innovation

TaxMantra.com: Say Bye To All Tax Worries as Taxation now Goes Online

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

They say, to have a smart wife is a luxury, but to have a smart accountant is a necessity. Bearing testimony to this proverb, Alok Patnia founded Taxmantra.com, an online platform that aims to understand and address the pain points of individuals, businesses, companies and new start-ups by providing timely and quality tax solutions in the most hassle free manner. In conversation with Abhilasha Dafria for YourStory.in, Alok, a qualified Chartered Accountant and a commerce bachelor from St. Xavier’s College, tells us more about how Taxmantra.com lives by the motto of “Experience Excellence” and “Stay Hassle Free”! Please introduce Taxmantra.com to our readers. Taxmantra.com provides a one stop solution platform to individuals, Startups and businesses to resolve their pain points with its unique and hassle-free services such as tax return filing, Company/ LLP creation, accounting, company law compliances and such other day to day business maintenance services. So how did you come up with this idea of starting a venture in the taxation space? I noted something very interesting during my stint with the big 4 accounting firms in Bangalore, that even though clients were locally based, we hardly met them face-to-face.  Client delivery used to happen via exchange of mails, with post discussions either through video conferencing or con-calls. Startups, new businesses, SMEs or for that matter even individuals have to still take time out from their work to visit a local consultant, as it is a common knowledge that not all can afford to hire big accounting firms. Thus, it thrilled me to start a service wherein, we can address the pain points of individuals, startups, by using internet as an enabler to reach clients irrespective of their locations with excellent service at the most affordable price Could you tell us in detail about the services you offer? Taxmantra.com provides complete taxation, accounting & financial solutions to individuals and businesses. The sole objective of Taxmantra.com is to bring full gamut of accounting, taxation and financial service on a single platform under three broad service heads; (i)     Individual Taxation Services, which includes services like Online return filing services, Tax planning and save taxes service, Tax refunds services, ITR Rectification Assistance in allotment/ Correction/ Surrender of PAN number/ Issuance of Digital signature certificates and all other services related to individual taxation, covering both Salaried and Non-Salaried Individuals. (ii)   Business Incorporation or Startup Services includes services such as creation of private limited company, creation of Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs), Start-Up Counseling and all other services related to business incorporation like local registrations. (iii) Business maintenance Services includes services  such as accounting, auditing assistance, Taxation, Company Law (ROC), Service tax and all other services related to business maintenance covering both Corporate and Non Corporate Entity. How many clients have you had so far? Without stating the actual number for obvious reasons, we can say that we are able to engage thousands of salaried & non – salaried individuals in filing their tax returns and also helping them in solving their tax issues. We are also assisting a good number of new businesses, startups, SMEs and some major businesses in handling issues relating to taxation, accounting, auditing, company law, service and such other issues. What is your clientele like? Could you share some demographics and tell us about your tie-ups if any? We have clientele based from metro cities, from B tier cities in India and also NRI clients from outside India. Our clientele includes Individuals (salaried and non-salaried), Startups, Businesses, Corporate and other businesses. We have associate tie-ups in Bangalore and Hyderabad and wish to extend our presence to other cities as well. What is the market-size you are trying to capture? With internet technology taking the centre stage, the government has made company law compliances  including incorporation of company, LLP, service tax returns, sales tax, vat, TDS Compliances, to name some, fully automated now and is taking added effort to make these more seamless and hassle free.   Also, to give you some data for Financial Year 2010-11, more than 15 million tax payers have preferred to file their returns through online medium. There is increased eagerness amongst Entrepreneurs, Start-Ups and other corporate and Non-Corporate businesses to prefer online medium for availing services due to paucity of time and hassle of visiting local consultants.  Thus, we think that there is a huge market for us to cater to, though initially there may be some bottlenecks. How many people visit your site every day? Tell us about the traction on your site. We have a targeted visitor of around 6K to 8K on a daily average from all virtually all parts of India and also non-resident Indians from abroad. Are there other players in the market doing similar things? What is your USP? Without naming any one in particular, we know that there are number of online service providers in this segment, with few of them providing only online tax filing for salaried individuals and then there are few engaged in rendering business incorporation services or accounting services and such others. But, what is so unique about Taxmantra.com is that, it brings all, salaried individuals, non-salaried individuals, Startups, businesses, SMEs on a single platform, wherein they can avail different services without getting into hassle of visiting different consultants for different set of services. How does the revenue model work? Our revenue model is very like any other service industry; that is, to provide excellent service fully customized to the needs of our client’s at most affordable price. For us client satisfaction is top most priority, and we believe that client retention is as important as new client acquisition. Since when are you operational? Where are you based? We are operational from first quarter of 2011. We have a fully functional integrated client delivery office in Kolkata and associate tie-ups in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Dhanbad.

