SwampFox

Supercharging our community!

In an interesting WSJ article, Steven Johnson observes:

Good ideas usually come into the world... constrained by the parts and skills that surround them. We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition.

Ideas are works of bricolage. They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas. We take the ideas we've inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.

I have been involved in lots of new ventures over the years, both in independent companies and inside large organizations. The notion that they are cobbled together initially from available parts strikes me as precisely right.

Clayton Christensen is a thought leader in disruptive innovation, and he observes that early in a new venture the architecture of the firm is crafted around the intersection of an evolving customer need and advancing technical capabilities. This process is what Steve Johnson describes. Entrepreneurs find pieces and parts of infrastructure from which they can create a business. Capital from an angel group here. Real estate from an incubator there. An employee graduating from a university research program. Entrepreneurs create a prototype not only of their new product, but of their new business. Through an iterative learning process, over time both the product and the business become more efficient and productive. As the venture matures, the processes inside the venture, from production to sales, also mature to the point that rather than the business model being fitted to the product as it was at the beginning, the only products that can be sold are those that fit the business model. Christensen says that large mature organizations should follow emerging businesses as incubators of new business models to see which ones gain traction in the marketplace. The successful ones are the drivers of the next high growth markets. While R&D on technology can be done inside large organizations, the R&D of new business models must be done on the outside, because the antibodies of large organization cultures will instinctively reject the transformational ideas of new models.

At our InnoVenture Southeast planning meeting on September 14th, Nate Miranda of Sealed Air made the observation that InnoVenture has done a good job of connecting people together through our Forums and Conferences. He noted that it takes time, though, for the customers, capital, talent and technology to come together to form a successful new venture. InnoVenture needs an "incubation" capability, where a group of trusted Colleagues can follow and contribute to the efforts of a Champion developing a new business venture over time.

Over the past year, InnoVenture has begin refining a Champion-Colleagues-Community model. A passionate Champion envisions an opportunity, and organizes a group of trusted Colleagues to help attract the customers, capital, talent, and technology that is needed from the surrounding community. The key to this model is growing trust among a core group of Colleagues. We all have experience with this. A trusted group of Colleagues can be informal, like an advisory board, or it can be formal, like a board of directors. A group of Colleagues can help Rod Bailey at Michelin identify people with insights about modeling and simulation of contact mechanics. They can help Jack Rogers at the SiMT develop a community interested high growth business opportunities around additive manufacturing. Trusted Colleagues can help an established independent company, like Lab21, get to the next level. They can help get a "proto-company" (as Tom Vogt at the NanoCenter calls many university business ideas) off the ground.

The major take away from our June 14th planning meeting is that a major focus of InnoVenture this year will be further developing the capability of a passionate Champion to effectively organize a trusted group of Colleagues to attract the customers, capital, talent and technology necessary to succeed.

You can help me by making this very personal. Comment below, or send me a note at JohnWarenr@InnoVentureSoutheast.com telling me,

What capabilities would help you to incubate your own new business ventures?

What capabilities would help you be a better colleague to others incubating their new business ventures?

Providing the platform for Champions inside and around major Anchors to incubate new, high-impact business ventures will be very powerful for all of us.

I am looking forward to continuing the journey with you.