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Last Friday Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher) gave us a little help getting the Going Global word out there by tweeting the following message to his many followers:
How can uk gov’t support tech companies launching in other markets?
His tweet attracted thirteen suggestions — here they are:
- Offer TSB/NESTA/RDA-type funding funneled through UKTI or other dedicated body
- Give us help with patents (advice, money to get them) both here and abroad so UK ideas stay with UK companies
- Help with flights; arranging meetings/”demo days” with potential partners/clients through embassy; provide local market information; help with PR
- Check out the UKT&I Global Entrepreneur Programme — how about an equivalent to that but with a local/national focus?
- How about a free local PR agency?
- Promote Webmission-like initiatives
- More school leavers with foreign language skills
- How about seminars on what other markets expect from you — getting language and marketing pitch right for those markets etc?
- Do a quick analysis of the brand name, appearance, and packaging would be very useful — just to make sure there’s nothing obviously inappropriate for the country/market in question
- Shared office space to operate out of on trips to key geographic markets; also, local legal help
- Advisors in UKTI with experience of building tech companies
- Allow application of R&D Tax Credits to travel and overseas office expenses
- The Government could assign case workers at consulates, dedicated to your company, to make introductions and assist
This is a pretty full list, and I expect some if the items on it may be a touch contentious, but I think it’s great to get some debate happening on this subject. What do you think — do any of these resonate with you?
Just a note — we’ve followed everyone who suggested something. If you’ve got ideas about how we can make this service better, tell us in a tweet (@goingglobalbeta), or follow us and send us an @ message. We’ll then follow you back so you can DM us. Not a Twitterer? Comment away…
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For the last two months we have been working towards a presentation to the UK Technology Strategy Implementation Board (SIB).
The board is comprised of senior representatives of large technology companies such as IBM, ARM, COLT, Logica, Microsoft, 02 and Nokia. In essence, the board’s primary role is to market the UK technology industry to the world. You can read more about the strategy here and the board members here.
The purpose of the presentation was to convey the vision we’ve been working on for the last two months.
The presentation was yesterday at IBM’s offices on the South Bank.
We dressed the entrance with a few visuals to help explain the thinking that went in to the service. Below you can see the example market guide content and the underlying data model for a few of the user journeys we did. I’ll blog a bit more about these two things very soon.
And here you can see the service ecology diagram, which outlines many of the different types of service you may come across when carrying out business overseas. What’s presented here is really just a fraction of the services available. Again, I’ll blog about this bit very soon.
The presentation centered around two user journeys we put together to demonstrate the concept (again, more on this later). We’re big believers in storytelling and user journeys are a great way to convey how a business might benefit from using the service.
The concepts we’ve put together were incredibly well received and there was unanimous support for what we are doing. Consequentially, the board made the decision to continue in this respect.
Of course we are very pleased with the outcome, but we have a long way to go before the work we’re doing starts having a positive impact on the UK economy.
Many thanks for all the people who came in for interviews, commented on this blog and the LinkedIn group. Please do keep giving us your feedback and insight. The success of this project relies on SMEs that are prepared to take the time out to help each other to benefit the UK economy.
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We’ve started referring to this service as a free peer-to-peer knowledge economy. Big name, but simply put, it’s a means for industry peers to share knowledge.
If you want information on, say, start-up success rates for a specific region of China, you can use the service to search for just that.
Your search will (probably) generate (some) results, as do most searches. So far, so ordinary.
But here’s where it gets interesting. If your search doesn’t turn up the information you’re after, you can ask for it.
We haven’t yet designed the pages, so we can’t show you those, but here’s the process — first in a slideshow…
Close-up on content creationView more documents from madebymany.… And now in words:
You fill out a quick request, specifying just what information you need.
The system fires off your request to the people best placed to answer it — so in this example, it might be the UKTI people on the ground in China, but also UKTI contacts in other regions that might offer an alternative option.
You get a heads-up as this information is created and uploaded onto the system.
You read the information, rate it and/or comment on it. If it does the trick, that’s it — job done. If not, you can request more information through the same process.
… So what do we think?
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Here’s an update on the project. It includes some stats on the market’s need for a service like this, as well as more information on how the service would work. There are also three user journeys.
All of this is subject to change as the service evolves, but for the most part, this is where we’re headed.
If anything in this presentation resonates with you, please feel free to jump in with a comment.
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Mike and I attended TechnologyWorld 09 in Coventry this week to meet some people who we hope will use this service. We wanted to find out what they think of it, and ideally start to build a community of interested users.
We spoke with a lot of people who had some really positive feedback about the work we’re doing. One of the challenges we had, though, was explaining just what we’ve been doing.
From words to pictures and back again
I’ve been working ‘in digital’ (sorry, folks) for a while now, and something I find endlessly tricky is figuring out the right way to explain (in spoken words and — at least in my case — flappy hand gestures) exactly what you’re creating (out of written words, pixels, algorithms, etc etc).
I don’t know if there’s one best way to do this, but I suspect there isn’t — in fact, I reckon it’s a lot like teaching something, where you find that some people learn with a teleological approach, whereas others do better with a metaphor or hands-on learning or whatever other method.
And so, without further ado, here are my findings on how to get early feedback from future users, with nothing but words and hand gestures…
1. Whatever you do, don’t bore them…
Sometimes I walk the potential user through a possible user experience, but I find that to be a roundabout way of doing things. It’s sort of like telegraphing punches: by the time you finally deliver, your target has been anticipating it for so long that they’re almost bored… and needless to say, you don’t land the punch quite as powerfully as you’d have liked to.
I avoided doing this in my TechnologyWorld chats, as I thought it asked for too much time and commitment from the people I was speaking with (after all, they want to tell me about their work, too).
