The Golden Egg, Innovit’s Entrepreneurship Competition ended the other day with the following winners:

In third place we saw Nude Magazine, A great new Icelandic online fashion magazine and in first place where ReMake Electric, saving you loads of money and making your house safer by bringing us the next generation of electric safety. Unfortunately not everybody can get the great runner-up, this years runner up was the Transmit Team with Brand Asset management program Brand Capital. I’m looking forward to the Beta!

I was asked to talk my experience during the last two years and share my thoughts on what we thought was important in starting a startup. 

The following five points are things that I believe have helped us a lot;

1. Talk.

Whenever you get the chance, talk about your idea with all the enthusism you’ve got. You will get better at explaining your ideas, get great advice about your next steps and people will gladly introduce you to people who can help you.

2. Speed.

Do everything as fast as you can and in as little time as you can. Build a prototype and throw it out there to get feedback. Fix it as fast as you can and iterate. You should always have something new to say to the people asking you, especially if they are investors, they love progress.

3. Honesty.

Although you want to hype your idea or product, building to high expectations is never, ever, a good thing. You should be very proud of the what you got today and talk very highly of those things.

4. Team.

When everything is going great, you will run out of time and will need more talent to join you. When you get to that point, hire people that are way smarter then you. 

5. Have Fun

Starting a company is just about the most difficult thing I can think of. It’s going to take way more time then you can ever imagine. So you’ve got to have some fun while doing so. 

This is translated from Icelandic. This is also just a short recap. I hoping to spend some more time on writing this. 

I’ve been getting loads of questions about the Ministry of Ideas. It recently opened it’s portal to English speakers so I’ll try to explain it a bit in this post.

A few weeks after this small economic thing we had in Iceland one of our serial entrepreneurs, Guðjón Már, called a group of peers and asked them to meet at a local pub. We talked about all the great things that could come of this and decided to meet weekly, the topics for each meetup where to be posted at our facebook page.

This was the beginning of the Ministry of Ideas. A think tank focusing on the brighter side of a total economic meltdown. A grassroot organization set up to communicate knowledge and facilitate networking among Icelandic entrepreneurs. Operating without any constraints, strings to financiers or favors to politicians.

During this past year the Ministry has exceeded everyones expectations, with loads of powerful stuff originated within, and spun of to make the world, starting with Iceland, just a little bit better.  Those project include;

• An TEDxReykjavik event bringing great Icelandic minds together for some talks.
• Society Initiative (Samfélagið Frumkvæði). An online meeting place for A) Ideas B) Location and C) Knowledge.
• A one pager to the leaders of the G20 nations. Outlining how Iceland is the perfect country for prototyping a more sustainable world. It got Obama to say; “let’s check Iceland out”
• House of Ideas. The mission is to create 500 new jobs in two years. The University of Reykjavik and the Academy of Arts are running the show. So far so great!
• Ministry of Ideas dot is - Getting great ideas into the right channels for execution. I’ll explain in more detail:

The Ministry of Ideas dot is

It’s purpose is to get the truckloads of great ideas in front of the right people, and make them happen!

You simply post your idea, it’s as simple as posting a new status on Twitter or Facebook. Then your idea gets it’s own life, people can agree or disagree, they can enter arguments or counter-arguements against it. People can even vote arguments helpful, or not. The purpose here is to bring the discussion up to a greater level. Have people discuss it from both sides and let newcomers make up their own mind.

On to the next great bit of The Ministries Garden, or whatever a thing like this is called, Social-voting?… The active users, those who take part in the discussions, vote on ideas and comment, get ‘Karma-Points’, a made up quantity that is used to get a better idea about who cares the most and has the most to say about certain topics.

Once a week, the most prominent ideas get a chance to be featured in a radio talk show in front of about 40% of the nation. Thais gets more people excited, or worried, about the idea and brings another wave of civilized discussion. When ideas are thoroughly though out, they are brought to a dicision maker. If it’s an idea on schools, the gyus with the most related ‘Karma-Points’ get an hour long meeting with the Minister of Education.

If it’s an idea about creating a Start-up competition that ends with an prototype (but not a business plan) it’s brought to the attention af a VC, an incubator and maybe a Ministry. And that, me deer friends is exactly what happend today!

Prototyping

An idea i posted only 7 weeks ago gained great traction and is now in the hands of Auður Capital, who runs BJÖRK VC. Innovit, Innovation and Enrepreneurship Center and the Minister of Industry.

