Sound Business Advice
The group of judges that preside over the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition picked their Top 10 Recommendations for Startups this week :
1. Find a customer for whom your product or service is a "must have" and who will buy again.
2. If you can avoid raising venture capital, do so. If you need venture capital, raise more than you think you need. Either way, focus on sales and conserve cash.
3. Surround yourself with good people and let them do their jobs. Don’t get caught up in control issues.
Some real gems of wisdom here ; Advice that would be invaluable to all kinds of businesses (and managers), not just startups.
I would like to add that sustaining innovation is not enough to keep the business going.a business should practise disruptive innovation to create needs for consumers.Sustaining innovations typically alter the business model to lower the cost or increase efficiencies for the customer.Disruptive innovation takes a proactive approach as opposed to the reactive approach in sustaining innovations.According to the reigning guru of innovation clayton m christensen who is a professor at Harvard Business School, firms succeed because they listen responsively to their customers and invest aggressively in the technology, products, and manufacturing-capabilities that satisfy their customers’ future needs. Paradoxically, it’s for these very reasons that companies stumble and lose market leadership. They become so focused on sustaining what they do well that they lose sight of the threat of disruption from more innovative competitors. New market disrupters create a new market for a product or service by making it so affordable or convenient that a whole new set of customers is born. PCs, portable computers, even on-line auctions on eBay – all those are examples of innovations that created consumption where no consumption existed before. Low-end disruptions, on the other hand, are disruptive innovations based on low-cost business models. Mini-steel mills, discount retailers like Wal-Mart, and on-line book sales on Amazon.com are disruptive ideas, but based on wooing away the least attractive of the incumbents’ customers.