By Tony Bailetti
This is part two of a two-part series that throws the spotlight on the need to develop prescriptive rules and practitioner-oriented models that can help technology startups operate globally upon or shortly after inception.
The lessons in this series are extracted from reading the literature and examining 21 companies that globalized early and rapidly. They were first published in the October issue of the TIM Review, a journal that provides free and unlimited online access to high-quality articles about technology and global entrepreneurship.
Part one covered the lessons learned from the literature. This post will share the lessons learned from examining publicly available information on 21 startups in 12 countries that globalized early and rapidly.
The three main findings are as follows:
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By Tony Bailetti
Entrepreneurs need access to the knowledge, approaches, methods, and tools they require to globalize their startups early and rapidly.
For the purpose of this series, globalization refers to the process by which a company meets the needs of a global market, one which integrates many formerly domestic markets including the company’s home market. A global market is the result of nation-states breaking down barriers to international trade, shifts to market economies, mobility of talent and capital, and advances in transportation, information, and communications technology.
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By Francis Moran
Former Canadian Olympic gold medalist and chef de mission Mark Tewksbury gave a keynote address at the National Angel Capital Organization‘s summit in Halifax in late October. In urging that Canadian business adopt the Olympic movement’s Own the Podium approach that sees athlete funding going disproportionately to those who show the best promise of winning a medal, Tewksbury said we have to move away from the old Canadian funding model. That approach, he said, sees government spread its limited funds across too many recipients, ensuring that nobody starves but also that nobody gets the resources they really need to succeed. As Tewksbury put it, funding before Own the Podium was “one for me, one for you,” ensuring “one for me-diocrity.”
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By Leo Valiquette
The Ottawa-Gatineau economy, according to the Conference Board of Canada’s Mario Lefebvre, is one that cannot be counted down and out.
That was the sentiment he delivered last week at Forecasting Ottawa’s Economic Future, an inaugural event that featured his outlook for the local economy and a panel discussion with frank perspectives from several of Ottawa’s business leaders.
Lefebvre reviewed Ottawa’s performance through the worst of the economic downturn in 2009 and 2010, a period during which it suffered losses in employment and GDP that were often marginal compared to other major urban centres across Canada. In fact, in the darkest days of 2009, disposable income continued to rise, thanks in part to continued job growth in the federal public sector; job growth that, at this point in time, outstrips the program spending cuts since announced by the Harper government. Despite that belt tightening, Lefebvre remains bullish on the local economy’s outlook beyond 2013 thanks largely to the presence of the public service.
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By Francis Moran
There’s been a growing amount of attention paid recently to the surge in interest by startups in working on enterprise-grade products and services rather than the quick-to-market consumer and web applications that for so long seemed to dominate pitch contests, accelerator program cohorts and media attention.
“Enterprise is getting sexy,” Kevin Rose of Google Ventures said recently. Bernard Lunn has done a 180 on his 10-year-old requiem for enterprise software, saying it didn’t die, it just went into a coma from which it is now recovering. Enterprises, Lunn said, “cannot simply empower every employee with consumer web type tools and hope they all pull together to grow the profits.” Our own Jesse Rodgers wrote earlier this week about the allure of building enterprise products, saying that opportunities in the enterprise are being driven by the BYOD movement that is requiring IT departments to deliver better tools, a higher expectation of a better user experience than that delivered by stodgy old enterprise software, and an easing of the once-onerous burden associated with the enterprise sale.
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