How much could you make with $5 and 2 hours?
Story from Tina Sellig (Stanford Technology Ventures Program)
She gave an envelope with five dollars of “seed funding” and told to all the teams they could spend as much time as they wanted planning, but only 2 hours of execution time.
On average the teams made $600. How did they do this? Here’s a clue: the teams that made the most money didn’t use the five dollars at all. They realised that focusing on the money actually framed the problem way too tightly. They decided to reinterpret the problem more broadly: What can we do to make money if we start with absolutely nothing?
One of the teams identified a problem common to a lot of college towns—the frustratingly long lines at popular restaurants on Saturday night. The team decided to help those people who didn’t want to wait in line. They paired off and booked reservations at several restaurants. As the times for their reservations approached, they sold each reservation for up to twenty dollars to customers who were happy to avoid a long wait.
The Winning Team: their insight was that their most precious resource was their three- minute presentation time on Monday. They decided to sell it to a company that wanted to recruit the students in the class. The team created a three-minute “commercial” for that company and showed it to the students during the time they would have presented what they had done the prior week. This was brilliant. They recognised that they had a fabulously valuable asset—that others didn’t even notice—just waiting to be mined."
Don't let the resources constrain your thinking.
source credit: Entrepreneur Inspiration.