The last few weeks have been dedicated to eating my own dog food about getting ideas off the ground.
Around September 2010, I realised that my innovation consulting practice can no longer be a 'Solo-Show'; to build the kind of company that I knew possible, I had to muster a great team around me.
A lot of people worry about 'How' to get an idea off the ground. In my view, the question to focus on is 'Who" are the right people you need to make the idea a huge success. Once the "Who" question is answered, the "How" part will emerge.
It took me a while gather a team who could see what I was talking about. Tim Brown from IDEO talks about T-Shaped People ... a group of people who have a broad set of complimentary skills and one deep area of Specialisation.
Collaboration is easy to talk about but really hard to practice. Most ideas won't get off the ground because the Entrepreneur wants to keep full control of the implementation. By sharing this idea with my new team, I had to let go of control, and trust the collective intelligence of the team will transition the idea to a whole new level that I could not possibly have achieved on my own.
I'm really proud of this team; It has got the right mix of Applied Research, Business Management & Entrepreneurship to tackle the kind of "Hard-To-Crack Problems" and "Hard-To-See Opportunities" that our clients will throw at us.
During the last 8 weeks, we have managed to complete the first phase of this new enterprise; the most important items being Company Structure, Shareholder Agreement, Branding & Identity. I'm really glad about deciding to use CrowdSPRING to find a company name & identity design.
The next phase is designing and market testing our service offerings. The link to the new company website is www.visionaro.com
Over the next three months, I'm looking forward to working with few selected customers for market validation and refining the Visionaro value proposition.
