This is the Table of Strategic Elements from my talk today at The Next Web in Amsterdam. You can subscribe to updates of this table and other posts in the sidebar. If you remix this table with new categories or layouts, I’d enjoy seeing it.

Table of Strategic Elements

Mark Randall - Disruptive Influence

Hypothetically, there are two customer segments we are considering targeting for new product development. We haven’t really started searching for the product idea yet. First we’d like to decide which segment we’d prefer. Let’s suppose one customer segment is a small, hard to reach market that doesn’t have much money and the other customer segment is a huge market with deep pockets that’s easy to reach. Now imagine the product solution we eventually come up with for the smaller market revolutionizes the world of that customer but the best product idea we can come up with for the bigger market is just a so-so, nice-to-have.

Which market should we choose to pursue? It’s not even a contest. Go for whichever market you have a revolutionary product for. Even if that market doesn’t have much money and they are hard to reach. If the product rocks their world they’ll crawl over broken glass to get it. We can build on that passionate adoption and branch out to more products and even cross over to adjacent markets. Do you know how many people on food stamps somehow find the money to support a $1,000+/yr iPhone habit? Create the right product and customers will find the money. Create the right product and you don’t have to reach the customer, they will find you. Google has still never run a product ad.

Here’s what makes me crazy, that anyone spends days and weeks researching every detail of each market sub-segment, how addressable it is, what the average spend is, how it breaks down by employee count, and so on before they have any idea what the problem or product is. I have actually been in a product presentation where the first 40 minutes and dozens of slides were focused on this kind of hyper-detailed, obsessive-compulsive, analytical navel gazing. I’m sitting there still clueless as to what the customer problem is or what the proposed product solution might be. Here is my message to my dear marketing friends,  “Please stop obsessing about market segments, spend and personas before you even have a clear vision of the product idea”. It’s not a bad thing to look into market size for maybe an hour or two. Just long enough to get a rough estimate that the market is reasonably sizable and then stop. Why? No matter how favorable we think one of these markets is over the other, the difference in response between a great product for an average market versus an average product for a great market will obliterate any difference between them. All this analysis is meaningless without a clearly defined problem and a product solution hypothesis. Seriously. As long as the market is remotely sizable, all that really matters is the depth of the customer’s problem and the unique value of the solution.

Great product concepts are rare. It’s not like we get to go outside in the storm and point our wand at the exact tree where we want lightning to strike. We don’t have the luxury of carving down our possibility space and dictating that we only want our product innovation to strike in this exact segment for this exact type of customer. It doesn’t work that way. If we are fortunate enough that the fickle gods of innovation choose to bless us with a great product solution for one of these markets, then that’s the market to pursue – even if it isn’t the one we intended to target.

Mark Randall - Disruptive Influence

Books
The Startup Owners Manual by Steve Blank
http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/0984999302
The first part of Steve’s previous book for free: http://www.scribd.com/doc/36002151/Four-Steps-to-Epiphany-by-Steve-Blank-PDF-excert
Steve Blank’s slide presentations that cover some of the material in the book: http://www.slideshare.net/sblank

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
http://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898

Running Lean by Ash Maurya
http://www.amazon.com/Running-Lean-Iterate-Plan-Works/dp/1449305172

Blogs
How to Build a Web Startup – Step-by-Step: http://steveblank.com/2011/09/22/how-to-build-a-web-startup-lean-launchpad-edition/
Great stuff: http://venturehacks.com/archives
Good entrepreneurial advice: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
Industry news: http://www.TechCrunch.com
Mr. Customer Development: http://steveblank.com/
Mr. Lean Startups, Eric Ries: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/
Incubator: http://blog.bootuplabs.com/
Marc Andreesen: http://blog.pmarca.com/
Sean Ellis: http://startup-marketing.com/
Dave McClure. Crazy… but smart crazy: http://500hats.typepad.com/greatest_hats/
Stanford Entrepreneur Club, lots of resources: http://www.gsbeclub.org/startup-resources
Lean Startup Mailing List: http://groups.google.com/group/lean-startup-circle
Ash Maurya: http://www.ashmaurya.com

