The Story of Kieran
And the Pattern of Multimodal Layers
This story is a part of the book “How to Build Thriving Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”
“So you spent the last three months building an app and didn’t check whether there were legal regulations around donating food?”
An investor for the final showcase of the Innovation in Health competition said this to Kieran (name changed for privacy), the founder of the mobile app Food Connect. The basic premise of Food Connect was that after large events, student organizations often had excess food. Food Connect would help these organizations plan and manage the process of donating their excess food directly to needy families. Food Connect hoped to widen the scope of the app to corporate events and large events like weddings.
Kieran turned bright red on stage. It was clear that, no, he was not aware of the legal regulations around food donation. The state of Michigan in Act 136 of 1993 of their state laws has a clause for “Immunity of Food Donors from Civil Liability” so long as they act in good faith. Likewise the federal government in 1996 signed into law the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Donation Act that protects any individual donating food to a non-profit. However, donations directly to needy individuals and families are not protected, which makes it so anyone that used Food Connect would technically be committing a crime.
Food Connect also faced the problem of scale. Each state has different standards for what is considered “acceptable” food to donate. These different regulations between states creates logistical problems for large companies, much less individuals who do want the potential of a lawsuit hanging over their head from every good deed they do. Kieran had not considered that there might be legal problems with food donation at all.
Kieran was a health policy graduate student that had studied the impact of food insecurity on communities. He had created design mock-ups and conducted extensive testing with the potential users of the app. He had the wholehearted support of several different student organizations that said they would use his app. But, he had failed to understand that even great products that people want to exist, have to exist within a complicated legal environment. Kieran’s failure stemmed from the fact that he did not build the kind of information ecosystem around himself that he would be aware of potential legal problems before he walked on stage.
Kieran was certainly not the only founder that faced this problem. In fact, these kinds of information gaps seemed to be a common occurrence for students. Again and again, I saw founders that faced roadblocks that could have been addressed early on but had become progressively harder to work around due to the time, money, and energy they spent building their companies in a specific way.
One founder I spoke with spent years creating compostable packaging for their organic granola bars, only to find out that no grocery store would take their product because the grocery stores had expiration minimums for packaging on their shelves the founder was not aware of. There was the entrepreneur who built her brand based around intricately designed lipgloss cases, only to find that these intricate designs made large-scale production ten times the cost. There was the man who spent a decade on his Ph.D. where he developed a more sustainable rubber for cars, only to find out that no tire-maker wanted his new design because it would demand a complete overhaul of their manufacturing plants. Then there was the non-profit that helped map aquifers in Africa, only to find no company wanted their software because the diggers were paid by number of holes dug, not the number of successful aquifers found.
All of these entrepreneurs could have spent their time and money more effectively if they were aware of legal, regulatory, and production issues around their companies. The more time founders spent building in an unprofitable direction, the harder they found it was to pivot.
But it is hard to search for solutions when one is unaware of a problem. Community Information Designers (CIDs) that find they have a large number of founders that spend over three months building out a company that is unviable points to an information ecosystem issue where founders are in information silos. CIDs can help founders get out of these silos and find potential problems earlier by creating spaces where founders can develop “multimodal layers” by interacting with different disciplines to create richer mental maps.
Narrowing Unknown Knowns
Some parts of a business are clearly known, like a company’s revenue from last quarter. If a founder has kept their books correctly this should be an easy number to find. This is “known” information within a business. If revenue dropped last quarter, founders can at least be aware of the problem to then be able to fix it.
Other problems are classified as “known unknowns” where founders do not know the specific information but are aware that they do not know it. For known unknowns, founders can at take steps to estimate and account for their lack of information in certain areas. Known Unknowns might include a clothing store that is unaware of what will be the trendiest items in six months time. To account for this lack of information, they can look to other retailers and fashion bloggers and generate ideas similar to others in their field.
Founders that deal with known unknowns might include a catering service working a new type of event. They might not know exactly how much food to serve, but they can estimate based on past events that they have catered. Or, a seasonal restaurant that does not know the price of food costs in two months time. Staff can research what crops are expected to have a strong harvest and so can plan their menu accordingly. In each scenario, whether it is looking at competitors, estimating from past experience, or researching cost projections based on information they do have, the entrepreneur is aware that there is information they do not know but they can act to make unknown information more known and can build their business models in ways to account for these unknowns.
Unknown unknowns are different (Graham). These are problems that founders are not aware of and so are not taking any action to make their businesses resilient to them. This class of business problems might include global pandemics, earthquakes, solar flares. They can be unknown or changing legal frameworks. They can be something like AI that makes a founder’s business completely untenable overnight.
Unknown Unknown problems in business that are shaped by natural disasters are often so unexpected and hard to predict how their occurrence will affects supply chains or demand that it is hard to give emerging business owners good advice on how to solve for them. While certainly not futile for entrepreneurs to proactively identify this class of unknown unknowns, these worldwide unknowns are extremely hard for anyone to account for.
But the situation Kieran, like many founders, faced was somewhere between a known unknown and an unknown unknown problem. We will call these potentially known problems. These roadblocks were unknown to the founders, but someone else in an adjacent discipline is aware of this information. Kieran just needed to connect with the right person.
Stephen Shapiro, an expert in business innovation said in a talk he gave at TEDxNASA, “If you’re working on an aerospace challenge, and you have 100 aerospace engineers working on it, the 101st aerospace engineer is not going to make that much of a difference. But you add a biologist, or a nanotechnologist, or a musician, and maybe now you have something fundamentally different” (Clark). Each new layer of expertise adds a different way to look at a problem.
A biologist might understand how gene expression changes after spaceflight (Rossman). This understanding of health concerns can help NASA better plan for the healthcare system needed to support larger manned missions to the Moon.
Fashion designers at NASA have incorporated several different functions like lights, alarms, cooling tubes, and gas analyzers embedded into space suits’ fabric to provide astronauts with suits that provided more features with less weight (Friedman). Their work has enabled NASA to make the astronauts more comfortable and mobile.
When founders engage with others from different disciplines that have new information sets, each conversation can potentially help founders narrow the number of unknown unknown problems they face. Like a metaphorical net, each new multimodal layer within a founder’s information map provides greater coverage and increases the likelihood that a problem can be caught early on. Problems caught early means businesses that can pivot sooner, and in turn a higher chance that the founders’ startups will find a viable revenue model.
Build Ecosystems where Multimodal Information Maps Flourish
CIDs can proactively design physical spaces and programming that help founders build multimodal layers into their information maps. The next chapter “Building Places for Multidisciplinary Collisions” explores how CIDs can design physical spaces that help founders engage with people from different disciplines. Then, “Lenses for Entrepreneurs: Building Out Your Knowledge Space” provides guidance for CIDs to provide programmatic activities that can help founders proactively uncover unknown unknowns and develop multi-modal information maps.
