Automate Innovation - Idea generation as a service

Back in 1996 Bill Gross founded Idealab, the first “startup studio”. As stated in their website, Idealab was founded to test many ideas at once and turn the best of them into companies while also attracting the human and financial capital necessary to bring them to market.

Since then several entrepreneurs have utilised this ideology to achieve greatness. Just to name a few: Samwer Brothers and their Rocket Internet, Science, by the ex-CEO of MySpace Michael Jones and Expa, created by Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbleUpon and Uber.

All of these ideas share the same formula: you get an idea, you build a product based on your idea, you start a business to sell your product, your business succeeds or, more likely, it fails and you start all over again. Always looking for a new idea(s). Simple and straightforward.

But it’s 2017 now and a new winning formula has begun to take hold. One that challenges the very idea of how a business should be built in a first place. It plays out quite differently: First you start a business. Then your business experiments with lots of ideas, and many ideas fail but some might succeed. Then you turn these ideas into new businesses, and finally, the formula repeats on its own. Partly this is utilising the typical BML (Build-Measure-Learn) cycle which is embedded in our Service Jam methodology.

Failure is an option

As pointed out, ideas will fail and this has to be acceptable. A colleague said to me the other day: “I figured out what bothers me so much about my job. I’m working on a startup team that has no real threat of failure. It should have failed months ago but hasn’t.”

This often happens inside enterprise companies. People should be rewarded for success—a raise, equity in the startup part of the business, a promotion.

The point is, the team building the MVP inside an enterprise should truly act like a startup. They should have funding to pay for salaries for the team as well as for any and all expenses, and that funding should come with expectations around performance.

If those goals are not met, the funding should run out. If funding runs out, the team no longer has those jobs. I know it’s harsh, but without these consequences, too many skunkworks teams go on and on, and on and on, and on and on…

Using lean startup principles inside large companies is not impossible – as long as your innovation team acts as like a real startup. The best shortcut for this is experimenting in real life.

At Eficode, we've been automating software development for a while now. The results we've seen have been so great that we started to think about how we could come up with a solution that could automate innovation. Hence…

Idea Generation-as-a-Service

Our three phase “Launchpad” includes: Ideation, Pitching & Implementation.

If you’re interested in getting new ideas to delightful products with rapid time-to-market, with a monthly fee you can easily budget - contact us HERE.