2. Problem-solving sometimes works
Another way of going about it is with a problem-solution method, where you can walk through a problem and show how your product solves it. The downside is that this can take a while, and you run the risk of losing your audience if the problem you spell out doesn’t resonate.
3. Answer the biggie: what’s in it for me?
Finally — and this is the method was very successful on Monday — you can try walking users (well, future, would-be users) through the benefits of what you’re doing. I found that people responded very positively to learning about how this could help them… even if they didn’t necessarily need all of the help it could offer.
One thing I have learned though is that it’s prudent to be really humble when you do this — it’s all too easy to alienate the people you’re talking to by sounding a bit overconfident about the horse you’re backing.
I’d like to know how other people approach this challenge. Ideally, we’d have hours to play with and all sorts of sketches and slides and user journeys to walk through… but that isn’t always the case. With five or fewer minutes to play with, what’s the best way to (really, solidly) explain a digital service?
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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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When I began on this project, I knew very little about internationalisation. It’s a huge and very daunting subject. This is because it can be different for every industry, market, product, founder, entry mode etc.
Any complex subject usually has a wealth of academic literature associated with it. And internationalisation is no exception.
From the beginning, we needed some form of robust model to understand the process that firms go through.
Early models of internationalisation, namely the Upsala model and Cavusgil’s I-model, suggested that firms gradually increase their involvement in overseas markets which they consider have some form of psychic proximity to their own domestic market. For example, many firms may consider the US to have a close proximity simply because we share the same language.
The following image conveys the I-model process of internationalisation (Cavusgil).
- Domestic marketing – Firm isn’t considering internationalisation and is carrying out marketing efforts solely in the domestic market
- Pre-export – Firm is researching and preparing for involvement in a new overseas market.
- Experimental involvement – Firm may be attending trade shows, missions, offering services in a new market in order to evaluate demand.
- Active involvement – Firm is trading directly in or with a new market. Typically less than 10% of revenue will come from this new market.
- Committed involvement – Firm has made a commitment to the new market and may be considering other new markets.
The crux of this model is the precis that firms experiment gradually into new markets, as opposed to jumping straight in head first.
However, this model has a number of problems.
The traditional staged models don’t account for the behaviour of some firms (e.g. ‘born globals’) who have the management expertise, a network of valuable contacts, a knowledge-based product (i.e. no physical shipping) and a desire to internationalise to many markets concurrently and rapidly to gain a first-mover advantage.
Born global firms becoming more and more common and is particularly important for UK Technology companies, where intellectual property and technology design form an integral aspect what the UK excels at.
The staged model is still very valid for some firms and we have witnessed a number of firms working in this manner in our own research. However, a more holistic model has been developed by Jim Bell, Ron McNaughton, Stephen Young and Dave Crick.
An integrative model of small firm internationalisation
The integrative model (Bell et al) takes into account not only the more proactive and competitive approach of born globals but includes the more traditional staged approach and even seeks to marry the two approaches with the concept of born-again global firms.
The model indicates the most stereotypical trajectories as opposed to rigid pathways and has served as inspiration for an approach to the design which prioritises versatility.
Most importantly, when incorporating the stages of internationalisation, the model tends to use them more as states, not stages. This thereby affords the potential for forward, backward or repetitive involvement in the ’stages’.
A flexible model, but does it suit you?
I would be interested to hear if you have internationalised your business and you feel you do not fit into the above model.
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In designing the service, we’ve tried to take into account not only our users’ needs but how businesses are currently served. And ultimately, how our service should be best positioned.
We began by working out what big goals SMEs tend to have when looking to enter new markets. These were mostly gleaned through conversations directly with UK SMEs that came into the office, through the LinkedIn group and through other desktop research. They are by no means exhaustive but they certainly cover plenty of ground.
We then started to look at how these goals could be grouped in terms of how current services answer those needs.
As you can see below, these categories are Insight, Planning and Connections.
Insight is all about knowledge and understanding.
Planning is about ensuring things happen on time and on budget.
Connections is about having the right relationships in place.
These aspects are all hugely important depending on the context, but we believe that a service isn’t likely to be everything to everyone. And why should it? Some of these needs are already served very well elsewhere.
We believe the service could do varying degrees of two of these things very well.
Perhaps one day it could do all three, but it doesn’t necessarily need to do all three.
What’s crucial is that it must address the needs that are least best served currently.
Lots of services in the digital world offer these things already, so we plotted where we think those services exist.
We also looked at various services that exist in the real world.
From this, we believe that there is an opportunity somewhere sharply positioned around insight but less on planning. A couple of reasons for this are as follows.
- The area of connections is already well served by LinkedIn, Twitter, trade organisations and other services. This stands to reason, as the concept of connections is commonly understood as hugely important in business of any kind.
- Many participants mentioned how fragmented information about internationalisation is.
- Business planning is still largely closed and confidential and isn’t something that necessarily would thrive in the social web (although the concept of open business planning certainly has legs and isn’t currently well served).
It would be possible to do this in a very scientific and quantifiable manner, however, we’ve used this technique more of a thinking tool than a research tool.
As ever, feedback is very much appreciated.
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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.
About
We’re Made by Many, and we’re working with UK Technology to create a cracking new service for businesses with big overseas ideas.
- What kind of super-useful, sticky things are brands and businesses doing with Twitter? We just followed @cleveraccounts for inspiration. 2010-04-06
- Here's a site we're loving right now -- timely, too: Vote for Policies http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/ 2010-04-06
- This one's for the Agilists -- blog post documenting our user story session as we map out the new service http://bit.ly/9k8BLO 2010-04-01
- More updates...
Sites we like
UK Technology Global Markets groupFrom: Made by Many Ltd.
In partnership with: UK technology