Tagged as: enterprise, innovation, learning, non-tech entrepreneurs, online marketing, password, social-media, technology

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Are the Indian Tech Startups Building Platforms or just Products?

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

Let me start by asking this question – what differentiates a platform from a product? A product is typically targeted at consumers and the only metric to measure the success of a product is the number of consumers using the product or the market share. But what is a platform? A platform is a product that goes beyond the consumers and builds a thriving ecosystem around it. Majority of this ecosystem consists of developers and other product companies that embrace and extend the original product. Facebook is undoubtedly a platform. That is because there is a very healthy ecosystem around Facebook that literally brought everything from the digital storefronts to the commercial e-learning services into Facebook platform. The other example is Amazon.com, which is one of the early companies that realized the advantage of building a platform and not just an online ecommerce store. That enabled Amazon to quickly become the only digital outlet for traditional brick and mortar retail companies. In the recent past many companies successfully transitioned from a product company to a platform company. Apple and Google are the examples of the new generation platform companies. Of course, Microsoft made sure that everything that they built is a platform by encouraging its partners to complement the functionality. Do you know that the most popular consumer product of Microsoft, Microsoft Office is a strong platform? There are tens of thousands of companies whose products and business models revolve around the Microsoft Office platform. Technically what turns a product into the platform is the Application Programming Interface or API. An API is a hook for developers to tap into the power of a product. This opens up many avenues for the developers to extend the scenarios that go beyond the original intent of the product. An API lets developers automate the functionality without going through the user interface. For example, if you are an ecommerce website, you can integrate your product tracking page with the Blue Dart API to provide a unified and seamless experience to your customers to track the status of their order. Interestingly, once a product starts exposing the basic API, the consumers of the API will drive the innovation and will influence the evolution by shaping the roadmap. Over a period of time, the API becomes mature and starts powering other successful products and services thus transforming the original product to a complete platform.   When it comes to Indian startups, it is hard to find APIs even among the popular ones. For example, redBus.in can open a simple REST endpoint to find all the bus operators available in a specific route. Flipkart.com can expose their catalog as a search-able API. WhatsonIndia.com can provide an API for the TV listings. JustDial.com is a great candidate for the local listings API. These products / services might be technically designed to expose the APIs, but the fact is that they are not discoverable by developers. Exposing a part of the product/service through APIs will only help in driving the adoption and growing the ecosystem. More developers means more consumers and more consumers will bring the social aspect to the platform. In the long term, the API will become the force multiplier of the platform. I did find a couple of Indian tech companies exposing the API. One is Zomato.com and the other is KooKoo.in. The later had to expose APIs because it is their core offering but I was glad to see Zomato.com dedicate a section to developers . I may be missing other companies offering the APIs. If you have an API for your online product / service, please do let us know. We will be happy to cover or provide a sample use case to our audience.   Do remember that the browser is not the only channel for your customers. With the Android and iOS penetration, many customers prefer to have an App in their mobiles or tablets to access the product. Going forward, it will be Smart TVs that will become a frontend inviting the couch surfers to use your product. I was pleasantly surprised to see the Zomato App on my 55” Samsung Smart TV! I want to share one final thought. Many product architects and developers may think that an API layer can be added later after going live with the product. But remember that the API design is very crucial to the product strategy and it has to be baked into the core design right from day one. It is extremely hard and expensive to add an API layer after on-boarding hundreds of customers. Let’s hope to see more platform companies emerging from India in the future! Janakiram MSV , Chief Editor, CloudStory.in This post was originally posted on CloudStory.in

