‘An entrepreneur is a person who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down’ (seen on a T-shirt). As entrepreneurs, we need to have the ability to see change before it happens; we need to identify opportunities and be resolute in moving towards them.
Wouldn’t entrepreneurial life be so much easier if we had a failproof way of predicting which innovation would be a success and which one not? If we had a crystal ball that could tell us with accuracy whether we should pursue an idea or run for the hills? In the absence of an ‘innovation crystal ball’, let’s try to find a framework that we can use to generate ideas that are much more likely to succeed than others. But first let us look at the most common mistakes that founders make when coming up with innovative entrepreneurial ideas.
According to Jared Friedman, Angel Investor and partner at Y Combinator, the most common mistake that you can make as a founder is to believe that you need an amazing idea to get started. What this usually looks like is someone who believes the key to having a successful innovation is starting with a brilliant, error-proof idea, with all aspects of it figured out. It is very easy to look at successful businesses today and think, ‘Wow, that was a brilliant idea’, but I can tell you that businesses only look successful in hindsight.
Writing about disruptive innovation, Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, said: ‘But in disruptive situations, action must be taken before careful plans are made. Because much less can be known about what markets need or how large they can become, plans must serve a very different purpose: they must be plans for learning rather than plans for implementation.’
Innovative ideas morph over time. Look at the story of Airbnb, for instance. The multibillion-dollar business was born in 2008 when tech entrepreneurs Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky launched a simple online platform to rent out an air mattress in their apartment in high-rent San Francisco. When the Great Recession hit later that same year, suddenly the need for short-term, low-commitment living quarters exploded exponentially. By March 2009, the site had over 10 000 users and 2 500 listings, and big-name investments started flying in not long after. The rest, as they say, is history. The point is the founders just started. They didn’t wait to have it all figured out!
Or look at Netflix. It is said that founder Reed Hastings was motivated to start an online DVD rental by mail service after incurring a late fee from Blockbuster for failing to return his copy of Apollo 13 in a timely manner. In an ironic twist of fate several years later, the new-born company nearly crumbled when Blockbuster made the fatal mistake of refusing to buy it out during the dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s. Netflix weathered the storm, however, by harnessing its innovative spirit to pioneer the streaming on-demand video service we know today, leaving its brick-and-mortar competitor permanently in the dust.
Today, Netflix is worth billions and growing, thanks to the current higher than ever demand for home-based entertainment. Again, the founders just started.
These are but some of the successful businesses that were born out of the need to solve a problem. You are better off working on an idea than waiting for it to be perfect! The first step to good innovation is to find a problem that needs to be solved.
Another mistake that a founder can make is to start with a solution instead of a problem. I’ll give an example. Imagine you come up with a start-up idea ‘Just-in-time hairdos’. It’s an app, you push a button, a hairstylist shows up. This is a solution. What problem does this solve? Maybe it’s hard to find a hairstylist? Is this a real problem? My point is if you come up with an idea like this, you are starting with a solution. Solutions that come without a problem in mind are usually not great, because usually you never actually find the problem. You’re much better off starting with a problem and then looking for solutions. Rather than ‘build it and they will come’, find a problem and find a way to solve it.
So, what you want to do is to pick a good starting point. If you have a good starting point, then even if your initial idea isn’t great, it just needs tweaking to get to a great idea. Whereas if you pick a bad starting point, there might not be any way to morph into a good one. You’ll have to start over completely.
‘Don’t worry about failure; you only have to be right once,’ said Dropbox co-founder Drew Houston … Now go ahead and innovate!
Author
Ndia Magadagela (CA)SA is an entrepreneur and a co-founder of Everlectric
