E - Novation and Start - Up Companies

Author experiences from working jointly and within startups inform this chapter. Emphasizing the importance of employees achieving unprecedented productivity through working collaboratively and supported by flexible roles and social technologies cannot be understated. Startup employees led by the entrepreneur are masters of embracing complexity. This means the startup team understands cause and effect follow a non-linear relationship with the subtlest of changes potentially resultant in producing chaotic behavior and surprise. For the startup, especially in recessionary times, this means counterintuitive thinking wins the day. In light of this, small expenditures can have a greater impact on developing new business compared with the large budgets available to incumbent players. The startup employee prefers not to be constrained by the old broadcast model of email instead exploiting social technologies. This includes the use of wikis as an enabler of both interactive communications and repository of company knowledge. A founding myth helps drive new hires and can underpin a service centric focus creating unique customer experiences based on the vision of the entrepreneur and storytelling. A startup is a learning organization improving processes and results on an ongoing basis mirroring entrepreneurship as a learning process. Within a startup, limited processes exist, and core employees embrace next practice to help drive a major source of competitive advantage. Startup employees realize success goes beyond consideration of product functionality or a track record of existing customers. Each business development opportunity for the startup is driven by experience co-created with the customer. By 2010 the potential to launch a “startup-in-a-box” with an E-Novation framework (Pattinson and Low 2008) supported by social technologies to foster intense collaboration among core employees will become both a reality and essential. Only through a combination of framework and social technologies can startups and founding employees keep pace with the changing business landscape and generate a rapid amount of knowledge to sustain sufficient advantage in the market.