Interesting article last week by the swedish newspaper DI (Dagens Industri). They noticed the student entrepreneurs from KTH that have created BoRank.se.
They rank housing societies to make purchases of households more transparent. I love this idea since it makes complicated information accessible for everyone and in that sense revolutionize the market.
My idea: Could you apply this on other purchases? An app to value a car or second hand-items? Any ideas?
@Michiel posted a text before about Scrive on the subject short versus long term ideas. His main question was if you should launch a short term idea even though it eventually loses it’s customers. I agree with Michiel and would like share my thoughts to bring the discussion further.
I enjoyed the post and it got me thinking of short-term solutions myself. First of all, in some way, aren’t all business solutions somewhat temporary? The market isn’t constant and we live in a changing business environment. When thinking of it more closely, I couldn’t think of any company who haven’t changed their product even a bit. Telephone companies catches up with technical progress, service companies as taxi-drivers like uber update their offer to match the need of their customers. So, is there really a permanent offer and business idea? What do you think?
My second thought was how this affected the example with Scrive. Even though a customer solution might me temporary, they can still make it a successful business. The problem is probably more about the strategy of the startup since the investment costs and the development time has to be minimized for the company to be profitable even in the short run.
And the last thought about the question “should they still launch their idea?”. There’s other aspects to it when starting a business based on a short term solution. If you create an agile company with the possibility of changing their product, they can get long term use out of their short term business idea. First of all, they can build up an installed base of users that represent a customer network that can be used for future business. They can also build up structure capital that can be utilized when changing their business.
What’s your thoughts on this? Can you come up with a company that hasn’t changed their product/service at all?
I would really recommend you all to take a look at this TED-talk. After going through some TED-talks regarding entrepreneurship this is the one I want to highlight because it is relevant in an early phase of a start up when a business model is crafted.
Bill Gross states his first hypothesis that five specific parameters affect the success of startups more than others. He therefore decided to look into them by studying data from hundreds of companies. The parameters he studied was
The result of his study shows that timing was the number one most important factor for success.
The number one thing was timing. Timing accounted for 42 percent of the difference between success and failure. Team and execution came in second, and the idea, the differentiability of the idea, the uniqueness of the idea, that actually came in third.
Gross means that if this can increase the ratio of success for new companies, it can make the world a better place. I wouldn’t take it that far, but hopefully this can affect the way we treat market timing when marketing our ideas.
What came to my mind was how to find the perfect market timing if that really mathers. After spending time thinking about this and doing some research, I can break down my first thoughts on what aspects to investigate further
I’ll be glad to hear your thoughts on the subject!
See related links below.
Here’s a rather old but interesting article The Guardian posted about social entrepreneurship and the phenomena in Sweden. It states that swedes traditionally are innovators but the concept of social entrepreneurship is new to the country. When talking about innovation in this digital era the recent sparks as Spotify, Skype and Soundcloud are some of many to be mentioned. But what about social innovation?
The link to the article: http://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2013/jun/04/social-entrepreneurship-rise-sweden
Why this interested me is that they identified a trend in the Swedish landscape: social problems have traditionally been a responsibility of institutions rather than individuals. An example of this is policymaking in order to solve the most pressing social challenges.
However, this trend is about to be broken and social challenges can be treated by using social innovation that changes the entrepreneurial landscape. This is now on a rise and there are government initiatives that are catching up with the changes by supporting these entrepreneurs. One example is The Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth (http://www.tillvaxtverket.se/ovrigt/englishpages.4.21099e4211fdba8c87b800017332.html).
So my thoughts are from an entrepreneurial perspective: what are the future trends to be broken? How can you be one step ahead and create business ideas that fulfill needs that haven’t traditionally been solved by entrepreneurs?