What is a Startup
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A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. So, the goal of your early business is to find a viable business model. The challenge with most entrepreneurs is that they ASSUME that they know (and we all think our ideas are awesome right?!) and go about spending their time, money and energy building something (which can be fun, because it’s a creative outlet), and it’s not until they go to market to sell it that they realise NO ONE WANTS IT or the customer wants it in a different way. No wonder 9 out of 10 startups fail.
By connecting with Startup & Innovation communities, you will learn key skills such as validating assumptions, agile planning, creating minimum viable products, lean startup techniques, you will connect with other likeminded people, and you’ll instantly have access to a support network to help you turn your idea into reality and so much more.
Because the reality is this is hard… most start-ups change their business model multiple times, before finding what works and if you forgo the process and just jump in and start building stuff, more often than not you will run out of time, money and energy.
We’ll teach you how to fail small and fail quickly, because that is how we learn, testing our assumptions and getting feedback.
So what is innovation and how is it related to start-up?
In general terms we like to look at it like this… If you own a business and you are launching something new, then that’s innovation, if you don’t own a business then that’s a start-up. A lot of the same principles of idea development apply to both start-up & innovation.
Innovation has many definitions… Our favourite is “new ways of doing things that create value”. We all know that the world is changing at an unprecedented rate (and its set to go up a gear in the next 2 – 5 years). Which means the good old days of slow moving stuff is gone!
If we drilled down into innovation a little deeper, we’ll see that innovation can be categorised under 2 key characteristics:
- Incremental innovation – the adoption of new ways of doing things within your business that help you keep up within your industry. This is the minimum you need to be doing! The reality is there maybe another organisation out there that is thinking more disruptively ie: looking at completely new ways of doing business. Which flows onto…
- Disruptive innovation – utilising technology, internet, new business models to completely disrupt an industry. Netflix did this to video stores, Uber is doing it to taxi industries and the list goes on. Please know that your industry is NOT immune.
A good innovation strategy will look at processes for both incremental and disruptive innovation. If you’d like to discuss these further, please contact our startup & innovation coach explore@thespacecairns.com
Your idea
A quick word about ideas…
I know you’ve probably heard this before, but it’s worth hearing again. We now live in a global marketplace. Technology and the internet are enabling us to do business in ways that were previously outside the capacity of most people. The playing fields have been levelled for regional areas such as ours. We are no longer at a disadvantage being so far from a capital city and in fact we know have the upper hand if we play it that way. Because we have lifestyle and the internet.
This text here is to encourage you to think bigger, because now, anyone with an internet connection can build a global business. It used to be…
- 100 years ago you would have had to own land to accumulate vast wealth
- 50 years ago those that owned factories accumulated vast wealth
- Now people all around the world with little more than an internet connection are building global businesses and accumulating vast wealth.
Why are we sharing this with you?
If you’re idea is focused on just the local market, we’d ask you to rethink it. It takes just as much effort (time and energy) to build a small localised business as it does a high growth, highly scalable, global business. Think bigger from day 1. The world is just a click away. The opportunities are so much bigger when you think global. What is it that you know, do well, or what problem do you have, that if you created a product/solution around, that you could sell around the world?
There is much support available for those who are solving problems / developing ideas that can scale to regions beyond this local region. Money, mentoring, resources available to those working on national / global ideas. There is very little to no support available to those who are working on a small localised idea.
We encourage you to think bigger with your ideas. Ask yourself can my product/solution scale to other regions beyond this one? Is it repeatable in other regions around the world? If you answer yes to both these questions, then we think you are on the right path.