We are in the world of Start-ups. A world where a small group of people try to solve some problems.
Startups:- A small group of highly focused people trying to solve / address some specific customer problems. The success rate of the startup depends on various factors. Even if the startup didn't succeed in business, they would have nearly solved some of the basic needs / problems of the customer.
The highly focused, deterministic, risk taking attitude of the startup would help them to be aggressive and advance faster to the solution, most of the time disrupt the market / industry with the solutions.
Mature process oriented Model:- A model usually adopted by the mature organizations and multinationals. This model would be more reliable and would have less risk. These models are proven, but at the same time, ends up in lot of process overheads.
Most of the times, the process are followed like a ritual without having a clarity on the reason for following the process.
The Hybrid Model:- The Hybrid model is the right mix of the startup model and mature process oriented model.
Why Hybrid Model:- The startup model and Mature process oriented model have its own advantage and drawbacks.
Consider a case where a proposal to address a business gap or a new offer to market is being thought about. This should ideally start with a startup model due to the following reasons
1) Quick Proof Of Concept to validate the idea
2) Less Cost and impact
3) May help to explore new methods / techniques - out of box thinking & innovation
Where as when an offer is placed to market, or maintaining an offer the mature process oriented model would have advantages
1) Less Risk
2) Better Reliability
3) Better plan for end to end product life cycle management
The right mix of the models would help the Organization to succeed. In the current world non organization would be able to sustain if they are only with one of the model.
Eg:- Lets consider the pioneer in photography Kodak as an example.
Kodak was one of the best in photography, with the conventional film camera.
They didn't consider the disruption of digital photography and overlooked the technology. This resulted in Kodak loosing the market share and at the end the market itself.
Kodak was believing only in a "Mature Process Oriented Model", the lack of startup model in them made them fail.
Eg2:- Pebble Watch was a crowd funded startup initiative for smart watches. The watch was an amazing product (Infact I own one). But unfortunately it lacked to keep the momentum and compete with the giants like Samsung, Google, Apple, etc.
The less insights in terms of making the watch more smart and the lack of mature process oriented approach with a long term vision had resulted in the great product to drop down in demand.
What is happening to bigger organizations and multi national product companies
The Multi national organizations 90% plus is focused on maintaining the existing offers and add some incremental innovation. The focus on disruptions (even if defined by leadership) usually dies down as the "Process" that is followed limits in disruption and exploring new mechanisms.
This results in slower pace of generating new offers. To cover this most of the Organizations try to partner with startups. To some extend this may work, but most of the times the direction of the startup vz the Multinational do not align resulting in below expectation results.
What a multinational or a bigger product company could do
Any bigger giants in the market was once a startup. There is no giant which came as a giant, it had grown as a giant. Keeping this in mind, the Organization should focus on creating a Hybrid Culture leveraging and motivating the employees to push themselves across the startup culture and the well defined process oriented culture.
Empower the employees to form small focused teams (say an internal startup), where they could focus on some of the ideas that would have a high business impact. The startup culture, would help them to gain high momentum. Even if the concept didn't fly, the team would have exponentially improved on efficiency which would help in the regular products / projects they work.
The small focused group would also help the employee to think beyond their regular boundaries which would at some time help them to incubate the disruptive idea.
The leadership team should be closely watching the team, guiding and mentoring them.
I strongly believe that the Hybrid Culture would only help any Organizations to sustain.
Author:- Bibin Andrews
No comments:
Post a Comment