Pitching to Investors

Venture Hack’s Pitching Book. A complete manual.   http://bit.ly/b1gSs1
Dave McClure’s presentation, Startup Viagra: http://slidesha.re/a1S3a7 http://www.scribd.com/doc/16362914/FAIL12-Ways-to-Blow-Your-Investor-Pitch

Mark Randall’s Presentation Slides (PDF)

Mark Randall - Disruptive Influence

Canon made a “brilliant mistake” with their 5D mkII camera unleashing a profitable market disruption. Now they’ve released the 5D mkIII and, unfortunately, they’ve “fixed” that mistake instead of building on it. Canon could learn a thing or two from Intel. Note: This my personal opinion and unrelated to my employer’s views. 

I’ve always loved Canon’s consumer DSLRs cameras, starting with the digital Rebel, arguably the first truly ‘consumer’ DSLR because it was priced under $1,000. Three and a half years ago Canon launched the 5D mkII, a new flagship camera in their mid-high end professional line. It sold for about $3,000 or nearly $4,000 with an included lens. Normally I would never have noticed this kind of camera. I was happy with the price and performance of cheaper DSLRs. But a few months after release the 5D mkII started generating a lot of buzz from video shooters and indie filmmakers. The camera included a video mode that was rather primitive but the camera’s still photography strengths, including the large 35mm imaging chip, low-light performance and high-quality interchangeable lenses made the imperfect video mode capable of some truly sensational results. You had to crawl over some pretty big flaws to get those results but there had never been anything like it anywhere near the 5D’s price point.

As great as the results could be with the 5D, the shortcomings in the video mode were serious. It could only shoot in auto mode which caused the camera to change brightness in the middle of a shot, the external audio input was nearly unusable due to high noise and the frame rate was wrong, 30fps instead of the film standard of 24 or even the video standard of 29.97. But what the camera could do was so appealing, clever users started working on the problems and came up with a variety of hacks and workarounds to solve the worst of the issues. With these tricks, indie filmmakers and adventurous hobbyists started shooting truly sensational scenes and posting them online. Canon noticed that sales were skyrocketing and thousands of requests were pouring in from users begging Canon to fix a few things with the camera to make it more suitable for video and films. A few months later Canon released a downloadable patch for the camera that allowed users to disable the auto mode, improved the audio recording and let users select 24fps. The day Canon released that update, I started shopping for my 5D.

I fell in love immediately. It was like shooting 16mm film from my days as a student. There were still some smaller annoyances with the camera but the big ones had been solved and it was awesome fun just shooting stuff for myself. The look of the footage was breathtaking. The great results had me spending more money buying lenses from Canon, adapters, filters, a viewfinder, shoulder rig, and much more. Over the course of two years I spent around six thousand dollars on my new “hobby” and more than four thousand of it went to Canon. I had previously been a low-end Canon customer buying the cheapest DSLRs and lenses. The 5D turned me into a cash cow for Canon. I wasn’t the only one. 5D cameras remained hard to get for over a year. Add-ons to make the 5D even better could be sold-out for months. At trade shows the booths showcasing tools and upgrades for DSLR video were packed. With the 5D, Canon launched an entire industry segment. It even had a new name “Cinemaphotography”.

The fascinating thing is this was all an accident. Canon has publicly stated they never intended the 5D for this purpose. The video mode wasn’t a primary feature. It was based on a request by the Associated Press. AP wanted to have their photographers start capturing little video clips to upload online to go along with the photos AP was already licensing to newspapers. Canon thought online video clips might be a nice extra feature to sell more 5Ds to professional still photographers. That’s why the audio was crappy, the frame rate was wrong and the auto mode couldn’t be turned off. It was a brilliant mistake that created a vibrant new market.

