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Earlier this week I talked about this project on the Made by Many blog.
The thrust of my post, for anyone who doesn’t have the time to prowl through it, is that the people behind digital products and services tend to build them in isolation — behind a creative wall.
I think this wall should come down — or at least, be dismantled as much as possible, wherever possible. I believe we can create better things by soliciting peer feedback early and often. (Indeed, this blog is a means for doing just that.)
My post has elicited some feedback from my MxM colleagues, namely in regards to the feasibility of doing this.
Mike, who is also working on this project, says this open approach to product and service design is “less appealing for organisations in massively competitive markets, where marginal points of difference can result in enormous profits”.
Fair enough. He also points out that openness is not necessarily key for innovation or market success — and he cites Apple as an example.
But as far as innovators go, Apple is so far ahead of the pack that its product development methods are not really worth including in a conversation about how MOST companies can improve the way they work. There are too many other factors at play: I can train as much as Michael Phelps does, but I’m not going to swim as fast.
The issue, for most innovators, was put very clearly by Anjali: the creative wall is a mindset as well as a practice — a mindset she alleges won’t be easy to change:
“I met an FMCG company recently who were completely against being open because product development sometimes happen so slowly… NDAs and incentives will NOT work for behemoth places, period.”
Anjali’s got a point — but for us, it’s time to draw a new line.
We’re not a behemoth FMCG, nor may we be working on something where small points of difference will necessarily result in enormous profits, as Mike says. We’re also not asking for a bunch of NDAs to be passed around.
All the same, innovation is our lifeblood. It’s a risk, maybe — but the conversation is worth having. So over the next few days we’ll post one of the things we think makes our service unique.
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Today marks the first day of Global Entrepreneurship Week. No big deal? We beg to differ — here’s why.
1. These people are our customers
We’re building a service to help entrepreneurs turn their local businesses into global businesses.
This service will help small and medium-sized tech companies get to international markets faster, whether they’re staking out new territory or competing against already-established market leaders.
But however successful our service is, no small or medium-sized business is going to get far off the start line with stale ideas. Being as good as the competition just isn’t enough… which brings me to my second point.
2. Entrepreneurs have to be better
Global markets are crowded, competitive places — in technology markets this is especially true. Only the strongest, most clever, most tenacious entrepreneurs survive.
Look to some of our most successful entrepreneurs. Many of them have failed — badly. Fallen flat on their faces. Lost every penny. We know them today because they came back to succeed. And it’s by coming back with new ideas and better executions that entrepreneurs keep markets dynamic.
3. Only the strongest survive
‘Good enough’ stops being good enough when something better is out there — and the entrepreneurial spirit ensures that something better is never far away.
This means consumers get higher-quality goods and services, and in turn, the providers of those goods and services are continually challenged to push the bar higher.
… And this is good for us all.
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Can you ever have enough customer input *before* you design a product or service? We don’t think so… and thus without further ado, we’d like to do a little matchmaking between tech companies and UKTI business support:
UKTI would like to support interested companies to attend LeWeb 2009 in Paris.
The aim is that UKTI will be able to help businesses make the most of the LeWeb tech conference to the end of helping them do better business.
The conversations that happen before, during and after the conference will hopefully yield some clear directives on what UK tech businesses need… which we will then factor into the service we’re developing.
If this sounds like something you would like to take part in, please get all the details on LinkedIn and reply privately or as part of the discussion.
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Preparation is everything... Photo copyright Michal Osmenda
We’ve spoken with all sorts of people (entrepreneurs, public sector employees, SMEs, service providers) about their experiences taking businesses to new markets. Among other things, we asked them where they struggled.
Surprisingly to us, the biggest hurdle they mentioned was about getting your hands on the facts you need. Just about everyone had a story that began with those fateful words, “If only I had known…”.
Here are a few snippets from the interview archives:
“There are so many issues you don’t expect, like the complexities of VAT in Spain, or how to get a bank account in France without an address… peer-to-peer advice would have been really helpful.”
“Frustratingly, the HMRC rulebook is unclear [on VAT in European markets]. For software the issue is complicated by specific rulings about ‘downloadable software’. I know that lots of sellers are basically putting their heads under the blankets, and just ignoring VAT. Anyone got any advice?”
“Sorting out ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ in French is just the beginning. Translation is not enough — you have to localise.”
“We wasted a lot of time and money assuming things would be as they were in the UK. Real advice from people who had done it before would have been invaluable.”
“I need to know what I have to do so I can do it and get to market. As an entrepreneur, I have to minimise the cost of failure.”
“Knowing about cultural differences is massively important. You’ve got to understand the etiquette, from how to deal with someone in seniority (do you get straight down to business?) to the dos and don’ts of greeting a lady (do you shake hands?).”
“It’s totally different working with people in Santa Cruz versus in Boston. Knowing the pace the market works at can be a real advantage when it comes to doing business with people there.”
“In US markets the costs of labour are different from state to state. You can do a bit of desktop research, but people on the ground with local knowledge make all the difference.”
“I spent two years trying to convince my Spanish customers to sign contracts before I realised this was just the way the Spanish market worked. Insight from someone who had been there before could have saved me a lot of money.”
What do you think — do any of these resonate with you?
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We put this presentation together at the outset of our project. It explains, in a really top-level kind of way, the challenges businesses face as they internationalise, and it sets out our end goal: to help businesses get to market faster.
Get-to-market elevator pitchView more documents from madebymany. -
Going Global (Beta) is the story around a project we’re working on at Made by Many.
We’ve joined forces with several industry players including UK Technology and UKTI to solve a problem:
How do you help UK-based SMEs, specifically tech companies, get to international markets faster and with a greater chance of success?
How, indeed…
We took this project on in early October. We began by asking UK-based tech SMEs — the people we hope will use and benefit from the service we build — to tell us about how they internationalise: the steps they take, the challenges they face and, in retrospect, the things they wish they had known.
These discussions have played out in person, over the phone, and in the LinkedIn group we created, UK Technology Global Markets. They have resulted in some really human, unexpected insights into internationalisation (more on those later).
Just over a month in, we’re getting close to the end of our visioning process and we’re confident we’ve got a service candidate that will make a real difference to SMEs.
Doing it the agile way
Now that the vision is just about set (more on that later), the next steps are prototyping, design, development, and of course, a LOT of testing. As we’re working according to agile principles, we need to expect things will change as we go (new ideas, shifts in requirements, Acts of God) and we’ve got to be ready to adapt to these changes.
This blog is a window into how we’re getting on with this project. We’re throwing the shutters wide open with a real-time, insider’s view on this project… every bit of it.
Feeling a little bit naked
Naturally, our blog is open to everyone, but we think or at least *hope* that it might be of particular interest to product managers, designers, planners, developers and agile buffs. It’s an agile experiment, performed in full view of anyone who cares to look.
Why bother? Well, we think that doing this in a really transparent, accountable way will help us deliver a better project.
So welcome to The Story Of, told as honestly as we can tell it. Stay tuned and tell us what you think, and if you want the other side of the story, join our LinkedIn group and listen to what our customers are saying.
We’re also on Twitter @GoingGlobalBeta
UK Technology Global Markets group