Magikcraft in Japan and Denmark — in 140 characters or less
November 2017 — Magikcraft in Japan / Denmark
Phase One: Japan
I flew from Brisbane to Osaka, Japan to attend DojoCon Japan — left on Wednesday night, arrived Thursday afternoon.
At the airport I met up with CoderDojo Community Lead Ross O’Neill, CoderDojo co-founder James Whelton, and CoderDojo Japan board member Takashi Hosoya.
I stayed in Kansei district at the house of Takashi Hosoya-san.
Here is Takashi’s son with a Magikcraft sticker on his laptop:
On Friday I met many of the CoderDojo mentors who arrived from all over Japan for DojoCon. We spent 11am — 6pm in a Karaoke bar in Ibaraki.
I also caught up with my old friend Jens Petersen, a Dane who married a lady from Osaka, and worked Internationalization for a number of years out of the Brisbane Red Hat office.
On the subject of internationalisation, we did a bunch of work on Magikcraft to localise it into Japanese:
I paid attention to Sriram Krishnan when he spoke at the Myriad festival earlier this year:
Here we are working on it in Brisbane at Fishburners:
For DojoCon Japan we went all in.
One of the learnings from CoderDojo’s Coolest Projects — in Dublin, Ireland back in June — was that the killer format for these events is a Magic show (Majikkushō in Japanese). So I got two assistants from the audience, and with Tim on the server in Brisbane we made a legendary Chicken Karaage using Magik — culminating in a culinary explosion involving 400 chickens, 200 zombies, and a whole lotta lightning!
Outcomes:
- I set up a partnership for translating and distributing Magikcraft Documentation in Japanese.
- Japanese users created a 伝説のMagikcraft Japan Users Group on Facebook.
Phase Two: Denmark
I flew on Sunday from Kansei airport to Narita airport in Tokyo, and thence to Copenhagen, Denmark, to participate in the Lyfebulb-NovoNordisk Innovation Summit.
In June of 2017, Prahlad Wulf took MC:T1 — Minecraft for Type 1 Diabetes — to CoderDojo Foundation Coolest Projects in Dublin, Ireland.
It was that engagement that lead to both DojoCon Japan and the Lyfebulb-NovoNordisk Innovation Summit. MC:T1 was selected as one of twelve technologies disrupting the future of diabetes management.
Since CoderDojo Coolest Projects, we’ve done a lot of work on MC:T1 — particularly since Tim Marwick started working on it.
At the Summit I joined eleven CEOs of startups from Europe and the US.
Part of the Summit was a pitching competition.
I pitched first:
CoderDojo Brisbane gets a shout-out in Denmark:
The outcome of the pitching competition was: 1st Amin Zayani of MedAngel (US$25k prize), 2nd Malcolm Nason of Bonbouton (US $15k prize), 3rd Jen Horonjeff of Savvy Coop (US$10k prize)
On the third day, we had a keynote and a panel Q&A, which included the President of the International Diabetes Foundation, and Shomit Ghose from Onset Ventures — a Silicon Valley fund that invests in high-growth technology startups that have a business plan projecting $100m revenue at the five year point.
I spent an hour with Shomit after the keynote, in a workshop working on pitching.
What I would do differently next time is spend some more time in my pitch articulating the relationship between Magikcraft and MC:T1, and the Magikcraft business model.
It would have been nice to win one of the cash prizes at the Summit, but that wasn’t the main focus for me. Also, although I love winning — truly anyone there deserved to win the award.
We won 2nd place at the Flight Centre Data Hackathon earlier this year, and I spent the next six months trying to figure out how to engage with Flight Centre.
So I went to the Summit knowing that winning the award on the day wouldn’t produce the results that I wanted from the event. It would be creating effective follow-through that would do it. As Jason W. Roulston says: “the gold is in the follow-up”.
So I spent my time there connecting with people in different departments in Novo Nordisk, in Lyfebulb, and among the Award finalists, looking for alignment and possibilities to explore.
Novo Nordisk assigned me a buddy — Ulrik Poulsen — who was an absolute champion for me in finding the right people to connect with and how to position MC:T1 for alignment.
The morning after the Summit, last year’s Award winner — Brianna Wolin— Aaron J Horowitz , and I had breakfast together and looked at the follow-through from last year’s Summit, and what we could do over the next year together.
Outcomes
- We created a Slack team for Lyfebulb-Novo Nordisk Innovation Summit Alumni to keep in touch and to boost each other’s signal on social media.
- I had a call with Karin Hehenberger, the founder and CEO of Lyfebulb. We’re working on a couple of things — exciting details to follow. Karin is strengthening Lyfebulb’s follow-through in taking Alumni companies to market, as well as catalysing innovation in patient-entrepreneurs.
- I’ve got a call with a Novo Nordisk team working on a collaboration with Lego.
- Post-summit we got 200 people sign up from the US, UK, and Australia for the MC:T1 beta-testing program.
Final Thoughts
- I always knew we would be Big in Japan.
- Start-ups engaging with corporates requires hustle to get the follow-through result, especially when the corporation is early in its innovation engagement strategy — like Flight Centre and Novo Nordisk both are.
As Aaron Birkby says about Israel’s mature corporate innovation engagement scene:
The 350+ multinationals based in Israel are actively hunting to do business with startups — indeed it is a large part of their R&D model. And by “do business with”, I mean “be a customer of, invest in, or acquire”.
Shomit Ghose said something similar to me — Novo Nordisk are just beginning to develop their startup innovation engagement. A company like Johnson & Johnson has a more mature model with their JLabs.
I think of a company like Novo Nordisk like an early market. It takes more work to penetrate the market, including market education, but competition is lower.
About me: I’m the founder and CEO of Magikcraft.io — the world’s most innovative platform for learning to code JavaScript in Minecraft; a Red Hat alumnus; a CoderDojo mentor; and a father. I am a commitment that children experience life with joy and power.