What led to this mistake? Companies typically try to maximize revenue by segmenting markets based on price and performance. Increasing performance has a linear relationship to increasing price and shrinking market size. Pricing this way is thought to maximize revenue. Except this common view can be wrong. The Canon 5D was probably part of an orderly revenue optimization plan crafted by Canon product managers. There were cameras in the Canon product line above the 5D and cameras below it. They all fell onto a roughly linear price/performance progression, at least for all the key features Canon thought users cared about, such as megapixels, still frames taken per second and low-light performance. To Canon, the 5D’s video mode was a minor feature that might attract a few more sales. This was actually true for Canon’s traditional market of professional still photographers and serious still photo hobbyists. For those customers the 5D’s features did fit right on the straight line. However, with the video mode Canon accidentally attracted customers from another market, the market of those doing (or interested in doing) film-like video production. These new users saw the 5D mkII on a very different price/performance graph. To these users the 5D was way over to the right on performance but very low on the price axis. That’s what got so many of these new customers so very excited. The 5D enabled us to do things we never expected and did it at a price low enough to actually “create” new customers where there had seemingly been none.

This is the danger of traditional market analysis. It can create the illusion of an orderly linear progression between value, price and market size. There are explosive unrealized opportunities lurking underneath these mistaken linear progressions. Smart business people can find and exploit them. I love it when one of these “accidents” happens because I like watching what the industry players do in the next generation. Do they learn from their brilliant mistake and keep forging ahead into undiscovered territory “off the line” or do they retreat back to the line for fear of not maximizing revenue?

Yesterday, Canon announced the 5D Mark III and it looks more like a retreat back to the standard price/performance line than a further leap into potentially explosive new markets. It certainly seems to be a nice camera and it’s an improvement over its predecessor in many ways but the improvements are evolutionary instead of revolutionary. I was hoping the Mark III would represent as much of an improvement for video shooters over its predecessor as the Mark II was over the Mark I. I began to suspect we might be disappointed last October when Canon announced the C300 camera, a $17,000 camera targeted directly at professional small film production. The C300 camera has many of the features I was hoping to see in the next 5D but Canon has instead decided to segment the market and charge a substantial premium for those features in new model. Even though they will sell far fewer units at this higher price, Canon’s spreadsheets must say they’ll net more total revenue. Maybe that will work, but I don’t think their market projections accurately reflect the number of new users the 5D mkII “created” by leaping much farther ahead than the typical product generation. With the next generation returning to a more normal-sized step, will those customers created by the leap begin to fade back to wherever they came from? In my next upgrade cycle I think I’ll be returning to the more affordable DSLRs under $1,000. The latest versions have already gained much of the 5D mkII’s original leap through product line trickle down. To keep me, and I suspect many thousands of others, buying at the higher 5D price point, Canon needed to follow the original leap forward with another leap instead of a normal step.

It’s unfortunate because I think Canon had an opportunity to keep the market expansion rolling. Many of the features in today’s cameras are not driven by hard costs such as labor and materials but rather by amortized IP costs which are relatively arbitrary. I suspect the DIGIC processing chip in the new 5D mkIII could have delivered more functionality than it does. For example, 60fps at 1080p resolution is something the $17,000 C300 can do. The new 5D mkIII delivers 60fps only at 720p resolution. It’s a step up over the mkII which couldn’t do 60fps at all but other Canon DSLRs under $1,000 have had 60fps at 720p for nearly two years. An even bolder feature would have been to give 4:2:2 color space and compressed RAW files to the 5D mkIII. That would have made the 5D mkIII as disruptive as the 5D mkII was. What Canon eventually decided to do isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just the conservative approach. It’s safe but unlikely to yield exciting market shifts that create new customers and windfall profits.

In my startups we made these kind of happy mistakes quite a bit. That’s why startups can be so exciting. They generally don’t have an existing business to protect and can’t afford expensive market research reports predicting market sizes. While interesting, these pricey research reports are often wrong because they only extrapolate the past into the future. They invariably miss showing opportunities for disruption. I found out after we launched the Snappy Video Snapshot the market research reports had said the worldwide market for video capture peripherals was only 5,000 units a year. It’s a good thing we couldn’t afford those research reports because we sold over a million Snappys.The same thing happened with Trinity and with the Video Toaster. They were hugely disruptive to the existing industry because they delivered so much value at a radically lower price. To be sure, there were trade-offs made to reach breakthrough price points but we tried to make clever trade-offs users like us would be willing to live with. Some users will accept certain shortcomings or quirks in exchange for awesome capabilities in other areas. No serious market analyst would ever have predicted the non-professional Canon 5D mkII, with all it’s workarounds and shortcomings, would be used to shoot last week’s #1 national box office motion picture “Act of Valor”.

Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard business school, calls these users “overshot customers”. These are potential customers who don’t appear in market research because they aren’t in the market. Yet, if an acceptable mix of features are presented at the right price they’ll buy even if those features come with some severe limitations. I’m sure some at Canon think all those extra 5D customers just appeared out of nowhere. They weren’t in anyone’s survey or research report. How many other overshot customers are available to be discovered and monetized with a unique, maybe even counter-intuitive, set of features and limitations?

In the early Video Toaster days, I was at an industry trade show in New York. We were attracting huge crowds with a radically priced product that had remarkable capabilities mixed with some rather arcane limitations. We were taking a lot of orders but hadn’t shipped yet. We were already starting to freak out the big players because it looked like we might disrupt their carefully modeled market and perfectly straight price/performance lines. A senior exec from Sony offered to take a few of us out to dinner after the show. It was a fun dinner and he was a nice guy full of industry info. After dinner he hired a horse drawn carriage to take all of us around central park on the way back to the hotel. During the ride he finally got to the question I think he’d been working up to all night. He asked me, “The market for video switchers and effects devices is pretty small. What happens when everyone in the market has already bought your product and there’s no one left to sell to? Won’t you have left a lot of money on the table?” I asked him how big he thought the total market was for all these products, his and all his competitors combined. He gave me a number. I smiled a bit when I told him, “We already have more pre-orders than that”. Clearly, his best market research was wildly wrong.

Most research does “top down” market sizing which is basically all competitors sales combined. That’s what the research reports usually assemble either by polling manufacturers, resellers or component vendors. Even the forward-looking future predictions are created by asking the people currently buying today’s product how many they think they’ll buy in the future. The researchers might take that number and add the industry’s historical growth rate and then adjust a bit based on projections for the overall economy. Do you see what’s broken with that? Explosive growth happens when you find a way to ignite the people that aren’t buying today, who aren’t even shopping in the category today. That certainly describes me and the 5D mkII.

Intel created a similar situation several years ago with a Pentium processor called the Celeron 300A. This particular Celeron chip was a relatively low-end processor but a unique and accidental combination of design and fabrication technology allowed savvy users to run the chip at a much faster clock rate than specified. The hack required some tricky modifications to enable but the speed increases were stunning. The word started spreading among hobbyists and soon some motherboard manufacturers started making motherboards that had the required modifications built in. This unleashed an explosive market expansion. The Celeron 300a was the coolest thing in the tech world. Many users were running the 300Mhz chip at 450Mhz and enjoying far higher performance for the same price. In the following generations Intel locked down some of the ways that users were overclocking the chips but often left a kind of “bonus” performance gain for savvy users willing to do a little extra tweaking and run their computer outside official specs. Intel experimented with what these users were willing to pay and whether it hurt the sales of their more expensive processors. They found that most businesses didn’t want to run their machines out of spec, even if it had no downsides. There were also non-hobbyist consumers that would just buy whatever standard PC Dell or HP had on offer. But there was a growing market of “enthusiast” users that loved tweaking their machines and making them better. This was unexpected. To their credit, Intel didn’t let this “accidental learning” go to waste. They started to cater to this market selling unlocked, overclockable processors for a bit more than the standard processors. This accidentally discovered enthusiast segment is now so significant Intel makes a class of chips just for them. It’s a lesson that Canon might do well to study before the benefits of the 5D mkII “brilliant mistake” dissipate.

