The best way to innovate is for a large company to view itself as an innovation ecosystem. Because of its core business, an established company cannot be as flexible as a startup, which can focus itself on creating one single product. Instead, established companies need to increase their innovation capabilities from within, without endangering their core business. This requires a big change in the organizational structure, which should ultimately lead to a company that can both search for new business models and execute existing ones.
The blogs are categorized into different elements that come into play with an Innovation Ecosystem. Combined with the “Must Read” blogs it gives you a perfect understanding of what innovation ecosystems are and how to improve one.
It is rather more likely a synthesis across domains or even combining opposites. There are several types of innovation. You need them all.Apart from innovating your products and the processes of your current business models, you also need to innovate whole business models. Define the types of innovation for your organisation.Exploring new models requires a […]
When looking at the success of startups, a common belief is that one third of the companies fail, one third return their money and one third of the companies become successful enough to really move the needle on your investment portfolio. But is that true?
The other week at the Lean Startup Summit I introduced our ROI calculator in a couple of innovation accounting roundtable sessions. The sessions were overbooked in general since innovation accounting and the connection to portfolio management was a topic many were interested in. Most of the people joining the tables were looking for ways to […]
-”Ok, we agree, let’s try innovation. We’ll start slow, with 2 or 4 startups and see what happens”. I have heard this often enough. It seems a logical thing to do, try something first. The problem lies in the fact that people often forget that investing in ideas is, and always will be, a betting game. So the chances of these two or four startups becoming a success are slim considering the odds of 2 out of 10 will make it big.
Creating and running startups as part of a corporate is hard. It’s because the whole organization of a corporate is heavily optimized on execution. And that is how it is supposed to be! Startups however are searching. Searching for a business model that works and can only start executing when they’ve found that working model. […]
How long does it usually take to go through all four phases and what type of investment fits every stage?
“-Can you tell me what you would look for in a startup so I can properly build my MVP?” I am at a Meetup where investors (VC’s mostly) sit around the table with Saas startups. Others are nodding at this question, it is the thing they want to know as well. “-So what do you […]
Photo credits; Marcos Ojeda As we have mentioned before, one of the beliefs in our investment thesis is: “The time of the unicorn is over. We need revenue-driven and problem-solving startups.” Why is this such an important part of our thesis? The system as it is right now, we feel, is broken. VC’s are steering startups […]
At NEXT Amsterdam we believe in helping others. Not only startup founders but also our fellow (informal) investors. That is why we are sharing our knowledge and experience in a series of blog posts about how and why we invest. Two weeks ago we wrote about the investment thesis as the basis of every investment […]
This is Part 2 of our Investing series. There is often a lot of debate about choices investors make. “Why on earth did Investor X invest in Startup Y?” As an investor, you have to make bold choices. Every investment should have the potential to become really big, otherwise, you will never make up for […]
We often get the question of how we select our startups and why. Not only from startups but also from Angel investors. That’s why we decided to write a series of blogposts especially targeted at new (informal) investors. So you can learn from the lessons we learned in the last few years. As an investor, […]
From passion to vision, why all startups should think about it. The one thing I ask first when visualizing business models and strategy is; “What is your Vision?” Why I ask this? Because I think that Vision is a very important part of your business. It guides you, it keeps everyone on the same road and […]
