Customer Interviews No. 1

The beginning of my idea:

1.  So I am a resident assistant at UF and sometimes I have issues coming up with fun program ideas. Other times, I come up with good ideas and don't have enough time to put them together. We have access to SharePoint to share program and bulletin board ideas, but not many people contribute or use them. As RAs, we have to submit activity assessments after each program, so that's where my idea developed: I would like to create another small section to the required activity assessment that would collaborate the information from programs to allow other RAs to search based on different criteria to come up with a good program idea.
2. Obviously I knew the other RAs at UF would have this need like me, so I knew I needed to interview other RAs.
3. Here were my questions:
• How do you typically come up with program ideas?
• Can you explain the decision factors that go into selecting the one you pick?
•  Typically what types of programs do you host?
•  When you can't think of a good idea, what do you do?
•  Are there additional resources that would be helpful in planning programs?
•  What great program ideas have you had that you weren't able to do? Why?
•  For your residents, what are the best types of programs an RA can host?
4. My five interviews are below. I went to different area desks to interview the RAs.
5. I think my idea is still a pretty good idea. After talking with some people it seemed like they already met the need, but others still said a collaborative program book or better way to access program ideas would be great. I need to develop the idea better, but the organizational pattern I have in my head fits with what some of them described.
6.  Because I was an RA interviewing other RAs, even though we didn't know each other, they were pretty helpful and I wasn't as nervous as I would have been if I tried to interview people in Turlington or the like. It was weird at first, I was basically explaining why I had to talk with them and felt like I was trying to convince them that I wasn't super lame. At the last office, I thanked her and left almost awkwardly cause she didn't even say your welcome or no problem, just stopped talking to me. Hopefully I am more confident with the next ones.

Week 4 Reading Reflection

Innovation: The Creative Pursuit of Ideas

1. I am surprised that the evaluation and implementation stage is considered to be the most difficult step in the creative endeavor. To me the most challenging step is coming up with a feasible idea. 
2.  I am a little confused between the misconceptions of innovation “innovation is planned and predictable” and “innovation relies on dreams and blue-sky ideas” because the book states the innovators are very practical people and that the process to innovation is gather knowledge and incubate your thoughts which sounds like a very planned process of innovation.
3.  Question 1: How long do you sit and mull over an idea that may or may not come to be anything possible and not get that “eureka” moment, before giving up on the idea?  Question 2: What is the best idea for obtaining a partner in your entrepreneurial venture when you have a great idea, but don’t have the skills to implement it? I think my idea is easy to put into practice, but I don’t have the computer skills to do it.
4.  One of the things I disagree, or have an issue with, is the idea that “killer phrases” are the real barriers to creative thinking. I am the president of a club and when we try to come up with fundraising ideas I sometimes use them because the ideas are unfeasible or not worth the effort, and many times my other officers have come up with better ideas.

2.   

Top 5 World Problems

If the top problems in the world had to be narrowed down to five, I would rank them like this:

1. Lack of Clean Water
• Rivers, like the Ganges and Yangtze, are very unsanitary.  This river is contaminated with feces, diseases, and other pollutants.  Without access to other water, this is what people have to use for bathing and drinking.
2. Hunger
• With 1/3 of the world obese, it seems ridiculous that 1/3 of the world is still starving. 
3. Disease
• With lack of food, access to clean drinking water, and education about disease transmission, the outbreak of AIDS, yellow fever, Ebola, and other diseases is concerning.
4. Human Rights Violations
•  There are more slaves now than there has ever been in the history of mankind, including sex slaves, labor slaves, and people who would be considered free, but kept in slave-like conditions.  Also women in many countries are restricted from opportunities such as education, freewill, and life.  In addition, the treatment of female babies in China is disturbing.
5. Population Growth



Crowded city in India

•  Population is growing at a rate that Earth won't be able to handle.  The fast growing population has resulted in urban sprawl, encroachment on animal habitats, sanitary issues, job availability, and poor transportation.

