WATISIT?

A-players: 100% red-flag for any (French) firm (found of mixing french and english) trying to recruit you. As High achievers, it hints for not so sane work environment

Cognitive bias: mental shortcuts our brain uses to prevent saturation or Decision fatigue. It has a direct impact on our decision making, which people often perceive as negative. (More on the topic here)

Decision fatigue: State of exhaustion experienced by the brain after making too much decisions (we take up to 35000 decisions a day). Cognitive biaises are here to prevent this 

Design: In this blog design refers to a methodology used by … designers. Strongly problem and user oriented, design inspired the famous “design thinking” movement

Design Thinking: Borrowing from designers a user-centric analytic position, Design Thinking is a methodology divided in four phases (Discover / Define / Develop / Deliver). As it has become the new normal when leading innovation projects, Design Thinking is now often discredited. More here

Disruptive Innovation: Contrary to Incremental Innovation, disruptive innovation means the product / service changes the paradigm (new market, new targeting, new communication plan, etc.). We tend to overuse the word « disrupting » in our everyday language, which undermines its reality. In fact, disruptive innovations happen very scarcely Example: Netflix disrupted the way we consume video content and internet revolutioned our relationship to the world

Emotional Intelligence: Often written as EI, Emotional Intelligence is the capacity to identify, canalize, and guide emotions (whether it’s your or your pairs’). 

Energiser: Short moment at the beginning to gather the crowd and start focusing as a group. Example: a giant shi-fu-mi

FabLab: Also known as MakersLab or Fabrication Space, a FabLab is a place where prototyping happens. Either firm-owned, educational or associative FabLabs come in many shades

Facilitation: The ability to guide people through a certain methodology. If often implies preparing a workshop / event, gathering crowds / etc. More here

High achievers: see A-players

Hard skill: in opposition to soft-skill, refers to the technical (or mesurable) skills needed to operate a certain task/job. This is mainly what schools & diplomas help us acquire throughout our studies and validate with a diploma

Holacracy: Famously adopted by Zappos, holacracy is a new organisational governance relying on collective intelligence, small teams and autonomy rather than a strict top-down hierarchy.

Innovation Hub: A place  gathering different innovation actors. By creating new synergies, those places sprout, nurture and launch new concepts answering today’s challenges

Incremental Innovation: In opposition to Disruptive Innovation, incremental innovation hints for little fixes on a product / service. In other words, its an empiric process.Example: the constant updates we have to do on our electronic devices is an incremental innovation. User feedback is heard and functionalities corrected

Minimum Viable Audience: First conceptualised by Seth Godin, this asks the question of « what’s the smallest audience you can have that will keep your business afloat? »

Minimum Viable Brand (MVB): Hints at the least costly in time / money / effort branding possible that can still sustain your business. Mostly used for sprouting ventures needing a brand to develop that can easily shift according to the business’ needs (See Minimum Viable Product and the related article)

Minimum Viable Product (MVP): Often confused with the Prototype, the MVP is the first functional test of a service or a product. A MVP can be purchased and work on on its own. The MVP implies more time / money / effort involved than a prototype which comes to validate the concept. The MVP also tests the interest of your target customers for your solution and its usability. For instance if I’m building a website a prototype can be a series of paper boards to hint at the user experience. Its MVP might be a first website version built with no code tools (before maybe hiring a developper once the product desirability is validated) 

Proof of concept (POC): The POC (often confused with MVP or Prototype) is simply a way to prove that the solution you wand to deploy is technically achievable

Prototype: A prototype is the first « tangible draft » of a project. It’ supposed to encapsulate your concept and doesn’t need to be functional as it is the idea that is being tested here, not the product – VS. the MVP. It can be as simple as a piece of paper, a series of mock-ups (if we’re speaking of an app for instance), etc. More on the topic here

Peer-to-peer: Originally computer-related (I just found out about P2P here), peer-to-peer reconsidered ancient schemes in the classroom, introducing horizontality as a new way of learning

Soft-skills: In opposition to hard-skills, soft-skills are the abilities that help you adapt to your environment and acquire new competences. For instance, being « agile » or a « quick learner » are considered as soft-skills as « empathy » 

Sprints: this term usually refers to a pre-defined period of time (often 5 days) used to quickly test a hypothesis on the field. The goal is to (in)validate an idea and prevent teams to develop a solution too far from the users’ real needs