Building an innovation factory

We are living in an era where technology and innovation are essential. The world around us is changing faster than we can comprehend. Technology has transformed every kind of business and will continue to do so more dynamically in the years to come. As a business leader, you must be in a denial to overlook how these changes are impacting your company and formulating your future possibilities. Keeping your head in the sand is no longer an option!

As a leader, you have to respond today. Technology and innovation can no longer be viewed as a sideshow. It is the way to do business and the key driver of sustainable growth. Of course, this notion is not something new. We have been dealing with these challenges for many decades. What is remarkable today is the pace of change. Everything is happening faster than we had planned and the impact is always more powerful than we had anticipated. It is cheaper and faster to create a company today than ever before and at the same time, the average lifespan of companies is getting shorter and shorter. Foster and Kapan in the extremely informative work “Creative Destruction” have predicted that the entire S&P 500 index will be replaced by 2027!

After 20 years as an entrepreneur creating startups and scaling technology businesses, I was still frustrated that things weren’t moving as fast as they should. For that reason, I decided to take action and create the innovation factory that I always envisioned. A shipyard, if you may, of business that will cover the entire process (from idea and validation, up to growth and scale) and help entrepreneurs, inventors, technologists (and everything in between) to design, develop and market their solutions.

In this process it is essential to be fully aware of what is possible, It is important to realize that businesses fail a lot. The first 3 years of every business (a period that is more known as the startup period) nine out of ten times you are going to fail. Even if you manage to survive this valley of death, there are 90% chances that you will end up in a business that is different from what you have initially planned to do (on average startups pivot 3 times in the first 2 years). Most entrepreneurs rarely get it right at the beginning and have to iterate and pivot their way to success.

‘Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have… It’s about the people you have, how you’re led and how much you get it.’ - Steve Jobs

Taking all this info under consideration along with the lessons I learned the hard ways as an entrepreneur for the last 20 years, I needed to do 3 things in order to start building the shipyard for businesses.

1)    Create a management framework that will cover the entire process. After 20 years of developing products and formulating teams that create value and at the same time reading almost every book that is currently available in the field (my top 3 are 1) Blitzscaling, 2) Business Dynamics, and 3) The corporate startup), I have formulated the key components of a business framework that could be relevant for an innovation factory. Hopefully, in the near future, I will have the chance to share them with the community but before doing that I need to validate them first. And for that, I need to join/create a team that shares the same passion.

2)    Formulate or join the right team. As an entrepreneur creating from scratch or joining a team is always one of the biggest challenges you must face. You must be “lucky” enough to find professionals with the same vision that have complementary skill sets and at the same time be structured enough to create the right processes and a culture that will help the team grow. In my case, the trigger was my interaction with Marios Papanikolopoulos and the amazing MoRo team. MoRo is building and backing solutions that aim to make the world’s cities a radically better place by revolutionizing the urban mobility experience. But more than that, MoRo is a team of some extremely talented people that combine technology and data to create innovative ways that change how we experience movement.

3)    Just do it. After identifying the need (build an innovation factory), formulating the plan (an innovation framework) and finding the right partners the only thing left to do is to take a breath and jump.

Stay tuned for the updates!