So the "solutions" to these problems ranked from most possible to implement to least would be:

1. Hunger
• Governments in poverty need to be helped and powerful countries need to stop taking advantage of underdeveloped countries. Increased access to education and productive farming practices.  Increased investments in GMOs would also help provide food to hungry people.
2. Human Rights Violations
• Important things to fix this problem would be to spread awareness, increase foreign aid efforts, increase peace efforts, and promote education for women and people in poverty.
3. Lack of Clean Water
• Education is a priority to prevent people from continuing to use this polluted water.
4. Disease
• Providing more education about the spread of diseases along more access to health care and sanitary efforts would help stop the spread of disease.
5. Population Growth
•  This is a tricky one to solve.  Of course you can always say education, but actually reducing population would require killing or limiting births which both aren't acceptable.

It was really hard to decide which problem was the worst. I chose lack of clean water because it leads to and worsens the other problems. Diseases are spread through the contaminated water that people bath in and drink from, so until the water problem is solved, disease probably won't be.

As for the solutions, I think hunger would be the most likely.  The couple solutions I listed above could work, and also instead of paying our farmers subsidies so they don't plant crops, we could continue paying them, but to plant crops that we could send to starving countries.
The population growth problem seems the hardest to fix without violating personal rights.

Very Short Interview No. 1

My interview with Debbie Shaw:

Debbie Shaw owns a home daycare business. She has successfully managed this business for eighteen years and throughout the years has expanded to provide tutoring services and swimming lessons. She is an entrepreneur because she assumed financial, career, and social risks to start this business along with investing her time and money. She has created value in this business by providing special nurturing and educational skills that have guided young children to grow into mature adolescents ready for a bright future.

1. How did you decide to leave your previous career to begin a new business?
• I was originally a school teacher. And to be honest, I had a child of my own and did not want to put my own child in a daycare, so I started a daycare business so I could stay home with my child and earn a living taking care of other people's children.  Had I not had a child of my own, I probably would have continued teaching. I saw the value of being a stay at home mom, so I chose the best of the both worlds: I got to continue to teach, which was my chosen career, and stay home with my children.
2. When you began your business, what did you bring to it that was unique from other home daycare's?
• Other home day-cares don't offer swimming lessons, homework help, tutoring, field trips, or service part-time needs (many home day-cares only take full time children). I cater to all ages, infants to 12 year olds, meals, and transportation to school.  I was a certified teacher. That gives me more credibility when I offer tutoring services, I had been taught how to best educate kids. Most home daycares are just some lady without any degree at all, just babysitting. I'm providing education: reading and writing skills that can better prepare them for kindergarten than the average home daycare operator.
3. What do you wish you had been taught in school before starting your own business? 
• That's a tough one. I didn't go to school to start the business, I went to school to be a teacher not a home daycare operator. I do okay with budgeting as far as supplies and food and I don't think I needed help there. And I knew how to talk with parents about children's behavior. I guess before starting my own business I wish I would have had more computer skills which would have allowed me to take certification classes with ease. I could have budgeted using the computer for food, payments, receipts, printing delinquent payment notices. Using Word and Excel would have helped write newsletters and create my attendance roster and menu charts. I have to log attendance, I have to log transportation, I have to log income which all would have been easier if I had the skills to use a computer.

I didn't originally think of Debbie as an entrepreneur. She didn't fit the profile I had in my head of someone who creates a new invention and turns it into a business.  I didn't know of anyone else that owns their own business, so that's why I interviewed her. And it turns out, I really do think she is an entrepreneur because she brought her teaching skills to her business and offered a wider variety of services than the typical home daycare does.

