After years working on (and failing at, and learning from) my own startups, I recently joined Pollenizer in a newly-created position: Senior Startup Coach.
When you join the team at Pollenizer, one of the first things you get to understand is the importance of eating your own dog food… Notwithstanding that Pollenizer recently celebrated its sixth birthday, we are still 100% in startup mode: we use the same tools and resources that we recommend to aspiring startup-pers in our Lean Startup Bootcamps (yes, that’s right, Team Polly still uses a Lean Canvas!); we are constantly running experiments; and if you asked the founders, I suspect they would be the first to say that we are still pivoting and hustling our butts off to get closer to the ever elusive product-market fit.
The creation of this Senior Startup Coach role is another step down that path – it is yet another experiment, as we learn how best to build a guild of entrepreneurs across Asia Pacific, and work with private investors and large companies to incubate new digital businesses.
I see part of my job as helping to execute and improve existing business models, while the other part is all about the search for innovative new business models. With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to look at the concept of sustaining innovation versus disruptive innovation in the context of my work at Pollenizer…
First, let’s take a quick look at Clayton Christensen’s work on disruptive innovation with this two-minute Harvard Business Review primer:
Over the years, Pollenizer has developed an extensive knowledge base which now forms a key part of the educational tools that underpin the company’s business model. Delivering that content is a hands on job, which means that the number of entrepreneurs we can help is limited by the time it takes to deliver the course multiplied the number of founders we train at any one time.
Startups are all about constraints and doing the most we can with the limited resources we have… So, how do we optimise that most precious of commodities – time?
In the absence of cloning, I guess you could say Pollenizer’s hypothesis here is that the best way to scale our time is to bring in the next generation of coaches, to share the established knowledge base and develop it by adding their own unique experiences, then deliver those learnings to new audiences.
Thinking about that in the context of a lean canvas:
OK, so the “sustaining innovation” element of my work is starting to make sense: I am here to deliver and constantly improve our educational content, and help to move that product up the value chain.
Let’s not forget, though, that delivering “hands on” training courses is, at the end of the day, an analog game. And, as much as we might be at the forefront of digital innovation, even companies like Pollenizer are exposed to what Deloitte call the short fuse, big bang of digital disruption.
What does this mean for our existing business model? Only time will tell… But for now, let’s put our startup science lab-coats back on and think about this again in the context of a lean canvas:
We are striving to build a guild of entrepreneurs across Asia Pacific, but it is hard to grow a network at the best of times – the personal touch which is so important in the early stages is inherently hard to scale, and the challenge only grows when you enter new countries and new markets.
I guess this is where the “disruptive innovation” element kicks in to my work… So, how does Pollenizer stay ahead of the pack?
As Helge Tennø wrote in a recent blog post, customers hold the key to staying in front of disruption:
People don’t care about structures and nomenclatures that companies build to put things and ideas into silos. They don’t care about industries. And developing ideas inside these silos might seem sensible to companies but people see things differently. They care about jobs-to-be-done, values, worth and themselves.
This is as true of Pollenizer and our customers as it is for you and yours.
Whether you are working on a startup or inside an established business, the questions remain the same:
- What big, hairy problems do your customers have which keep them awake at night?
- Can you solve those problems so much better/cheaper/faster that your customers will pay 10x for the solution?
- And what is so unique about your offering that makes it hard (if not impossible) for anyone else to do it?
Image Credit goes to entrepreneur, academic and lean startup guru Steve Blank, whose work on business model innovation in existing companies is, to put it simply, first class.
If you want to read more on the topic, check out his blog from last week on why companies are not startups and work your way through the archives to learn more about the future of corporate innovation and search vs execute business models.