The usual scenario: investors look for startups with business plans, designs…and teams in place. There are other ways of supporting startups that all have in common: they need to understand whether an innovation will work and sell.
Don't find them - build them
Today, I read here (Wired UK, July issue) about building startups in-house. It's putting innovation into higher context. Tech will help leverage the developments and deployments, but in its core it's a bottom up approach of developing businesses around people.
A company builder for innovation builders
A company builder begins pre-idea, pre-team…Their approach is evolutionary in the sense that they encourage and support people to do groundbreaking things. They finance the try at a low level already. The ability to support cross-overs, selection and mutation enable the company builder to finance along a profile of optimal market risk for the startups and of their own.
I like this approach, because it creates real options for both the company and the innovation builder…and it provides constructive learning on a higher level…also for both.
This is what I wrote two years ago about startups. Don't do it alone gets another dimension when working with a company builder…