Week 3 Reading Reflection

The Entrepreneurial Mind-Set in Individuals

1. I was most surprised by the dual grief recovery process.  I always thought the learn from your mistake, but keep looking on the positive, restorative side was best, but the dual process models suggests switching ways of thinking during the recovery process.
2. The grief recovery process proposed by Dean Shepherd that involves switching between the loss orientation and restoration orientation, is a little confusing.  It's easy to say they shouldn't dwell on the loss or completely ignore it, but I don't understand how someone is guided back and forth between orientations to achieve an effective outcome from their entrepreneurial fail.
3. Question 1: Financial risk can be managed by getting investors, but how do entrepreneurs successfully manage the family & social risk and psychic risk?  Question 2: Because many entrepreneurial ventures are created by an individual, how do entrepreneurs minimize negative ethical rationalizations?
4. In the excerpt, "Entrepreneurial Fear 101" I disagree with Wilson Harrell's statement that the key ingredient for entrepreneurial success is the ability to handle fear. I believe its the drive to achieve combined with the proper strategies for handling risk.

Identifying Local Opportunities

Here's some issues from Clay County presented by the Clay Today newspaper:

1. BCC Takes up Multiple Issues
• http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028416/00577  --page 1
• The Board of County Commissioners' meetings are typically broadcast for residents to watch, but for the past couple months the broadcast has not worked. When residents turn on to watch, they only get shown a blank green screen.  The School Board actually manages the broadcast channel, and there has not been a problem with the broadcasting of the School Board meetings.
• So the problem arises because the residents who want to stay informed about the meeting proceedings are not able to watch the live broadcast. Also, the commissioners have spent quite a bit of money on the communications equipment and software and it hasn't been able to help the residents.
• The problem is both for the residents who aren't able to watch the broadcast and for the BCC because when residents can't watch, the BCC isn't getting the feedback from the county that they should.
2. Good Parade, Bad Parent
•  http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028416/00577  --page 4
• Craig Seaton discusses his experience at the Green Cove Springs Christmas parade.  He tells how great the parade was, but heavily criticizes the behavior of numerous parents he observed.  So many were smoking next to their young children, one man even blew smoke into his child's face. Also one mom continuously berated her child all afternoon and never showed her child any love.
• The problem here is that parents, whether intentionally or not, abuse their children by endangering them with the effects of secondhand smoke.
• I would say it's obvious that the children have the problem of being around secondhand smoke, but I also think smoking parents have "a problem" because they are hurting their children.  The article suggests making this park a No Smoking Zone, which I would undoubtedly support.
3. Landscape Resolutions
• http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028416/00577  --page 25
• This article discusses that many landscaping techniques that people use regularly can cause more harm than good.  The most common errors involve overwatering, pruning & fertilizing, overplanting, and amendments (use of fertilizer when planting).
• The problem here is that many people don't know how to care for their plants and end up hurting the soil and plant life.
• The people that don't know how to properly care for their plants have to problem and the plants are being negatively affected.
4. OPHS Bomb Threat Cancels School Tuesday
• http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028416/00577  --page 40
• Orange Park High School received an emailed bomb threat early Tuesday morning, the 8th of December.  After deputies and police dogs had searched the school and everything was clear, they had the teachers inspect their classrooms to make sure everything was normal.
• Along with the other bomb threats that happened in the Orange Park and Jacksonville area, I think the problem here is that students can too easily claim there is a bomb at the school and get to skip school when it is cancelled for investigations.
• The schools have a problem, because if these threats continue to happen more and more school has to be cancelled.  Also, parents will seriously fear for the safety of their children and maybe choose not to send them to school and opt for homeschooling.
5. Letter to the Editor-Bus Driver Calls on Citizens to Get Involved
• http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00028416/00577  --page 4
• Bus driver Keith Nichols wrote the letter to the editor to inform the public of the wrongdoings of Robert Waremburg, Director of Transportation, and of the website that provides proof of his claims, www.cespa7409.org.  One of the big claims is that when Waremburg was asked about the cost of air conditioning for buses, he quoted an outrageous price for air conditioning units that don't fit on the currently owned buses.
• The problem here is that Waremburg has been dishonest and demonstrated inappropriate behavior on a number of issues, and some of the other directors are protecting Waremburg's actions.
• The citizens have this problem because School Board directors are behaving dishonestly.

