Great ventures are a fruit of many labors, many gardeners. They are products shaped best with diversity, collaboration and coalitions - and yet a shared imagination.
Starting up ventures and building them to be amazing isn't a one man show. It is all about collective, iterative imagination. The germ of an idea or the pinch of a problem is baked, massaged, spliced and mutated with partners, colleagues and friends to grow, to transform into something amazing. This collaboration creates multiplier effects for your business and culture.
While we have great respect for the remarkable soloists, who do the whole hog alone, adventuring on their own, we are more in awe of those teams who seamlessly amongst themselves, weave in a single minded purpose, that guides different heads. It is what Linda Hill, Harvard professor and co-author of the eponymous book says is "Collective genius".
It takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to spark an innovation
This adage continues to ring right, and more so now than ever across the world as it heals and resets. Collaboration is inevitable and what the doctor ordered in a world going digital and partly remote. Even the rapid vaccine design and platform response is a case in point of relentless collaboration amongst minds and skills across geographies in the face of pressed time.
A problem is best viewed through different lenses and best solved joining the unlikeliest hands. This can amazingly be found across species. That has been the design of nature, to preserve its diversity - where each has to play its role.
Getting social is good for society and ventures
Today, the "economy of commons" is emerging as a viable alternative to the school of neo-liberal economics that considered man to be a homo-economicus, obsessed with pursuing personal gain, profit selfishly and hence best governed by the market. Where the Gini coefficient has consistently gone south, read more unequal for most countries, there are remarkable new schools of thought to correct this - Doughnut Economics for one, that speak of interdependencies.
Society is migrating to the new shared culture of working. It is the community today which is the driving force. Peer to peer networks, platform technology, and remote collaboration have made it wonderfully possible to get amazingly diverse ideas and original talents to work together and create good. The ‘digitalized’, ‘networked’ societies of today thrive on shared knowledge and are creating a truly flat and more equal world. But this is yet a minor fraction and has to grow.
Getting social in fact, throughout history, always got more work done. In fact it has been the model to create greater good for the greater number.
Ventures also benefit from such diverse collaborations and healthy contrasts. There are 3 that come to mind.
#1. Left and right
Getting the balance right between the business balance sheet and the creative score card keeps a venture on track. A dream venture after all needs to be both viable and desirable.
This healthy tension between left aligned thinking and right aligned thinking is a fertile ground for innovation and a moderating mechanism for respective excesses.
Having an interdisciplinary community working with you on your start up or venture can give you a serious advantage. Ideators, connectors, strategists, design thinkers, branding experts, coders, experience architects, visual artists, musicians, researchers - here too many cooks don't spoil the broth. Rather they reimagine the new and flavor it, owing to the very healthy and productive ideological tension.
#2. Lines and dots
Venture design helps you build the amazing, start up and scale a venture or simply solve a problem. This most often if not always involves co-engineering and co-designing with founders and founder teams.
Joining the dots and data points that are seemingly random, extrapolating lines & possibilities and spotting the blips - all have a hand in new venture development.
Lines have to be drawn from research & insights to design, from ideation to product development, and audience behavior into marketing.
The entire journey towards creating, designing and building a venture involves making sense of diverse drivers and interdependencies. Markets, consumers, competition, product, culture and even the unknown known.
#3. Insiders and outsiders
If the same pair of eyes are going to be looking at your problem, chances are you will not be coming up with a new solution. You need fresher lenses.
It makes immense logic to seed experimental ventures with "outsiders" who bring in the fresh (non-blinkered) perspective to ideas. After all one can't see the label on the jar from the inside.
For corporate houses that would like to invent a new venture, germinate a new idea and prototype it or make a few interesting experiments, corporate venture development is a path to inventing and incubating the new. Corporations and traditional businesses can benefit hugely from co-creating and co-designing with the "outsiders" and venture designers.
Venture development is not about us and them. It is all about the WE.
About NYUCT Design Labs
NYUCT Design Labs is a venture design house that operates at the intersection of design, strategy, technology and imagination. It helps you blueprint, design and build ventures or simply solve a problem. From ideation to last mile execution. 0 to 1.
The lab explores what your customers, employees, and partners want in order to create transformative strategies and experiences.