NEW MAN’S BUSINESS ACCELERATOR - THE SERENDIPITY ENGINE OF THE CENTRAL AND SOUTH-EAST EUROPE

Almost every day I got questions what we are actually doing in NewMan’s Business Accelerator and what we are trying to achieve… And this questions started to multiply in the last couple of days since we published our latest campaign with a title: “Accelerating Serendipity”… What is this that you are promoting now, where this word came from ?!?

Serendipity isn’t magic. And is not only HAPPY ACCIDENTS. Three Princes of Serendip “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of” as early as in 1754. Today, if anyone remembers anything about serendipity are the “accidents”. But equally important is “sagacity”, which the chemist Louis Pasteur famously called “THE PREPARED MIND.” One that thinks more systematically than simple cause-and-effect. In other words, it’s a mind that’s open to the unexpected, to holding back and not jumping to conclusions, and to resist walls between domains and disciplines. You don’t get lucky if you plan everything - and you don’t get serendipity unless you have PERIPHERAL VISION and CREATIVITY. 

We experience moments of serendipity daily, each with potentially huge payoffs down the road. But because we can’t predict which ideas will collide and fuse, we cling to boring productivity and efficiency. We not only run our lives but our entire economy this way, using GDP and even grosser statistics to measure progress that has never unfolded in a straight line. Life is emergent and unknowable — we’re just terrified to manage it that way.

We as NewMan’s Business Accelerator don’t presume that we can schedule innovation, but strongly believe that we can make suitable environment for fruitful and valuable introductions of people and ideas. Everything that we are doing, from the design of our new offices with lot of areas for relaxed collaboration, the creation of our Prototyping studio and our Rooftop cafe, the involvement in NASA Space Apps Challenge, the often trips to San Francisco and Los Angeles and all over the region, the engagement of specific mentors for our students and start-ups, the selection of events that we support and organise, the development of our Cloud Academy and Smart-up programs, it is with an aim to offer tons of opportunities for close encounters, for brains and ideas circulations, to increase the potential for fortuitous discoveries and to prepare our students, start-ups and freelancers to maximise their benefit from it.

The way we are positioned in the region and at the global education and start-up scene the chances of someone from wherever on the globe, but very relevant for the future of our participants and associates, walking in NewMan’s are substantially greater than in any other office space or education institution in the country. We are crossroad and place to exchange services and ideas with others you would never encounter anywhere else. We are not a set of students, we are not a set of mentors or entrepreneurs, we are a SET OF INTERACTIONS. We are place where strangers collect, collide, and fuse - releasing tremendous heat and light in the process. What makes NewMan’s Business Accelerator great, in other words, is how well its people are connected - to us and to each other. It’s place where you can find and connect with others who either share your passion or have relevant capability to help you address the challenges ahead. 

By this we aim to engineer serendipity. And by engineering serendipity we ACCELERATE SERENDIPITY, and by accelerating serendipity we ACCELERATE LEARNING of each and everyone that ever spent some time in NewMan’s either by dropping-in at some of our events, by being enrolled in some of our programs, or being engaged as our mentor or supporter… Since we consider that the future of every new discovery is a place for answering questions you never thought to ask. 

We live in a region where most of the todays institutions were built in a different era – one that relentlessly sought to suppress passion in the name of predictability and efficiency. And when I say institutions, I mean all of our institutions – corporations, schools, NGO’s and governments. It’s no accident that only single-digit percentage of the workforce is passionate about their work. This is a sign of great success for these institutions. This is exactly what they were designed to do – suppress passion. It starts with our schools that seek to prepare us for all the other institutional environments seeking people who can reliably follow instructions and execute in a predictable manner. Passion leads people to take risks as they embark on new quests, passion drives experimentation and tinkering, and sometimes even bold leaps, that undermine tightly integrated systems, and passion drives people to connect in unexpected ways that are not carefully programmed in advance.

Passion drives us to learn faster in our never-ending quest to achieve higher levels of impact within our chosen domain. But our institutions today are driven by scalable efficiency, not scalable learning. In fact, scalable efficiency (at least as traditionally defined) is profoundly hostile to scalable learning – how could anyone really learn in an environment that is highly risk averse, standardises all activity and tightly specifies every step that must be taken? Think for a moment! What would institutions look like if their core rationale were scalable learning? What if the reason we’ll come together in institutions in the future is that we’ll learn faster as participants in those institutions than we ever could on our own? We craft NewMan’s to be this kind of institution. A catalysts of your passion and amplifier of the impact of your actions. One that focuses on the ability of each of you to achieve far more of your potential than you ever would have imagined possible. Here anyone, regardless of origins or wealth, can achieve great success. But this isn’t pre-destined and inevitable. Far from it. It requires each of you to make the choice to come in NewMan’s (onsite in Skopje or online via our Knowbook platform) and to make a dedicated effort as long as it is required to achieve that success and to build a new life for yourself.

Our mission and vision is not just created on paper or engraved in stone. It is built through the actions that we are taking as we see the opportunity ahead and it emerges and evolves through the interactions with all of our participants and partners as we collectively begin to sense a growing opportunity and learn what it will take to achieve that opportunity - a young people from the region of CENTRAL AND SOUTH-EAST EUROPE to start CHANGING THE WORLD!

We have an extraordinary opportunity to turn our region into an amazing place to live, grow, learn and excel. The path we take from here will depend on each and every one of us. I count on every leader in the region of similar initiative or mission as NewMan’s to connect in order to work together to overcome challenges as well as draw comfort and reassurance from each other if we stumble along the way. We need to join and focus our efforts to frame the opportunity ahead and to help all young talents and entrepreneurs from our countries to connect among each other and to re-connect with the passion we all had at an earlier point in our lives. The good news is that, if we choose to act, small moves, smartly made, can indeed set very big things in motion.

To all young people out there: You don’t need tons of money, university diploma or fancy clothes to be part of NewMan’s Business Accelerator. Just come as you are with an opened mind and tons of passion for building great things together… I am sure we’ll find a way to make it work! And if you are an organisation or corporation ready to be “serendipitied” don’t hesitate to reach us - we and our young talents will be delighted to join our forces with you.

Irena N. Chaushevska,
Founder & CEO of NewMan's Business Accelerator