World's Biggest Problems

With so many problems in the world, here are ten that I think are pretty big:

1.  Climate Change 
• Science has proved that humans are negatively effecting the climate. This will have many repercussions including loss of species' habitats, weather becoming more severe, rising temperatures, loss of polar ice caps, rising sea levels, and coast line cities disappearing.
• Some things that can be done about this are to invest in renewable fuels, make more effort to clean oil spills, pick up trash, and remove green house gasses from the atmosphere. 
2. Human Rights Violations
•  There are more slaves now than there has ever been in the history of mankind, including sex slaves, labor slaves, and people who would be considered free, but kept in slave-like conditions.  Also women in many countries are restricted from opportunities such as education, freewill, and life.  In addition, the treatment of female babies in China is disturbing.
• Important things to fix this problem would be to spread awareness, increase foreign aid efforts, increase peace efforts, and promote education for women and people in poverty.
3. Animal Protection
•  Many species are becoming extinct, endangered, or threatened, including the passenger pigeon, the northern white rhino, and manatees.  Humans treatment of the animals themselves, and their habitats, cause this issue.
• Increasing protection efforts would be the best way to help animal species survive.
4. Environmental Protection
• Many of the rain forests in the world are disappearing. This is caused by population growth, logging, among other things.  Also, with the destruction of rain forests, is the disappearance of plant and animal species.
• Increased protection efforts, more funding for state parks, and investing in alternative materials would help prevent deforestation and the destruction of the environment.
5. War
•  With war all over the world, including Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East so many people are being killed and forced to live in awful conditions.  It prevents people from accessing basic needs.
• Some things that would help would be limiting the leverage special interest groups have on politicians, increasing compromise efforts and deliberation, and providing access to education.
6. Hunger
• With 1/3 of the world obese, it seems ridiculous that 1/3 of the world is still starving.
• Governments in poverty need to be helped and powerful countries need to stop taking advantage of underdeveloped countries. Increased access to education and productive farming practices.  Increased investments in GMOs would also help provide food to hungry people.
7. Lack of Clean Water



Ganges River

• Rivers, like the Ganges and Yangtze, are very unsanitary.  This river is contaminated with feces, diseases, and other pollutants.  Without access to other water, this is what people have to use for bathing and drinking.
• Education is a priority to prevent people from continuing to use this polluted water.
8. Population Growth
•  Population is growing at a rate that Earth won't be able to handle.  The fast growing population has resulted in urban sprawl, encroachment on animal habitats, sanitary issues, job availability, and poor transportation.
• This is a tricky one to solve.  Of course you can always say education, but actually reducing population would require killing or limiting births which both aren't acceptable.
9. Unequal Distribution of Wealth
•  In the U.S. alone the distribution of wealth is extremely skewed, with the top 5% having 60% of the wealth, and the lowest 40% having only 0.2% of the wealth.  Other places in the world have even worse distribution.  This issue keeps the poor people from rising above the poverty line.
• A solution would of course be to tax the rich and redistribute the wealth, but that defies the concept of capitalism and with the rich very influential in governments, probably will not happen.
10. Disease
•  With lack of food, access to clean drinking water, and education about disease transmission, the outbreak of AIDS, yellow fever, Ebola, and other diseases is concerning.
• Providing more education about the spread of diseases along more access to health care and sanitary efforts would help stop the spread of disease.

Week 2 Reading Reflection

What the biggest surprise for me in the reading was the distinction between an entrepreneur, a small business owner, and an innovator.  I never assumed that all small business owners were entrepreneurs because my mom owns her own daycare, but is in no way an entrepreneur.  I always thought entrepreneur and innovator were close to synonymous terms, but the reading described to me that you have to do more than innovate to be an entrepreneur, you have to put innovative ideas into a business practice.