Mark Randall - Disruptive Influence

Ever wonder why Amazon can’t offer a cheaper bundle including print, audio & e-book versions? Is it accountants vs. book lovers? Amazon is good at figuring out what we want before we even know it. That’s why I like the company. So it stands out when they miss an opportunity. I buy a lot of books from Amazon. I also buy audiobooks from their Audible division which I listen to while driving. Sometimes I’m torn between buying the printed version of the book, an e-book or an audiobook. They are all ideally suited for different things. When actually reading, I prefer a printed book if it’s a title I think I’ll want to keep, refer to or possibly loan out. If it’s typical Tom Clancy long-flight fodder, then I prefer it as an e-book since longevity, shelveability and loanability are trumped by portability. If I have some drive time coming up, I’ll want to go for the audiobook.

But what if I have a book like Matt Ridley’s excellent Rational Optimist sitting in my Amazon shopping cart? This is a book I’ll definitely want to shelve, refer to and loan out. If I’ve got a two hour drive tomorrow and a cross country flight the next day, I’m confronted with a lousy choice. It seems wasteful to pay full price for the same book three times over. Yet I’d be happy to pay something more to have e-book portability, print book longevity and audiobook convenience. This is a perfect opportunity for Amazon to up sell me. There are upsides for Amazon beyond more revenue. Since I have the electronic copy available immediately as a download, I don’t care if they save money by shipping the printed copy to me slow-boat, instead of second-day. Since I’ll have the printed copy for long-term reference I don’t care if they restrict the digital copy to not be transferable to other devices. This would also open opportunities to implement cross-platform features further solidifying Amazon’s position, such as the ability to pause the audiobook when I drive up to the hotel and have the e-book open up to the correct page later that night in my hotel room.

It just makes so much sense. Let’s take a real scenario. One of the many e-books now sitting in my Amazon “buy it later pile” sells for $12.99. The printed copy costs $13.02 delivered second-day (yes, I know, it makes no sense – e-books are overpriced). The audiobook download costs roughly $15, depending on which plan you have. That’s a total of $41. If Amazon offered to bundle up two versions of the same $12 book for $20, I’d buy the bundle most of the time – an 80% increase in revenue. If all three versions cost $25, I’d find it hard to resist. Amazon would be turning a $12-$15 sale into a $25 sale by bundling versions of the exact same book. This wouldn’t cannibalize sales because the customer is unlikely to have ever bought the other versions separately. That’s a win for the customer, a win for Amazon and a win for the author.

Having such a capability would also enable other revenue generating opportunities such as discounted follow-on sales. There are some books that I’ve bought in one form but after having them realize I wish I’d bought them in another form. A good example is Daniel Kahneman’s excellent Thinking, Fast and Slow. I bought this as an audiobook but stopped listening to it a little more than half way through. It’s a great book but it’s got some pretty deep, densely packed scientific concepts. After listening, I realized I should have bought the print version to fully absorb the material. Interestingly, Amazon’s Audible app on my phone knows that I listened to nearly six hours of this book quite avidly and then stopped. Yet it’s still sitting there in my playlist. If Amazon were to hit me with an offer to buy either the e-book or the printed book for a deal, they’d likely have a sale.

The frustrating thing is that I’ll bet there are folks at Amazon who know all this, agree completely and would love to start pleasing customers and earning more revenue this way. But they can’t and I can guess the reason why. The people responsible for publishing the printed book, the e-book and the audiobook are from different divisions in the publishing company. Their bonus depends on the revenue and profitability that their version of the book generates. The fact that the publisher and author stand to net more revenue overall from bundling doesn’t matter to them. Even if gross revenue is higher for each division, apportioning the revenue between divisions means that someone will gain and someone will lose profit margin. Fundamentally, the issue is that content publishers have double vision. Sometimes they want to view the content they publish as a license to consume, such as when they would like to prevent you from loaning or reselling the content you bought. Other times they want to view the content they publish as merely selling the media the content is on, such as when you would like access to the content on different devices or, back in the day, when your CD got scratched. Trying to recast their relationship with content consumers in this way might be beneficial in the short-term but I think it reduces the publisher’s long-term revenue potential.

