Creative Idea Powerhouse

Due to recent project, I need to do a research on the Japanese giant e-Commerce Rakuten Inc. Its 2007 reporting net sales reached US$1.76 billion and Net Profit of US$304million (17.2% of Net Sales). It has total of 43.9million members under Rakuten Group (which 35.9million are from Malls business); and 22,396 merchants (stores). Under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Mr. Hiroshi Mikitani, the company has involves itself into multiple businesses such as Credit Card & Payment, Portal and Media, Telco, Securities and Travel industries.

I have gathered a short summary about this company to share with the entreprenuers in Malaysia:

5 secrets of Mr. Hiroshi’s Rakuten Success
1. Get things done (Kaizan concept)- continue learning and improvement from day to day – also the secret of Toyota Motors
2. Complete Professionalism- be the professional, the best in what you do in your industry – Jack Welch GE’s spirit
3. Hypothesize, Execute, Verify & Incorporate – visualize, and focus, then execute and corrective action
4. Customer satisfaction maximization - easy to say by many companies, even large corporations but when come to implementation, I still see many local companies take customers as secondary priority, where I have many bad experience on this.
5. Speed!, speed!! & speed!!! – this personally give me a big motivation to get onto action rather than plan plan plan….

Of course, the company itself also equip with most of the attributes to be a successful tech & web company, good working environment, free foods, continue learning & improvement culture,  and I have to admit that the most important thing over this is that they are putting customer as the first and most important priority all the time. They even have their Rakuten University to help customer to improve their e-commerce store, and a team of e-marketing experts to provide instant support and help when needed. Ask back our local website builder company, how many really putting the efforts on this? Time to change..

I will soon put up my whole paper about this company to share with you, meanwhile email me if you need to find out additional information about this company, or you have some insightful information to share with me drop me msg at eddie at ciph dot biz.

Rakuten.co.jp users come from these countries:
Japan95.1%
China2.6%
United States0.5%
South Korea0.3%
Taiwan0.2%

Have you ever think that the children will still learning A for Apple, B for Boy, C for Cat in next five years or it will have some changes for our tomorrow kids? Here I have compile a new ABC Chart to share and enjoyz while check-in yourself if how many ABCs you know from this chart?

Our project was finally accepted by the evaluation meeting, a big thanks for the evaluation team for their support, courage and believe in our idea . The next door keeper will be the approval committee formed by the panel from large corporations. The team members we met previously was from SMIDEC, also the MD of MDeC, and some senior members from MOSTI, TeAm and so on. Conclusion, they all are really the door keepers for the PreSeed fund. To sell the idea to them, I think the mistake I made previously was because I failed to speak in their language (a big failure for my presentation is not fast enough to understand the background of the audience, and speak at the tone of their background and culture …)

One lucky thing is that, I have been through this meeting, and have learn to able to speak at their level of understanding for technology, and to sell to them in this coming approval meeting, which the date of meeting is yet to confirm. Well, it is easy to understand as it is year end right now and most of the people are in busy schedule and it will be some how difficult to get all these senior members to be free at same time, and that’s the reason why it is more precious for us to make sure we don’t go in and waste their time … hopefully I’m not. Good luck to all the Preseed applicants~!

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="240" caption="Ideo Method Cards"][/caption]

One of the coolest stuff I always dream to have is the IDEO Method Cards published by IDEO, the powerhouse of creativity and design thinking leading by Tim Brown. Too bad it only accept orders from online and the shipping cost to Malaysia costed the same as the price of the deck itself, which means I have to pay double in order for me to get this US$49 + US$50 shipping.

THis is the talk given by Tim Brown, the key icon for the most creative house on earth, IDEO.
Fun play = creativity ~!
Enjoy!~