The National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps program (I-Corps) is not a resource for entrepreneurs to get free money to nurse their startups along the road to nowhere. Nor is it a business plan competition where there is only one winner and everyone else feels like a failure.
It’s a calling.
Being a technical entrepreneur – or any type of entrepreneur, for that matter – is not a job. It’s something you do because each morning, when you wake up, and each evening, when you go to sleep, and even when you wake up during the night… you are thinking about your idea. Not worrying about your idea. You are brainstorming because of what you did during the previous day and with whom you spoke and what you read. And how all that inspired you.
That’s entrepreneurship. It’s a passion.
I spent the last three days guest-mentoring a technical team from MIT-Harvard at the I-Corps training program hosted by the University of Michigan’s Center for Entrepreneurship. And while it’s one thing to read Steve Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany, and Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation, it’s quite another thing to see it played out among 27 academic technical teams from across the nation.
It’s a glorious living, breathing, dynamic pageant.
27 teams. Collaborating, not competing, with each other. Because everyone’s already been awarded the grant to participate. It’s the most major scientific and entrepreneurial blind date I can think of. You come together and, yes, you’ve got your own team to consider. Yet you are inspired to collaborate with everyone else’s venture, as well. You present your proposition in front of one another. You offer feedback to one another. You take your hits. You lick your wounds. You pick yourself up. You move forward.
That’s entrepreneurship. It’s a passion.
The Innovation Corps program is all about Customer Discovery. It’s about talking to real, live, potentially paying customers. For academic technical researchers who are used to attending peer conferences and publishing papers to earn tenure, it’s an uncomfortable requirement. Getting out of the building. Getting out of the university womb. Talking to customers who: 1) may not be your peers, 2) may not be technical, and 3) may hold the power to make decisions about your future.
It’s daunting.
How many grant dollars do you win each year for research projects which are purely intellectual pursuits and may never see the light of day for the greater good of society? What if your NSF funding were also based on the commercialization potential of the research? Would that change the types of students you select for your lab? Would that change the types of grant applications you submit? I think you’re catching my drift.
If you want to be an entrepreneur – and I don’t care if you have a sandwich stand in downtown wherever or whether you are going to cure diabetes – you must understand the environment in which your customers make decisions. You can’t hire marketing and sales people to have these conversations and create your markets for you, after you’ve devoted all your time to creating a product or platform that nobody wants. You must be able to articulate what it’s all about, not just to investors, but even to your employees… and your customers.
Entrepreneurship is a humbling experience. You will doubt yourself. You will question your motives. And then, you begin to leave your ego at the door. You start having customer conversations that “click.”
It’s about speaking to people. Simply. About the stuff that matters. To you both.
You are not your title, your education, your job description. It’s all about understanding your market, and what gives your customers pain, and just who those customers are. It’s about aligning your business model with your customers.
Entrepreneurship used to be treated as a mini version of how mature companies are structured. That’s hardly the case. Entrepreneurial start-ups are in a different universe. So if you left a company and are thinking about starting up your own company (and bringing the bias, baggage, and business model from your previous place of employment) Lord help you. Not gonna work.
It’s about looking at yourself from the outside in, from your customers’ perspective. Not the inside out. It’s open format and interoperability. It’s absence of silos and departmental “us vs them” mindset.
It’s collaboration.
It’s not just for start ups. More than a few mature companies could take a few notes from state of the art entrepreneurship.
Join me!
When I was the lead engineer at a small start-up 8 people, the reminder from one of them was that it was so much fun because we were always one step away from riches and one step away from poverty. It was a total commitment sort of thing, and quite a “head-rush” feeling. We had sales people who were very good in our area of business and they were also good at finding out what our customers needed to solve problems. All that I had to do was make the systems work. What I learned is that one should never ever under any conditions hire the engineering part out to anybody who does not have a huge stake in the organizations success. And if it has to be done right, do it yourself.
Well said, William. Once you have experienced “that” intensity, it gets firmly imprinted on your brain. And you never settle for less again.
We are a startup of 3; The way you described “passion”, it’s considered the driving force. But we need to make sure that all members of the team are at the same level of “passion”, or at least, the key members of the structure. Passion and motivation are very closely related. I made the mistake of thinking i can motivate (i might have been pretentious a bit) my fellow partners, but passion and motivation must come up from within.
The dynamics of a startup are like a marriage. Initially everyone is passionate. Then reality sets in. There are ups and downs. Everyone doesn’t see the same thing the same way. Customers are not knocking down the door; all of you (not just some of you) must engage to build your business. Passion also involves courage, self-discovery, and being honest with oneself and your team members. Many teams become dysfunctional because they will not address differences in opinion and work things out, together. A startup team is an organic whole. You evolve together as your startup moves. You must be open to pivoting as well. Thank you for your comments, Tony.