Content publishers generally perform a worthy function as long as they aggregate valuable content, serve consumers and maximize income for authors. When they stop doing that effectively, I think it opens an opportunity for Amazon. Amazon already publishes books themselves either in e-book form or through their low-volume, on-demand printing division. The problem is that the vast majority of these indie titles aren’t available as audiobooks or as high-volume, lower-cost printed books. That’s where the cross-media up sell opportunity is waiting.

Mark Randall - Disruptive Influence

My creativity does not need to be exercised.

Want to kick off your meeting with “a fun little creativity exercise”? Don’t. Please. You seem nice, so stop now before the love is gone.

Yesterday I was in a meeting that started this way and it reminded me I need to write this letter to all meeting organizers. If you feel the same, you can use my letter too.

Yesterday’s meeting began with an outside consultant brought in to “facilitate the process”. Process? Warning bells started going off in my head. The team that called this meeting is working on a hard problem. They invited a small group of creative thinkers from across the company to this meeting to help. It’s an interesting problem. It’s also a high value problem. I accepted the meeting invite because I want to help this team succeed. I like hard problems. I like helping.

But now this nice lady wants to kick things off with “a fun little creativity exercise”. I look around the room. There are some pretty damn sharp business ninjas assembled here. Serious heavy hitters with Costco family-sized “slam-dunk your problem with a kick-ass creative solution” skills. Is a “creativity exercise” really necessary? Creative problem solving is what these people do. All day, every day. If this was a pick-up basketball game and we’d invited the L.A. Lakers, would this lady feel the need to organize a “fun little basketball exercise” to kick things off? Maybe a quick game of horse to set the mood? Or would she maybe figure Kobe and the boys already have their own exercises and processes along with the experience to know when to apply them? Here’s the rest of my heartfelt love letter to all meeting organizers:

In thousands of meetings over a period of decades I’ve seen hundreds of these “fun little warm-ups” inflicted on defenseless participants by well-meaning meeting organizers. In my opinion, these exercises and ice-breakers are neither productive nor fun for most attendees. We shift uncomfortably in our seats, glance awkwardly at each other and resign ourselves to building team empathy through shared suffering. Most importantly, in my experience none of these exercises has ever contributed a scintilla of value to any meeting. Not one. Ever.

Don’t get me wrong. We all appreciate your efforts in organizing this meeting, setting an agenda and especially securing a decent selection of bagels. Here’s the thing you need to understand. Some of us came to your meeting because we actually want to help you solve this hard problem. This may seem weird to you but some people in the room think wrestling that hairy problem to the ground IS the fun part. It doesn’t need to be dressed up, sugar-coated or slowly worked-up-to.

Your attempt at injecting fun is only delaying the real fun from starting. Your effort to facilitate process may actually be interfering with our natural processes. That you feel the need to do this, says two things. First, it signals your opinion of this group’s un-facilitated abilities, which makes us wonder why we were invited. And it tells us that YOU don’t think this meeting will be engaging without the help of some superfluous fluff. That’s okay. There may even be other attendees that would rather be doing a warm-up exercise with you than focusing every available moment on the hard business problem at hand. You guys should go do that. Somewhere else. You can even take the bagels.

No matter how much you exercise, warm-up or team-build them, the attendees that truly need or want such things probably aren’t the ones who are going to get you where you want to go. Does the group you’ve assembled really need this kind of distraction before they can meet today’s challenge? Are they are otherwise incapable of comprehending the problem, parsing the data, self-organizing a framework, integrating feedback and iterating to a solution? If so, I would suggest you’ve invited the wrong people. The folks with the skills and passionate desire to rock your problem don’t need to be facilitated, aligned or motivated. We just need you to succinctly articulate the objective, frame the context, then stop wasting the minutes left on the clock and get the hell out of our way. Please.