Here’s a short video where I explain the concept in Icelandic.

If you look at the bigger picture here it’s not that we have a voting system. Democracy is, hopefully, not new to most of us. It’s the process and getting great ideas in front of those who can make it happen.

A great friend and mentor, Andri Heiðar Kristinsson founder and CEO of Innovt, is currently in Dubai attending the Global Entrepreneurship Congress. It’s a brilliant gathering of the entrepreneur ecosystem from around the world. Topics included raising the awareness levels among a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Arab world.

I was booked for another conference in San Fransisco so I didn’t get a change to attend this one. However I had a small role in their opening ceremony via video. A few months back Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson and I created a short video explaining the Global Entrepreneurship Week.

I have a great opportunity to talk to a great audience at the University of Iceland about our experience at One Young World. Here is the prezi!

OYW on Prezi

I just arrived from the One Young World Summit where young people from all over the world came together to discuss the worlds problems in search of better ways. I’m truly thankful for the chance to attend this conference, about 1000 delegates where chosen from over 15.000 who applied.

Kofi Annan, Archbishup Desmund Tutu, Boris Jonson, Oscar Morales, Bob Geldof, John Kerry, Clarence Seedorf, Wyclef Jean and HRH Haakon of Norway where among the councellors of One Young World and listend to our Ideas.

I talked about the following points:

• In Iceland we hve this small economic thing
• Leave us alone and well take our icy weather back
• I would rather want to focus on the brighter side of a complete economic meltdown
• A few weeks after the economic downturn we founded the Ministry of Ideas
• Gathering great ideas and finding the right channels for execution and implementation
• The National Assembly with .5% of icelanders in a single room, what matters?
• Iceland as a country for prototypng a sustainable society
• Baracks Obama interest on our One Pager!
• How can we start Ministries of Ideas all over our ONE world?

Overall a great experience!

Andrés Jónsson invited me to talk at a lunch meeting at the Public Relations association of Iceland. Andrés is currently one of the only PR guys in Iceland that gets it - I truly hope he’ll be able to open up more Icelandic eyes to the world of social media

My talk was on how Icelandic companies where using social media and and how that has been rapidly changing over the past few months. However, I feel that we can change this a whole lot faster!  I also showed them our new product, Vaktarinn, and got a feeling that most of them would give it a spin.

PS. I ordered “loku”, which i thought was a sandwich but turned out to be some kind of marginally good fish, can’t say I recommend it.

The University of Iceland has, from the beginning of CLARA, always been helpful! We received one of our first grants from the Rector’s Fund and our first office space at Innovit was inside the University.

Therefore it has always been great to go back there and talk about our venture with the students.

I talked about our long and hard journey from the the classroom to the founding of our company to today. With great emphasis on openness! Openness it has helped us get great input, raise awareness and get people so interested our idea that they quit their “high-salery/low-fun” job and join our exciting adventures!

I had the privalge of working with the Kaufman foundation to help with the Global Entrepreneurship Week

For one week, millions of young people around the world join a growing movement of entrepreneurial people, to generate new ideas and to seek better ways of doing things. Countries across six continents come together to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, an initiative to inspire young people to embrace innovation, imagination and creativity. To think big. To turn their ideas into reality. To make their mark.

Hillary Clinton, Richard Branson and I made a short video explaining the concept: 

Here are my slides (or more precisly my Prezi) at the 999 Social Media Conference:

I talked about three things;

1) Some trends we have noticed in the change of the how we look at marketing. How the content creation and media is going from the mass media to us, how companies should involve their customers in a conversation instead of looking at them as an audience listening to there message. Then a few words about the differences between the traditional Market Research and the way of Listening.

2) A few do’s and dont’s in a story form. The Dell Hell story as the first huge example of how not to do things and the story of how Scott Monty used is Jedi Social Skills to extinsh a potential PR fiasco for Ford

3) Finally a case study from the first Icelandic company to systematically listened to the online discussion: news, blogs, comments and forums. A prime example about how to listen there customers thoughts and worries.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

The definitions of a what a brand is are endless.

I asked this question in a lecture at the University of Reykjavik

I have a feeling that a brand is the collective of what people think about a brand, how people feel about a brand and what people say about a brand. And notice, this explanation doesn’t include the marketing director or brand managers, nor what he writes in the brand statement or any presentations.

How do you define a brand?