Tagged as: cloud news, enterprise, india, innovation, marketing, startup, tech news, unsexy-startups

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Unitus Seed Fund Launches with Three Social Enterprise Investments in India

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

New Unitus Labs Initiative Seeks to Accelerate Development of Innovative Startups Which Have the Potential to Significantly Benefit Families Living on Less Than $2 Per Day Seattle , WA and Bangalore, India, February 6, 2012  - Unitus Labs, an international non-profit focused on reducing global poverty through economic self-empowerment, is launching today the Unitus Seed Fund, a new seed stage venture fund that invests in Indian startup businesses with potential for large-scale poverty impact.  Unitus Seed Fund is also announcing its first three investments in Indian startups Bodhicrew Services, Hippocampus Learning Centres, and Milaap Social Ventures. “After a decade of helping accelerate and scale the Indian microfinance industry, we are excited to launch the new Unitus Seed Fund initiative in order to support development of more new pro-poor businesses,” said Dave Richards, CEO of Unitus Labs and Managing Director of Unitus Seed Fund.  “We are seeing a new group of highly capable and socially motivated entrepreneurs who believe that they can realize more wide-scale and sustainable poverty impact by operating as a business rather than as a non-profit.  The Unitus family of entities has always been willing to invest on the cutting edge of economic empowerment concepts and projects.” Unitus Seed Fund targets investments in companies meeting the following criteria: Businesses serving Indian markets Potential for scaled impact on 800 million people inIndialiving on less than $2 per day Strong, experienced management team Business developed beyond the concept stage Clearly differentiated value proposition Strategies to build effective distribution and marketing programs “Unitus Seed Fund addresses an important gap in the social impact venture ecosystem by funding and supporting businesses which are beyond bootstrap but not yet far enough along to receive growth capital,” said Vineet Rai, Founder and Chief Executive at Aavishkaar Venture Management Service and a pioneer investor for inclusive economic development inIndia. “If they can find and nurture more businesses to the point of readiness to scale rapidly, it will allow other social venture funds to focus on realizing the impact potential of these businesses.” “Unitus Seed Fund is providing a critical role as a supplier of very high risk, flexible capital to entrepreneurs who are trying to improve the lives of poor families in many important sectors including education, healthcare and livelihoods,” said Samit Ghosh, Managing Director at Ujjivan Financial Services and investee of Unitus Lab’s Unitus Equity Fund. “We received very valuable funding and management support from Unitus during our vulnerable early stages of our history.  Today, we are recognized as one of the best microfinance institutions in India providing financial and microfinance plus services to over million customers and their families across twenty states in India, thanks to our friends like Unitus.” Announcing First Three Seed Investments Unitus Seed Fund has made its first three seed investments — all in India — in three sectors: skill development and job placement services, affordable rural education services, and new areas of microcredit financial services. Bodhicrew Services:   Skill development for those working in the unorganized sector “We are very pleased to have Unitus Seed Fund as an investor in Bodhicrew because this is not only testament to our commitment to promote skill development of those working in unorganized sector in India but also to our business model and vision”, said Vivek Kaushik, CEO of Bodhicrew Services Pvt. Ltd. “With this investment from Unitus Seed Fund, we will be able to provide a truly integrated employment and skills services to the most disadvantaged in the labor market in a sustainable way.” Bodhicrew Services provides skill development for those working in the unorganized sector. Bodhicrew provides a complete domestic work solution