What was confusing to me was that despite the fact that the author clarifies that being a small business owner does not mean one is an entrepreneur, the statistics he uses to describe the "Impact of Entrepreneurial Ventures in the United States" are from the U.S. Small Business Administration.  I am still having trouble grasping what actually makes someone an entrepreneur.

If I could ask the author two questions, one would be: why do gazelles produces twice as many product innovations per employee as do larger firms? I would like to know more about the work environment of gazelles or other reasons they are able to achieve such high growth rates.  Another question would be: what has the effect of entrepreneurial education had on the rate of entrepreneurship in the U.S.? I would like to know more about the myth "entrepreneurs are born, not made," because I have heard professors say that you can't teach entrepreneurship.

I have trouble agreeing with the author's view that entrepreneurship can be taught.  I think that you do need to have some of the typical traits, for example initiative, drive, willingness to take risk, and aggressiveness.  I think I could run a small business successfully, but my small business wouldn't be considered an entrepreneurial venture because I don't think any one can teach me to take more risk or how to create a new way of thinking to combine innovation with a business.

Bug List

20 Things That Bug Me:

1. At Michael's, in Argyle Forrest, the quantity available listed online does not match the availability in the store.
• I would assume this is because the inventory system is not updated frequently by the employees or the system is not setup to do automatic updates.
2. In many retail outlets, prices online don't match the prices in the store.
•  Encouraging customers to purchase items online reduces the cost that a traditional retail store has to pay.
3. Walgreen's on Blanding Blvd was very strict about printing professional pictures and made me get a specific liability release form even though I had an appropriate form from the picture producer.
• They are very concerned with lawsuits.
4. Women's pants aren't sold by length and width like men's pants, instead the sizes sold at different retailers vary greatly.
• I have no idea why this is done.
5. Shoe sizes, even though they are supposed to be standardized, aren't always true to size and it makes ordering shoes online difficult.
• Costs to completely standardize the sizes of shoes would be tremendous.
6. Many restaurants on campus, such as Chick-fil-A, Papa John's, and Croutons, close before students are ready to eat dinner.
• More students live off campus than on campus, therefore Aramark would not make as much profit because fewer customers are available at night.
7. Amazon Prime's 2-day shipping often extends past two days and they have never offered compensation for the inconvenience.
• Around the holiday season shipping gets slowed.
8. Masterpiece Puzzle Company does not cut identical puzzles into identical pieces, therefore when a piece is missing they can't replace the piece.
• I don't know why. I think it would be easier to cut all the puzzles into the same pieces.
9. The custodian in my building often puts an extra toilet paper roll on top of the rolls attached to the stall wall and these extra rolls often fall onto the floor and then people don't want to use them.
• Over the weekends we go through more toilet paper than the allotted spots attached to the stall allow and the girls still continue to use it even though its been on the floor.
10. Netflix has taken over eight months to put up the final season of Parks and Rec.
• It is probably more expensive to buy the rights to the show the newer it is.
11. Pandora's customer service takes two months to replace broken jewelry.
• Pandora sends all the broken jewelry overseas to inspect and fix it and because it does take so long many people will just buy a replacement instead of waiting two months.
12. UF Bookstore sells many of their books in binder form which they do not buy back from students.
• When the book is in a binder and pages are loose-leaf, pages could be taken out and not put back by students and it would cost a lot to have employees check to see that every page was returned.
13. Many small sized packaged foods, like king sized candy bars, are singularly packaged but contain multiple servings which deceive consumers about the amount of calories in the package. 
• The larger candy bar provides more value for the customer at a lower cost than buying two candy bars.
14. Most alcohol, Seagram's wine coolers for example, don't contain the nutritional value on the bottle.
• These drinks aren't healthy, and if producers aren't required to reveal the nutritional information they don't.
15. K-Cup sellers, like Green Mountain Coffee, don't sell individual K-Cups to be able to test them before you buy an entire 18 pack.
• It is cheaper to package and sell larger packs of K-Cups.
16. Melamine dishware, sold at Target, is not made to be microwave safe, but it is sometimes necessary to reheat food that is served into the bowls on onto the plates.
• They can sell them for cheaper when they don't have to use materials that are microwave safe.
17. My Magic Chef mini fridge's freezer is very small, leaves food icy, and will not keep things like ice cream in their appropriate state of frozen.
• The freezer is simply an icebox, a higher quality freezer would increase the price of the fridge.
18. Samsung and Apple laptops, among others, don't come with very many USB ports and require users to buy an adapter to have more ports.
• It costs more and the laptops would have to be made larger to add more USB ports.
19. As Apple introduces new products the chargers they require aren't the same as the chargers of the previous models and you have to buy extra chargers.
• The batteries are different and require different chargers, and also they make more money when people buy additional chargers.
20. Comcast makes it very difficult to get out of a service contract.
• They make it difficult to do as much as they can to keep your business.

