1. Skilled leadership

• Know their strengths – and weaknesses
• Where they have weaknesses – they know how to delegate
• More than one person – and have complementary skills
• Charismatic and visionary – People will follow them along their path
• Committed – In it to win it and will put in the work it takes
• Experience in industry or entrepreneurship

2. Focused strategy

• Trying to do one thing and do it well, thereby making best use of their resources
• Willing to iterate rapidly based on learning from failure
• Working from a structured plan – not only pursuing opportunistic leads

3. High value proposition

• They have something people really want
• And ideally have validated this need through market feedback and, even better, sales

4. Large market

• Not only do people want it – they are willing to pay for it!
• References from one market into another – e.g. product and proposition can be used to access a different industry or geography
• However … The market should not be so large that it is already overrun with other competitors

5. Defensible position

• Something about them that cannot be replicated (see David’s post on economic moats)

6. Enough financial backing to make it happen

• But not so much that they take it easy!

7. Good advisors

• Not just one of the many people floating around Old Street with a copy of The Lean Startup – actual people who can add value to the business

For me, the leadership team is the most crucial part. There are any number of ideas out there that could be a fantastic success, but it takes strong leadership and execution to make it happen.

Technology on its own does not make for a commercial success. It requires a skilled team; executing a focused plan; for exploiting a validated application; in a sizeable market; with enough money and a bit of sound advice!

I wondered what the reaction might be if a doctor in a hospital documentary defined themselves in similar terms. Or take another profession: to become a lawyer requires the aspirant to study for years, but to become an ‘entrepreneur’ you simply need to believe you are one.

But perhaps this narrow line of thinking reflects something of a norm. Many business schools offer add-on courses where start-ups are a topic to be mastered in a week. Incubators and accelerators offer the same ‘sheep-dip’ philosophy.

If only building an entrepreneurial business could be packaged and codified so easily. The reality, of course, is that entrepreneurship demands rigour over time. Identifying new opportunities, making the ‘right’ decisions, and managing growth present challenges that take years of experience and reflection to perfect.

Rather than seeing entrepreneurship as just ‘something to have a go at’, we would be well served as seeing it as a profession in its own right. In this universe, it becomes a core business school discipline; it becomes an activity that can be learnt rather than being mostly a matter of luck. Successful serial entrepreneurs are not merely people who have a knack for winning the lottery over and over again.

In Europe, prior to the Enlightenment, one group of people who tried to do something new were the alchemists. Classically stereotyped as people who sought to create gold from base metal, they were lampooned by Tim McInnerny as Lord Percy Percy with his nugget of purest Green. His depiction was of a group of people who attempted, seemingly at random, to apply treatments and actions in order to create change.

The alchemists were swept away, in part, by the propagation of the scientific method throughout Europe. The scientific methods remains with us today, informing the approaches we take to discovery – and arguably creating innovation cycles that are faster than any could have imagined a thousand years ago.

Do you want to be an alchemist or a scientist? I subscribe to the latter approach over the former – and I believe that those establishing startups should view them through the lens of a scientist, treating them as an experiment

What does this mean? To me it means following an ordered process in order to best understand what you observe and maximise your chances of proving your hypothesis.

Think back to school – hypothesis, methodology, results, conclusion (no, I cannot forget!) – and take the same approach. With reference to startups, I would summarise the scientific method as follows:

• Question – how can consumers and/or businesses most effectively complete an activity?
• Observe – what do they currently do, what are the deficiencies to the approach?  Coupons in magazines in 2008 – why?
• Hypothesise – we believe that businesses / consumers would use coupons more if they were online, promoted on single days
• Create a methodology – build a site, and promote it for those interested in saving money via coupons; get businesses to provide aggressively priced coupon deals on a daily basis
• Analyse the results – are people using my coupon site?  Is the promotion right, are the coupons offering deals in the right industries?
• Interpret – yes, people really like daily coupon sites
• Create a new hypothesis – people are willing to pay a monthly subscription of £15 to access my daily coupon site

New businesses are created by inquisitive minds who ask questions and observe deficiencies. However, just having a great idea (or a hypothesis) does not mean automatic success.

Consider your business – are you sitting in a candle lit room in a pointy hat, creating nuggets of purest green? Or are you a scientist in a laboratory conducting a series of experiments to prove or disprove hypotheses about businesses and consumers? I know which I’d rather be.

I’ve stayed in 4 hotels, taken 4 flights (I hate flying), and I’m on the way to being an expert on all things renewable energy and high penetration wind power on Ireland’s electricity grid. Talk to me about TSOs, DSOs, DNOs, ENTSO-E, ROCOF and DS3: I’m down with all the acronyms.

This afternoon I presented our findings to our client following an interview that we conducted this morning with a high-voltage manager at Ireland’s national DSO. In Wales, we’d say that I did “alright like” (especially given that some rather rowdy individuals from the Irish Student Media Awards were attempting to break into my room at 4am this morning).
I’ve been riding an intense and very steep learning curve for two weeks, but it’s all been very interesting and enjoyable so far. I’ve learnt what Customer Relationship Management is all about, how to create a 3 month plan, and I’m also entering the world of blogging for the very first time.

A few weeks ago, I never would have believed that I would know all about “grid code compliance” or even understood what “spinning reserve” was all about. By now, those are the sorts of things that are filling my dreams each night. It just goes to show you what a fast-paced, engaging and informative industry I’ve found myself working in.

