Innovation is hard. Miriam-Webster defines innovation as “a new idea, method or device”. We have ideas every single day. Creating an environment where innovation is encouraged is even harder.
We all make the mistake of looking at Silicon Valley and immediately saying, “no, it’s not hard - look there.” This is not true. It is hard.
Silicon Valley can be copied. But even if you copy wholeheartedly every step of the process, you will never get the same Silicon Valley. Cultures differ, infrastructure differs, commitments differ - wherever you go.
I come from a small country - we have a population of less than 100 people per square kilometer, spread over about 5000 squares, and even though we have an estimated Gross Domestic Product of approximately USD40,000 per person, there is some uneven distribution over a slightly polarized, but growing middle class. More accurate data available here. (http://www.tradingeconomics.com/brunei/gdp)
This high GDP has given birth to a welfare state, which is awesome; but insidiously, it has also given birth to yet another problem among my people called complacency. This complacency has affected everything from diversification efforts to in-house family norms where parents have encouraged their children to stay at home and wait for a job rather than go out, take risks and build their own startup.
This is not a disease that only affects my country. It is in many countries across the world - all striving to build something new, and innovate, but there is a rarity in it working. So what is the formula to a successful innovation ecosystem?
Although Up Global together with Google For Entrepreneurs recently released a paper (http://blog.up.co/2014/09/08/white-paper-announcing-5-ingredients-fostering-thriving-startup-ecosystem/) about Talent, Density, Culture, Capital & Policy as the key ingredients of a successful entrepreneur city. However, I’d like to pose a few questions. What happens if you don’t have those ingredients? What can we do in that kind of circumstance?
More importantly, how can startups cities lacking in these key ingredients create a vibrant ecosystem? For this article, I shall only touch on three specific ways we can do this.
Create a vibrant, viable talent pool from current millennials.
By hiring raw, inexperienced talent, you give them the “forged by the fire” experience. This talent should be built from the ground up i.e., they need to be groomed from an earlier age, with the ability to code ingrained in their brains, either coding the hard way, or the easy way (visually). With the type of languages, autocompleting coding studios available today, literally everyone can code.
Startups can help by building a community of coders - they can run workshops for people who want to learn, inspire other new startups through meetups, and create opportunities for growth through open hackathons. These events can help budding entrepreneurs get to a working prototype. In exchange, startups can mentor them and learn something.
As an example, a number of startup entrepreneurs run their own community meetups - not even limited to coding. For example, in the small city of Kota Kinabalu, off the coast of Borneo, with a small population of just under a million inhabitants - there is an initiative called WebCamp KK (https://www.facebook.com/webcampkk). It’s run by a few entrepreneurs - and today, inspiration from those meetups gave birth to state-registered society specifically meant for communities. This community, the Kinabalu Coders - and that’s their short name (http://kinabalucoders.org/) - was formed to provide a platform where the different communities could work together.
Worldwide, there are both international meetups run by startups include, but are not limited to; Founder’s Drinks, Startup Weekend, Sydney Tech Startup Meetup, Girls in Tech, and of course Startup Grind - and the list goes on. Locally in countries, there are Open Chats, Geek Meets, StartupLokal and many more crazy names to go with these inspiring meetups.
Everyone is glued to their phone. Do something awesome to get millennials to look up from their gadgets. Just in case - millennials are defined by Google as “a person reaching young adulthood around the year 2000.” Personally, I’d say those reaching adulthood in 2010.
Bring the amazing startup culture to life.
Many new entrepreneurs in “non Silicon Valley” cities will carry a lot of cultural baggage from the bigger pre-existing traditional business. Generally this is because there are a lot of people who either have started working in these bigger businesses breaking out to start on their own, which means they start with structures, and beliefs that certain things need to be done in a certain way.
Experienced startups - successful or not, need to share the way startups are working for them; how the need for structure is irrelevant at the early stage, and the fact that failure is completely acceptable. One of the major factors in emerging startup cities is the fact that failure is not well tolerated. Startups need to band together and show that failure is critical to success.
How should this startups share? Remember the meetups - where they teach coding and share their experiences? They can also share the culture through these meetups. Startup Grind (http://startupgrind.com/) is a prime example of this. Startup Grind brings together a lot of startups from across the world to network and meet and understand what it means to be a startup, and this can be even hyper-localised through starting a local chapter.
The culture of positivity and passion is infectious in startups, and by creating a community with this passion, startups can then infect both the traditional businesses and even the policymakers in embracing the culture of startups.
Reinvest locally.
Successful startups - those who already make it out of the trenches in these cities need to reinvest locally. Not just in terms of direct investments, but really supporting the local ecosystem through supporting them in terms of making these startups their suppliers, grooming specific entrepreneurs, and help them make the connections. An interesting example of this is in Argentina, a study of which you can see in this interesting 5-minute video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g95QGhqAus) or if you want to see a more fuller study, in this presentation paper here, also by endeavour global, another startup development organization. (http://www.connect.org/email/global-connect/PDFs/Morris-Rhett-FINAL.pdf)
Sharing their connections can sometimes be one of the toughest things for traditional entrepreneurs since they feel that these connections are the keys to their business. However, at the end of the day, the more they build the local ecosystem, the bigger their own business can be, especially if they are already involved in grooming and building these local businesses.
So, take the best parts of SV, and use it as much as possible. To paraphrase President Kennedy, “Do not ask what your community can do for your startups, but ask what your startups can do for the community.”