to the rapidly growing middle class of India. Bodhicrew offers a one-stop solution to employers for an ethically sourced and well-trained workforce. To the workers, Bodhicrew offers technical training and guarantees safe placement and fair wages. It also supports legislative, administrative and policy changes which contribute to the employability, dignity, and welfare of the workers and their families. Bodhicrew is based in New Delhi, India. For more details on Unitus Seed Fund’s investment in Bodhicrew Services,  click here Hippocampus Learning Centres:   Improving learning outcomes for children in rural India “We are excited to have Unitus Seed Fund as a seed investor in Hippocampus Learning Centres because it vindicates our project, the first of its kind to provide affordable education services to remote rural populations”, said Umesh Malhotra, CEO of Hippocampus Learning Centres. “With this investment, we will be able to expand our reach into 100 villages, reaching out to more than 5,000 children and employing nearly 300 women by June 2012.” Hippocampus Learning Centres (HLC) believes that one of the sure shot ways out of poverty is education. HLC’s work focuses exclusively on the 700 million rural Indians with the aim of improving the learning of children. HLC establishes learning centres in villages offering preschool and after school programs to age groups from 3 years to 10 years with the aim of improving a child’s capacity to learn and do better in school. The fees at these centres are between Rs.60-Rs.100 (USD$1-$2) per month, which is affordable for poor families. The curriculum is centrally developed to cater to mixed age groups and is largely teacher facilitated. HLC hires woman from the local community as teachers, trains them to run the centres and provides them ongoing support. HLC intends to make these ongoing sustainable community enterprises and also achieve financial sustainability as an organization. HLC is based in Bangalore, India. For more details on Unitus Seed Fund’s investment in HLC,  click here Milaap Social Ventures :   Online platform to make microloans to India’s working poor “We’re excited to have Unitus Seed Fund as an investor in  Milaap  as they bring with them years of knowledge and experience in the microfinance and fundraising space,” said Sourabh Sharma, CEO of Milaap Social Ventures. “We look forward to their support and guidance as we try to help thousands of people get out the vicious cycle of poverty.” Milaap is an online microlending platform which enables anyone around the world to  lend money to the working poor  in India through the website  www.milaap.org . Milaap was founded in 2010 by a team of young and passionate entrepreneurs from premier institutions in India and Singapore. Milaap envisions a world where the poor are valued as dignified consumers, suppliers, and producers as opposed to mere borrowers. The loans aim to provide the poor with access to basic amenities including clean drinking water, toilets, education, renewable energy as well as income-generation opportunities. So far, Milaap has raised USD $200,000 for borrowers in various parts of India with 100% repayment rate. Milaap is based in Bangalore, India. For more details on Unitus Seed Fund’s investment in Milaap Social Ventures,  click here About Unitus Seed Fund Unitus Seed Fund is a seed stage venture investor in businesses which impact poverty.  Unitus Seed Fund identifies startups with strong entrepreneurial teams who have a mission to build large sustainable businesses which improve the lives of those living at the base of the economic pyramid (income of less than $2 per day.)  Unitus Seed Fund makes small equity investments and provides support to these social entrepreneurs to expand beyond their initial pilot to refine their business model and operations understanding to prepare for significant future growth and impact. Once solid progress has been accomplished, Unitus Seed Fund assists social entrepreneurs in raising growth capital to expand further.  Unitus Seed Fund is a project of Unitus Labs and is currently focused on the India market.  Unitus Seed Fund has offices in Seattle and Bangalore.  See unitusseedfund.com  for more details.