Right, I think we’re finally about to take off. It’s late and I’m on my way back home, and I’m still looking forward to tomorrow.

I don’t sit at either extreme, but I do believe that for the vast majority of today’s companies the website is the ‘shop window’. Now everyone knows that a good shop window pulls in customers – provided it is seen – no matter what the size of the organisation behind the shop. The website provides the entrepreneur with the opportunity to present their wares on a level playing field (the internet) against much larger rivals.

“But I am no designer!” you might cry. Irrelevant; I am not talking here about the prettiest shop window aiming to attract the most conscious fashionista.  This is about getting the right message across to the intended reader.

Have a look here; did that site make any sense? Probably not. To its intended reader, it’s spot on – XP Power is one of the fastest growing companies of its type globally.

So, how can the entrepreneur make sure that they are hitting the (right) mark with the company website? I would advocate the creation of a simple grid – on one axis list your stakeholders (the people you want to communicate with), on the other axis list the reasons you believe people are going to come to your website.  Here are some examples of each:

1. Stakeholders:
   • Investors
   • Specific customer sets e.g. middle aged men, human resources directors etc.
   • Journalists
   • Potential employees
2. Reasons for visit:
   • To get contact details
   • Information for an business degree thesis
   • Find out about the company
   • Identify fit between product / service and need

Next, put a cross through each box on the grid that is clearly nonsense, e.g. the box which is at the intersection between the ‘investor’ column and ‘identify fit between product / service and need’ row.

Then review each of the remaining boxes. If you already have a site, match all the pages to the relevant boxes in the grid. Where a page appears in multiple boxes ask yourself ‘can I realistically service all audiences through a single page, or should there actually be multiple pages?’. In some cases, the answer will be ‘no’ – the homepage is the homepage; contact details remain the same for all audiences. In other cases, you might wish to consider creating multiple pages to reflect the differing information requirements of the audiences.

You will also find …. gaps. Be honest with yourself, identifying a gap is a good thing – it shows where you need to put in some work to give your stakeholders the information they need.

A final thought: make sure you are running and reviewing your Google Analytics data. I won’t accept any excuses on this one – Analytics will tell you where your audiences are going, and where you should be focussing your energies when producing content.

The slides from the presentation are available to view below.

Premium Power is the developer of Decision Metrix, an enterprise analytics solution that enables network operators and distribution network operators to police and understand generator performance and grid code compliance.

RIG  is undertaking a global validation study to confirm market demand and identify early adopters.

I work with technology companies – the vast majority using a significant element of software within their overall offer. How does Buffett’s concept apply, when software is by its nature replicable – often by cheaper resources in other countries? You make the mistakes, others imitate with a much lower cost of establishment. Have a look at the Samwer brothers in Germany for the textbook case study.

So what to do? The obvious answer is legal instruments – patents and the like – but do all companies have the time / energy / finances to both create and protect intellectual property in this manner? I would argue (in a highly successful manner) not. There are enough things to do in the early stages, many of which will be the start of digging your moat, without recourse to lawyers.

Consider the component elements of a company selling software. These can be broken down into two categories:

1. Revenue generation and retention capability
2. Technology capability

When defining and refining your business, think about each category and ask yourself ‘what can I do here to develop my economic moat?’. Some examples might include:

1. Revenue generation and retention
   1. Dominate a specific market – either a vertical (e.g. supermarkets); a horizontal (e.g. human resources); or geographical (e.g. Italy)
   2. Ruthlessly pursue customer retention strategies – a business that does not lose customers grows
   3. Create revenue momentum – a series of wins shows the market you will dominate it
2. Technology
   1. Create network effects – leverage your users to dominate areas through networks (e.g. Facebook – there can be only one personal social network at any one time)
   2. Develop technology which will naturally expand its footprint within the customer, e.g. SAP – it reaches out across the enterprise
   3. Ensure accessibility – if technology is easy to acquire and use, it will stick
   4. Get multilingual quickly – think of the Samwer Brothers

You’ll note as you read through these points that there is significant overlap. Often the technology enables the revenue generation and retention objectives, and conversely the revenue and retention objectives will dictate (to an extent) what technology development must take place. Get out a sheet of paper and write these down for your business. Are they compelling? Do they link back to the objectives you set out?

Reflect on this exercise, and bring the thought processes into your day to day work – an economic moat creates sustainable long term advantage, enabling valuable businesses to be built.

It’s important to have the right commercial model in place. Charging £20 for a solution worth several thousand is a mistake. The point is that the value is easy to demonstrate when you can show the solution to a real pain point.

On a person-to-person level, no one wants to deal with someone who is just focused on commercials. People will be much more willing to deal with someone who is passionate about understanding and solving the problems they have. The proposition must be attractive to both sides, and there must be a commercial opportunity for the entrepreneur; but if a real problem can be solved, many of the other issues of a commercial deal can fall into place out of the solution.

Too many entrepreneurs I’ve met are focused on getting huge quantities of money into their business immediately and lose sight of the problems they are purportedly solving. For a young company without a lot of resource, getting money coming in is critical, but the paradoxical truth is that the fastest way to do that is to solve the problems of the target customers.

Their slides (minus videos) are available to view below.

Please email jessica@rapidinnovation.co.uk with any questions related to the presentation or RIG workshops.