The principles of disruption are simple — it’s the execution that’s hard. It takes guts, leadership, commitment, and engagement to successfully disrupt markets and create new ones.
Creating, building, and launching successful new ventures always begins with an aspirational challenge. It has to be broad enough to generate disruptive ideas yet still be bounded by well-defined value propositions to real customers and stakeholders — that is, to the people who matter most.
Organizations that wish to remain relevant and thrive in the digital economy need to unleash their intrapreneurs and give them time and space to focus on new venture creation. Most intrapreneurial personalities have been labeled as mavericks or troublemakers in the company. These are the renegades we are looking for at Mach49.
Despite enjoying tremendous assets and an army of talented intrapreneurs, why do many large companies find it difficult to design and launch disruptive new ventures? It’s simple: They don’t embrace risk and failure as part of their culture. Smart organizations view risk-taking as a badge of honor, rather than a blemish on one’s career.
We take teams that are passionate about a new venture idea, arm them with a portfolio of tools, frameworks, and methodologies, and then add the outside inspiration, experience, and mentoring needed to ensure that your new ventures thrive.
The best startups always exhibit radical customer empathy. Surveys, focus groups, and hearsay are never substitutes for direct customer and stakeholder interviews. If you outsource your visceral understanding and empathy of the customer, you miss what matters most to deliver a compelling customer experience.
All great startups live at the nexus of customer pain, the latest technologies, and emerging business models. It's imperative that large companies and their internal entrepreneurs stay current on the trends and technologies available to delight their customers. Having the vision to leap from pain to product to market is the magic moment for all great startups.
Destination defines the direction. You need to establish your offerings in the context of an opportunity framework—an executable vision — big enough to drive meaningful mothership growth. Then define a minimal viable product that can be tested quickly and inexpensively to learn, find traction, and product-market fit in support of your product roadmap.
Finding product-market fit requires an agile, yet rigorous approach to prototyping, piloting, and pivoting. Be willing to turn on a dime in a new direction based on what you learn from customers. And remember, whether it’s a technical, market, business model, or governance risk, your goal is to remove the greatest amount of risk with the least amount of capital.
You have a unique advantage over typical VC-backed startups. You have the customers, channels, talent, technology, brand, supply chain, and capital to ensure new ventures reach escape velocity into the marketplace far more quickly and robustly. To build a pipeline and portfolio of new, disruptive ventures, you’ll need to identify and enlist internal new venture advocates that create your own Silicon Valley inside your organization to accelerate growth.
As much as we celebrate startups, most people are employed by large companies — and they need purposeful, meaningful work for their ever-longer careers. Launching new ventures, especially those working to solve big, global problems, is one way to allow people in your organization to be entrepreneurial, creative, to feel alive, have an impact, and yes, to have fun.