Tagged as: accounting, adventure, facebook, india, innovation, internet, lose-something, marketing, online marketing, startup

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Exploiting Innovation for market dominance: A case for Technology Startups

by Paul Joseph February 6, 2012 Featured

Government of India has declared this decade (2011 -20) as the “Decade of Innovations”. Manmohan Singh has promised to increase R&D spending from 0.9% to 2% of GDP by 2017. MSMEs are economic growth engines for developed and more for the developing country like India. With this notion, InnovAccer – an Indian Innovation Management firm collaborates with Yourstory.in to create awareness of Innovation and Intellectual Property amongst startups. Starting from today, InnovAccer will release one article every week for 20 weeks to help startups gear up to innovate in the right direction and protect intellectual property at its best. Anyone can run a business, but running a sustainable business depends on whether you provide cost advantage to the customer or present to them new innovative products or services. With fluctuating economy worldwide, cost advantage is no more a reliable strategy. Even China who is a master of providing cost advantage has initiated innovation strategies after rise in their labor cost. Multi-National Corporations have huge assembly lines and supply chains in process to release out a product within months, while startups have to rely on their innovative technology which is unique in the marketplace. Thus, Innovation and protecting that innovation is a key to sustainable growth of a technology start-up. Let’s shift our gears to economic advantages of obtaining a patent besides its value for exclusive right protection. Consider a scenario below, wherein figures represent cost of production. Company II is playing on cost advantage and ruling the market share. Now assume that company I obtained a patent. Whole market scenario changes from thereon. Company II and III have to give license fees to Company I and thus Company I has cost advantage over Company II and III. A company like company III which has neither cost or innovation advantage loses the race. While innovation company I always wins the race. Future posts will cover stimulating and resourceful articles on how to exploit patents to create & benefit your business and make it into a sustainable model. About InnovAccer InnovAccer (Innovation Accelerated) is an innovation management and acceleration company focused and dedicated to provide high quality innovation management services to accelerate every step of an innovation life-cycle. InnovAccer was founded with a vision of people in the fields of Intellectual Property, Business Innovation, and Technology to change and accelerate the creation of innovation ecosystem in India.  InnovAccer’s team comes from a varied background of engineers graduated from IITs, intellectual property specialists graduated from Franklin Pierce Law Center, USA, analysts, statisticians, and business innovation experts. Website: www . innovaccer . com

Tagged as: accounting, enterprise, india, innovation, internet, learning, marketing, online marketing, social-media, startup, technology, the-wachox-way

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Innovation to enterprise through TePP funding

by Paul Joseph June 28, 2011 Featured

TBI helps innovators with funding to build an enterprise out of their innovation Are you an innovator with a novel idea that would impact the society at large? You may be an individual or a company and if you need to give shape to your innovative idea, prototype it, build a product, and sell it to become an enterprise, the Technopreneur Promotion Programme (TePP), an open innovation network… (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: content, frontpage, innovation, other-content, society, yourstory-in

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Young Entrepreneur Interview: Sanjay Dalal of Ogoing

by Paul Joseph June 21, 2011 Featured

What’s the definition of a serial entrepreneur? If you look it up in the dictionary you might just see a picture of Sanjay Dalal, the subject of today’s interview. Sanjay is the founder and CEO of Ogoing , a social network exclusively for businesses. Prior to starting his current venture, Sanjay founded the India Business Network, a network dedicated to helping companies in India do business around the world. He also founded Bharat Market, and online shopping network for Indian made goods. On top of all that, Sanjay has a consulting services company, called InnovationMain.com, and he’s authored more than 350 articles on the state of innovation in business as well as an eBook on innovation that has been used by more than 650 corporations and organizations worldwide. Some of the companies that have implemented his recommendations are HP, Pepsi, Hallmark, Best Buy, UC Irvine, Nokia, and more. With a plate as full as Sanjay’s, we were lucky to catch him long enough to answer a few interview questions, and the interview is below. Enjoy! Ogoing is a great idea that combines a lot of the best features from several popular social media sites. For those of our readers who aren’t familiar with the company, can you give us a quick overview? Ogoing is an exclusive social network for business. On Ogoing, a small business can immediately build online visibility, promote their products, attract new customers, and jump start sales using the latest social media. Ogoing is extremely easy to use; a business can setup a powerful profile, share specific updates about business news, events, deals, services and referrals, make new connections, and find local clients. It literally takes less than five minutes for a startup, entrepreneur or business to get started on Ogoing. How did the idea for Ogoing come about? The available landscape of social media services for business were limited and complex. Further, small business owners do not have time, resources or expertise to create and launch their social media marketing on these available platforms. I wanted to create a powerful social network that provides small businesses instant online boost, is very easy to use, and drives new leads.

