Innovation Economy of Platforms

The new world is being developed with new platforms. In the last few centuries, new world was explored in Americas, Austalia and many other parts of the planet. The first requirement for development of these new world was to build the transport infrastructure. Once the shipping routes and railway and road highway infrastructure was created, it automatically followed with millions of entrepreneurs who started trading, manufacturing, service businesses.

Same thing is now happening in the new world connected with internet and powered by exponential technologies. In the last few decades, Information Highways are developed all across the world and that has fuelled growth of Internet or Web entrepreneurs. Those countries which were ahead of the rest in building high band width internet infrastructure have notices maximum development of Internet economy. This followed with robust mobile phone infrastructure, fuelling mobile revolution. This strategy of building the infrastructure platform which will be utilized by millions of entrepreneurs to build their businesses, is being adopted by several Fortune 500 top technology companies, like IBM, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and even our Indian IT services multinationals like TCS, Infosys etc.

Apple and Google built the platforms for their iOS and Adroid users.

Within just 5 years, 1.25 million entrepreneurs have developed apps for Apple iOS platform and 85 billion users have downloaded these apps. A entirely new economy of Apps market was created.

Take for an example, how IBM is developing a platform with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. So many entrepreneurs are exploring the opportunities of building products and services which will use AI. Now they need not worry about building underlying AI infrastructure. A doctor who would like to build a specialized diagnostics service in his niche area of specialization can build his service on IBM Watson platform which readily provides access to whole worlds knowledge of medicine and AI capabilities for diagnostics. Once this doctor has developed his services in his specialized area of expertise on IBM Watson platform, the Doctor's business and IBM's Watson platform will grow together. IBM is therefore providing all facilities for new entrepreneurs to build their businesses on their platform.

Same holds true with SAP, which is promoting the SAP Hana platform, Amazon which is promoting AWS platform and Google's Appengine and Microsoft's Azure etc. etc. Our Engineering colleges should take advantage of this opportunity and try to get as many platforms on the campus for students to build their start ups. Generally all these platform companies will offer free acess to students and also several other mentoring and training opportunities.

Software Tools for Entrepreneurs

Start Up Management Versus Business Management

Start Up Management is completely different than Business Management, the way it is being taught in all Management Schools. The Lean Start up movement started by Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Ash Mourya and so many other proponents are telling this for the past several years. Business Management is all about how to optimize an existing, running business with established business models to maximise profits. Start Up management on the other hand is about experimenting a new business model, testing out the hypothesis and finally finding out which business model works. A business manager can not afford to fail, the start up manger is expected will fail fast and several times. Given this fundamental difference, the business management systems that have evolved over last few decades like ERP and Supply Chain Management, etc. are not of much use for the start ups. Instead an entirely new set of start up management tools are getting popular. Following is a list of software tools designed specifically for start ups of the modern times.

Start Up Management Software Tools

Lean Start Up tools

Lean Start Up methodology is now the defacto standard followed by all new start ups, specially the IT/web oriented start ups. Each Guru of this new methodology has helped create a software tool to manage the entire end  to end process from Ideation to Scale-up.

Launch Pad Central (https://www.launchpadcentral.com/) being called "Platform for Evidence-based Entrepreneurship" is promoted by Lean Start Up methodology founder, Steve Blank. Every student of Steve Blank at Stanford and UC Berkley, gets to use this tool.

Lean Stack (http://leanstack.com/)  helps a start up build Business Model, set up experiments, measure and get analytics. Developed by Ash Mourya.
Strategyzer (https://strategyzer.com/) is companion tool to the books "Business Model Generation" and "Value Propositin Design" by Alex Osterwalder.

Project Management

Each Start Up is a project and an Accelerator organization is required to manage many of them together, often as a cohort. Each start up has to keep track of planned activities, resources, milestones, assign tasks to team members, reporting progress etc. and consolidated reporting across all start ups for program management at Accelerator level. Several project management tools are being marketed specially for the Start ups, here is a list of some

ASANA (https://asana.com/product), PROOFHUB (http://www.proofhub.com/), BASECAMP (https://basecamp.com/), PODIO (https://podio.com/site),  SMARTSHEET (http://www.smartsheet.com/)

But a generic project management suite like Microsoft EPM which includes common MSProject also does a good job with specially tailors templates for a start up accelerator. 

Mentoring Management

For Start up accelerators, facilitating the mentor/mentee relations is a very important activity. Starting from recruitment of mentors and mentees, matching, monitoring progress and reporting. Several tools have come in the market to meet this requirement. There are software tools, a cloud platforms with hosted solution or a complete online mentoring program with mentors already recruited and ready to start immediately. Here are 2 solutions that I have used but there are so many others available in the market. Launchspot.io (http://launchspot.io/) is developed in the Waterloo start up world. Mentorcloud (http://www.mentorcloud.com/#about) is another solution developed in California. 

Funding Management

This is a special requirement of Start up accelerators. The sources of capital available to start ups has exploded over the past decade. There is free money in the form of grants from Government as well as charities, Angel investors are giving money with charitable as well as commercial interests, sharks are looking around for big catch. Investors are interested at different growth stages - early start up, scaling up, matured. In spite of so many investors, still it is not easy to match the right start up with the investors. 

Funding Portal (http://thefundingportal.com/) is a good example which is useful to finding government money in Canada. 

GUST (https://gust.com/) connects Start ups with investors around the world. 

KICKSTARTER (https://www.kickstarter.com/) and INDIEGOGO (https://www.indiegogo.com/) help you crowdfund your project. 

CDLIND (http://www.cdling.com/desktop/) scores your project, connects up with investors and experts resulting into powerful funding marketplace.

FUNDVANTAGE (https://www.fundvantage.ca/overview) provides current intelligence on various government funding programs, which helps start ups to choose the best options to persue and hence subsantially improve the funding success rate.

Learning Management System (LMS)

The main task the accelerators have is to educate. The promoters general come with excellent technical knowledge, perhaps also some commercial or legal knowledge but they invariably have a need for several very specialized topics.  Generally a start up acceleration cohort will follow regular week by week classroom and out of the building structured learning which benefits with a Learning Management System. Several excellent online courses are available which can be leveraged by the Accelerator program. An LMS like Moodle (https://moodle.org/) or a MOOC (Masive Open Online Course) management system like OpenedX (http://code.edx.org/) is a backbone of all learning in an Accelerator program.

Growth Marketing Tools

Start up is all about growth. The growth requires promoting/selling in all aspects of strat up. The product sales of course in most important but start up also needs intensive selling for recruiting top talent, vendors, promoting with government and other support organizations, investors ...

So much marketing and sales effort but all that has to be managed on shoe string budget. With good luck, the new start ups have learned to use social media very effectively. Every start up can not have these growth marketing social media expertise. However, the Accelerator organizations can provide various social media marketing tools and support to help their start up clients successfully achieve their growth targets. 

Need for an Integrated Platform

In the pat few years, start up practice has evolved very fast and so many tools have become available. These tools, however, have evolved in isolation. When a user organization adopts these tools there are integration challenges. Achieving this integration at each user organization is expensive exercise. It will therefore benefit if an integrated cloud-based platform is developed where all these tools are integrated and ready to use. Common standards for data exchange will need to evolve and some modifications may be necessary by each tool vendor to conform to standards. Fortunately, however, such integration is now very practical.