This list was very hard to come up with, especially around number 12.  Most of my list consists of services rather than products because I feel like I have become accustomed to the lacking of my products, but notice when people mess up . And it was very difficult to come up with the reason for the issues; most of the reasons I came up with came down to money.

My Entrepreneurship Story

When I was in junior high school we were required to complete a history fair project about an inventor.  I chose Dr. Martin Cooper.  Not many people know who he is by name, but we definitely use what he created every day.  He invented the cell phone.

For my project I needed some primary sources, so I decided to endeavor to get an interview with him.  And I did.  It's been quite a few years since I talked with him, but I remember him trying to explain some of the scientific stuff that I could understand no better now then I could today.  What interested me the most, was his idea for the future of cell phones.  His idea was that they would evolve simply into microchip-like devices that would be implanted under our skin.  I don't keep up much with science, but from a consumer point of view I don't see that happening.  With how attached we have become to smart phones, I don't understand how I would give up my games, scrolling of social media, and flipping through photos with my physical phone unless these microchips would be really connected to our bodies.

I enrolled in ENT 3003 because I needed a class to fill my schedule.  I am already ahead in the accounting program and needed to fulfill four credits.  I originally wanted to take a marketing class, but when those weren't open to non-marketing majors I opted to look at other classes and found this one.  The format of the class is something I'm not very comfortable with--I'm one of those people that actually would prefer tests and quizzes.  What I hope to get out of the class is a broader, and more open way of thinking.  I don't expect to become an entrepreneur, but maybe begin to think like one.

Introduction

I guess I'll do the typical college introduction: My name is Emily Buzby, I'm a third year accounting major from Orange Park, Florida.


I've lived in Orange Park, a suburb outside of Jacksonville, all my life.  My family is great! I have a younger sister, who unfortunately goes to FSU, divorced parents who are both remarried, and supportive grandparents who live nearby.  They are all super supportive, but with high expectations.  My mom, uncle, sister, and I were all high school valedictorians which should provide evidence as to how important school has always been to my family.

West Virginia Skiing

So I'm an accounting major.  Like most, I plan to start with one of the Big 4 firms and see how things go from there.  But what I'm most excited about is being a mom.  I can't wait to have two or three little ones running around my house!


I haven't traveled much recently.  In elementary school my family took a trip around the border of the U.S., but that's hard to remember.  I've also been to Canada and the Bahamas.  My favorite trips are definitely ski trips, but I haven't taken one of those since high school.  I'd like to travel to Europe, but haven't seriously thought of when or how.

Underwater Hockey

The most interesting thing about me is probably that I play underwater hockey! It's a fast paced underwater sport played on the bottom of the pool with strategy similar to soccer.  It's the first thing I did in college that was out of my comfort zone, this style of class may be the second.  Our equipment looks a little funny, but the team at UF is great!

Entrepreneur's Mantra

My First Post...

This is my first blog post ever! But I guess I will be expected to do many new things for this class, so I might as well start now.