Tagged as: entrepreneur, indian, innovation, networks, small-business, social, startup, young-entrepreneur

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Uniken Innovation Lecture Series Successfully inaugurated in Pune

by Paul Joseph June 15, 2011 Featured

The inaugural session of UNIKEN Innovation Lecture Series was held in Pune on 3rd June 2011, in association with Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) IIM Ahmedabad. YourStory.in was one of the Media Partner for the event. The evening witnessed a gathering of innovators, entrepreneurs, students, working professionals, leading industry experts, scientists and academia from… (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: centre, content, event, frontpage, innovation, media, other-content, series, visit-yourstory-in

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Uniken Innovation Lecture Series Successfully inaugurated in Pune

by Paul Joseph June 15, 2011 Featured

The inaugural session of UNIKEN Innovation Lecture Series was held in Pune on 3rd June 2011, in association with Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) IIM Ahmedabad. YourStory.in was one of the Media Partner for the event. The evening witnessed a gathering of innovators, entrepreneurs, students, working professionals, leading industry experts, scientists and academia from… (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: centre, content, event, frontpage, innovation, other-content, series, visit-yourstory-in

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YongoPal’s Moment of Zen: A High-Tech Startup Simplifies for Success

by Paul Joseph May 25, 2011 Featured

Darien Brown thought he had a good idea for a business when he came up with a way to connect English language students in South Korea with conversation pals in the US over social media. He had studied in Korea as an undergraduate and made some money on the side as a conversational tutor to students who wanted to turn their book-knowledge of English into genuine fluency. He knew first-hand the pent-up demand for informal, person-to-person interactions, and also knew that teen and college-age Koreans were even more deeply steeped in mobile technology and social media than their digital-generation American peers. Brown’s instincts were confirmed when his company, YongoPal , won the top prize of $25,000 in the 2010 University of Washington Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Business Plan contest , got funded by Dave McClure’s  500 Startups , and moved shop from Seattle to a high-end incubator in Silicon Valley. Brown and his team were flying high, building out the first version of their application as a traditional browser-based Web service to include every bell and whistle to provide the richest possible experience for language learners. Features included messaging, application sharing, scheduling, online video and everything their developers could think of. “Sign-ups for the service exceeded our expectations,” said Brown. “The problem is, usage was practically non-existent.” Users, it turned out, loved the idea of the service, but found it too hard and frustrating to use. The YongoPal team listened carefully, shut down the 1.0 release, and got to work on a refresh that tried to address the usability issues by fixing specific points of failure in each element of the feature set. “We launched the next version to great fanfare in December, and very little changed. We got huge early interest and very little activity on the network.” Things changed when the management team attended a user experience (Lean UX) workshop in February, 2011 offered as part of the curriculum at their incubator. “That’s when it all clicked,” said Brown. “We realized we had dramatically over-designed our product. The technology was getting in the way of what we were trying to achieve.” The team began streamlining the design, feature by feature. Finally, they got down to the video chat component, the centerpiece of the product’s original conception. “It turned out that the video conferencing was the real problem,” said Brown. The need for fast, continuous connections, schedule coordination, and privacy worked against the flexibility and portability that made the concept so attractive. “Our users discovered that the only time they could really do the video chats was first thing in the morning, before class, or late at night. It was very limiting and didn’t work at all for the students in our target audience.” Reluctantly, Brown let go of the core technology feature of his product – and his friend and roommate who had been the principle developer. “It was really tough, but there was nothing more for him to do. There was no code to write anymore.” YongoPal began testing various new approaches, but with less than two weeks ahead of the incubator’s big Demo Day for press and investors, YongoPal still didn’t have a firm strategy. As the clock ticked down, the company decided to move ahead with a new concept using shared photographs and instant messaging. They continued their user tests and refined their pitch for the streamlined service right down to the last minute. Less turned out to be more. The new concept wowed the judges and the press. Venture Beat named them one of the “ The Coolest Companies from Dave McClure’s 500 Startups .” The YongoPal team then started coding in earnest with a much surer sense of their product and mission. “Basically, it was the opposite of what we’d done before — which was to write a mountain of code before knowing how users were going to accept it,” said Brown. “By the time we started coding this product, we were confident that we had the basic formula down and had a firm general idea of how people were going to adopt it into their daily lives.” While the basic value proposition of the original idea – creating conversations between Koreans and English-speakers through social media – remained the same, the new approach was much lighter weight and a better fit for the audience’s lifestyle. “You can do it with any smartphone,” says Brown. “Just point the camera at something, share the photo and start a conversation. It’s a great way to use the routine details of day-to-day life to have natural conversations about real stuff.” Results from early testing were a complete turnaround from the disappointing first launch. “People love it, and best of all, people are using the hell out of it,” says Brown. YongoPal plans its official release in later this spring, assuming all goes well with Apple App Store certification. Unlike so many tech-driven startups, when faced with a choice between its technology innovation and its business priorities, YongoPal chose the latter. The company now has a new outlook and a new lease on life because of its willingness to rethink its strategy down to the fundamental level. If YongoPal achieves success, it will owe it to characteristics rarely associated with willful young entrepreneurs: the ability to listen, adjust, and bend when necessary to achieve the larger goal. Rob Salkowitz is author of Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship are Changing the World from the Bottom Up , and Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap . Follow him @robsalk .