Mark Randall - Disruptive Influence

Our iPad toddler at 18 months

Done wrong, an iPad can be cerebral junk food to your child. Done right, it’s a magical looking glass into a world of discovery. Our family had to experiment on our own offspring. We didn’t have a choice. There are no scientific studies on whether iPad usage accelerates or impedes child development. Until the science is done, our family (and perhaps yours) are the cutting edge of research. My 2 1/2 year old has used an iPad for nearly two years. We monitored what worked and what didn’t; making adjustments on the way. We’ve learned a lot. It boils down to five principles that can make all the difference.
The 5 Rules

1. Tablets are for two

When a toddler uses an iPad you must be there observing and interacting the entire time. This is hard. Tablets are the best electronic babysitters ever invented. A child might sit there lost in the “10-inch gaze” for days. This tempts weary caregivers to take a much needed break. Don’t. Tablet time = together time.

The results of our real-world experience are clear: Tablet time alone yields poor results, even with the best educational apps. However, with an engaged parent alongside, even a non-educational game can become a wonderful learning experience. The other day we were playing Angry Birds together and saw an intro scene of the pigs putting on an old-style Japanese outdoor play. This triggered a discussion about kabuki theater, what emotions the masks represent and how an alternate tonal scale can make different sounding music. That can’t happen if you’re not there.

2. The iPad should be a launch pad

Rubber band-powered bird launcher

The tablet can be perceived by a toddler as their highest value toy. Don’t let that happen. Just because it costs a lot, doesn’t make it valuable. In fact, without you, it’s worthless. To toddlers, an iPad by itself is not educational. Think of it like a jump rope or piece of chalk. It’s not an activity, it enables activities you share with your child. As neat as it is, no iPad will ever be as educational or meaningful as interacting with you.

Connect the virtual with the visceral. Look for opportunities to turn on-screen iPad experiences into shared experiences in the physical world. For instance, my daughter was struggling a bit with those Angry kabuki Birds. Launching the bird from the slingshot just wasn’t intuitive. The knack of angling the slingshot farther down to make the bird shoot higher up on the other side was eluding her. Not surprising since she’s never seen a real slingshot. So last week we made a slingshot “bird launcher” out of scrap wood and rubber bands. We drew pig faces on paper cups and stacked them over plastic eggs. Targeting the tower of pig cups with a rubber band-launched bird toy was awesome fun. The physics of angling the rubber bands? Intuitive. Creating the bird launcher with dad? Priceless.

3. Be as picky about apps as you are babysitters

Who do you trust? I know my wife isn’t alone in subjecting potential babysitters to a background investigation worthy of the FBI. So, why would any iPad parent ‘drive-by download’ random education apps based on a couple of six word user reviews and a pretty icon? There are tons of kid apps. Most of them suck. Call me crazy, but maybe parents should spend as much time vetting their kid’s iPad apps as they do reading labels on the kid’s food. 

The skills some educational apps target are about as relevant to our toddler’s development as teaching her E=MC². Forget about what seems educational and focus on the skills your child actually needs to develop today. For example, you might be focusing on motor skills one week and spatial reasoning the next. Other skills may include sequencing, patience, identifying emotions and short-term working memory. Based on your current objective, it’s possible that Angry Birds could be more developmentally appropriate for your child than an educational alphabet game. Only you can make that judgement. Make the most informed choice you can, then track the results. Is the targeted skill being developed? Is competency increasing? If not, then move on. You want to fit the app to the child’s level, not the other way around.

We’ve had great educational success with some non-educational games. For example, with active parental participation, Cut the Rope can teach sequencing and those Angry Birds can build motor coordination and spatial reasoning. We’ve also had good success with iPad puzzle games. Some of them ‘snap’ the pieces into position when dropped close to the correct location. This lets our daughter solve the pattern matching part of a jigsaw puzzle before her motor skills are developed enough to place the physical pieces.

4. Bring your child’s world into the iPad

Flash cards of her own things

One of the best apps we ever bought was a $.99 flash card program. It came with the usual stock photos of animals and random things but it had one feature that was awesome. The user could choose their own images and sound files. I took pictures of things in my daughter’s life such as her favorite toys, clothes, even photos we took of animals at the local zoo and made a flashcard slideshow. Each time she tapped the screen it would show another image of something that was already real to her and she’d hear my voice saying its name. At nine months old, this was a revelation to her and she loved it. 

