Board Games and Predicting the Future – BWP’s April Strategy Session at swissnex Boston
Board Games and Predicting the Future – BWP’s April Strategy Session at swissnex Boston
By Paola Mesadieu, Manager, Content & New Media. Boston World Partnerships
On Wednesday, April 20th, BWP made its way to swissnex ‘s Harvard Square headquarters for an international themed Strategy Session. This session featured two Swiss companies, an outstanding panel of BWP Connectors and 20+ MBA students from Basel, Switzerland.
As always, our companies presented and then asked the panelists for help.
First on the docket was Hadi Barkat and his company Redcut . Redcut makes games (both board games and mobile) that “improve the world’s IQ” via trivia questions. So far, they’ve made Helvetiq and Belgotron, which test players’ knowledge of Switzerland and Belgium respectively, and Hadi is looking to bring both his offline and online gaming platform to the States. Our second presenter was Peter Gloor of Galaxy Advisors.
Galaxy Advisors has as much ambition as Redcut. They predict the future!
Based on 20 years of Peter’s research at MIT and elsewhere, Galaxy does social network analysis, email mining and examines patterns of creativity, all of which amounts to swarm creativity theory.
Both presenters came away with both a clear set of ideas to work on AND contacts that can help them along the way.
Here are some helpful business tips that came out of the Q&A portion of the event:
- For bootstrapping start-ups, low costs in producing new products or services allow for experimentation that, at times, can be more valuable than market research.
- When expanding your company (especially any culturally themed company or product) to the US, think small.Don’t try to attack the entire US market all at once. The US is composed of too many sub pockets with varied interests to try to target all at once.
- Cool ideas don’t pay the rent. Cool ideas backed by a clear revenue plan do.
- Don’t have the tech guy pitch your company. But if you do, make sure that the slide deck is geared towards a general audience.
- If there is a big name distributor in your space, find a way to partner with them. Sometimes attaching yourself to the biggest distribution partner available is more important than having the perfect product.
Maybe my favorite quote of the night was the following:
“I actually wanted to be totally contrarian.” – Philip Guarino
Philip captured the spirit of openness to new ideas that strategy sessions are built on and that Peter and Hadi both embodied in giving their presentations and hearing sometimes tough feedback.
