 2021 [3]
 April 2021 [3]
 March 2021 [4]
 February 2021 [1]
 January 2021 [1]
 December 2020 [2]
 November 2020 [1]
 August 2020 [1]
 June 2020 [4]
 May 2020 [1]
 April 2020 [2]
 March 2020 [2]
 February 2020 [1]
 January 2020 [2]
 December 2019 [1]
 November 2019 [2]
 October 2019 [2]
 September 2019 [1]
 July 2019 [1]
 June 2019 [2]
 May 2019 [3]
 April 2019 [5]
 March 2019 [4]
 February 2019 [3]
 January 2019 [3]
 December 2018 [4]
 November 2018 [2]
 September 2018 [2]
 August 2018 [1]
 July 2018 [1]
 June 2018 [1]
 May 2018 [5]
 April 2018 [4]
 March 2018 [2]
 February 2018 [4]
 January 2018 [4]
 December 2017 [2]
 November 2017 [6]
 October 2017 [6]
 September 2017 [6]
 August 2017 [2]
 July 2017 [2]
 June 2017 [5]
 May 2017 [7]
 April 2017 [6]
 March 2017 [8]
 February 2017 [7]
 January 2017 [9]
 December 2016 [7]
 November 2016 [7]
 October 2016 [5]
 September 2016 [5]
 August 2016 [4]
 July 2016 [6]
 June 2016 [5]
 May 2016 [10]
 April 2016 [12]
 March 2016 [10]
 February 2016 [11]
 January 2016 [12]
 December 2015 [6]
 November 2015 [8]
 October 2015 [12]
 September 2015 [10]
 August 2015 [14]
 July 2015 [9]
 June 2015 [9]
 May 2015 [10]
 April 2015 [9]
 March 2015 [8]
 February 2015 [8]
 January 2015 [5]
 December 2014 [11]
 November 2014 [10]
 October 2014 [10]
 September 2014 [8]
 August 2014 [7]
 July 2014 [5]
 June 2014 [7]
 May 2014 [6]
 April 2014 [3]
 March 2014 [8]
 February 2014 [6]
 January 2014 [5]
 December 2013 [5]
 November 2013 [3]
 October 2013 [4]
 September 2013 [11]
 August 2013 [4]
 July 2013 [8]
 June 2013 [10]
 May 2013 [14]
 April 2013 [12]
 March 2013 [11]
 February 2013 [19]
 January 2013 [20]
 December 2012 [5]
 November 2012 [1]
 October 2012 [3]
 September 2012 [1]
 August 2012 [1]
 July 2012 [1]
 June 2012 [2]


Categories


 Agriculture [77]
 Bayesian Inference [14]
 Books [18]
 Business Models [24]
 Causal Inference [2]
 Creativity [7]
 Decision Making [17]
 Decision Trees [8]
 Definitions [1]
 Design [38]
 Eco-Green [4]
 Economics [14]
 Education [10]
 Energy [0]
 Entrepreneurship [74]
 Events [7]
 Farming [21]
 Finance [30]
 Future [15]
 Growth [19]
 Investing [25]
 Lean Startup [10]
 Leisure [5]
 Lens Model [9]
 Making [1]
 Management [12]
 Motivation [3]
 Nature [22]
 Patents & Trademarks [1]
 Permaculture [36]
 Psychology [2]
 Real Estate [5]
 Robots [1]
 Selling [12]
 Site News [17]
 Startups [12]
 Statistics [3]
 Systems Thinking [3]
 Trends [11]
 Useful Links [3]
 Valuation [1]
 Venture Capital [5]
 Video [2]
 Writing [2]