5. Keep it short. Keep it fun! 

Some educational apps have a ‘drilling’ approach. We avoid those. While formal education may require some work, learning should always be fun. There will be plenty of time for study and drilling in a few years. If my daughter gets frustrated, or I find myself “over coaching” her, it’s time to move on to another activity away from the screen.

At first we weren’t sure how long iPad play sessions should last. After much experimentation here’s what’s working for us. We let our daughter choose when to initiate iPad play and have been surprised that she doesn’t want it every day. Sometimes she’ll go without touching the iPad for a week or more. Once she’s playing, she usually starts losing interest after 15 or 20 minutes. The longest I’ve seen her stay interested was about 30 minutes. It’s rare that she asks for another iPad session in the same day. If she does, we just tell her that we’ve already done that today and we can do it again tomorrow if she’d like. As always, it’s best to set expectations up front. When starting a session we remind her how long the session will last and what’s going to happen after we’re done. “Let’s play with the iPad for about 20 minutes and then go to the park”. This helps smooth transitions from one activity to the next. For us the iPad is now just another addition to our parenting toolbox; next to all the other tools, techniques and activities we use to shape the experiences from which our daughter learns and grows.

What do you think? Do you have any tablet and toddler tips or tricks? We’re all figuring this out together.

Mark Randall - Disruptive Influence

My toddler with iPad at 18 months

Is that iPad making your kid smarter or dumber? For the moment, no one really knows. Impassioned opinions are readily available on both sides but rigorous scientific studies have yet to be published. Are tablets+kids our generation’s developmental thalidomide or merely another fluoride, beneficial in measured doses but harmful when free-based? Today’s kids are guinea pigs in a massive uncontrolled experiment to find out and I worry about my toddler. I love technology. I believe in the ability of tech to empower individuals, connect communities and unite our species. I believe this deeply. Yet I would turn into a born again Luddite in a heartbeat if I thought technology was harming my child. Two things I care deeply about appear to be in mortal conflict and I need an actionable answer NOW.

There is a study, “Young Children, Apps & iPad” (pdf), funded by the Department of Education’s Ready to Learn initiative, which looked at kids 2 to 8 years old and their engagement with iPads. Read into the study though, and you’ll discover it was based on briefly interviewing and observing 60 kids over a very short period of time. It contains such insightful findings as, “Children’s initial reaction to touch screen devices is characterized by fascination and immediate engagement”. Yes, the same could be said of Twinkies, but it doesn’t mean Twinkies are beneficial. In short, there is little in the study that will be surprising, or even informative, to anyone that’s spent much time with kids and tablets. This study can shed a little light on how kids engage with tablets but tells us nothing about whether their development is being stunted or accelerated.

In the other camp, we have the semi-luddites. The best of the bunch may be the book, Simplicity Parenting, which proposes simplifying your child’s life. A central tenet is cutting exposure to technology and media. Much of the advice seems commonsensical and it turns out our family is already doing most of it. Keeping a consistent schedule, cutting the number of toys and more imaginative play are good but banning tablets? Is that going to far? While it “seems” to make sense, and one may certainly feel superior for enforcing a zero tolerance tablet policy. Is it actually right? There’s no empirical data yet to support that conclusion.

Are we guilty of slapping our preconceived notions of “proper education” onto a generation that will live in a world vastly different than today’s? Conventional wisdom from educational groups like HeadStart and First 5 will say there’s little else as good for your child as sitting down with them and reading a pulp and glue book. Intuitively this seems correct, yet the contrarian in me imagines Johannes Guttenberg’s kids, around the year 1450 or so, being caught up in a debate about these new-fangled printed books being educationally inferior to existing hand-scribed parchment. While the things we define today as tablets may not exist in the future our kids will occupy, they will certainly read almost exclusively from electronic media. Reading from a static page incapable of moving, reacting and interacting with the reader will seem as alien to them as movies on shiny discs. Is tablet-based interactive media simply the literacy of their era? I believe that iPads can be good for our kids but it’s essential we apply this technology in the right ways.

< continued in part 2: 5 Rules for iPads & Toddlers >

Mark Randall - Disruptive Influence