Tagged as: apple, book, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, innovation, time, video, young-entrepreneur, youth

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5 Traits of a True Innovator – Are You One?

by Paul Joseph May 19, 2011 Featured

The word “innovation” is thrown around a lot, and a lot of entrepreneurs are called innovators or think of themselves as innovators. But what does that really mean? Is anyone who comes up with a new idea an innovator? If that’s the case, few entrepreneurs aren’t innovators. And in fact, to some extent every true entrepreneur undoubtedly has at least a touch of the “innovation gene” in them. But not everyone is what we would call a true innovator. As an example, Motorola was the first mobile phone manufacturer to offer a color screen, with the T720. Did that make them innovators? Maybe, in the most basic sense of the word, but lets face it – the color cell phone screen was coming with or without Motorola. On the other hand, look at Apple and the iPhone. When a product has every competing company scrambling to come up with something comparable, you know you’ve introduced a true innovation. What is True Innovation? So, what’s the difference? Both the 720 and the iPhone offered something no one else had before, and you could even say that both marked the start of a new era in cell phones. But unless you used to own a T720 or worked for a company that carried them, you probably don’t even remember ever hearing of them. Everyone knows what an iPhone is though, even if they’ve never owned one. That’s because they didn’t just introduce a tweak of an existing product or a cool feature; they revolutionized mobile interface technology and changed the lexicon of a generation in the process. That’s true innovation. It’s not just that everyone has heard of the iPhone either. A great marketing campaign might have accomplished that. It’s that the introduction of the iPhone caused consumers and technology manufacturers to think of cell phones in a new way. True innovation doesn’t just cause a buzz – it initiates change. How to be a True Innovator If you want to be a true innovator, there are a few traits that will define you as such. Here is what true innovators do: 1. They recognize needs. Innovators are people who can identify a need within an industry, market segment, or culture and spot opportunity in it. While the term “need” is broad (do we really need to be able to flip through pictures on our phones with our fingers?), the point is that innovators understand what people are looking for and go about finding ways to provide it. 2. They develop and refine a solution. Once an innovator recognizes a need and makes up their mind to fill it, they tend to work tirelessly on finding the most imaginative, practical solution possible. Then they work to refine their solution to not only meet the need but anticipate future needs and advancements in order to give their solution longevity. You can be sure the iPhone people bought in June of 2007 was not based on the first schematic proposed. And you can be just as sure that the addition of a camera and ability to work on the 3G network had already been worked out at that point. 3. They take chances. True innovators are great at identifying needs and developing solutions, but they know there’s no guarantee their solution is going to be a winner. All entrepreneurs are willing to take risks, and innovators are willing to go even further and risk going where no one has gone before. 4. They push the envelope. The very nature of true innovation is that it is beyond the norm. True innovators understand that they need to think beyond what anyone has tried so far. They take things to the next level and then some. This is part of taking risks, but it’s also about imagination and a willingness to try something completely new. 5. They create meaning. When we talk about true innovators, we’re not talking about people who create a product for the sake of creating a product. These are people who are out to make an impact. They might not be trying to fix the world’s ills, but they are at least trying to shake things up and get people thinking differently. True innovation often spawns entire industries – and there is meaning in that. So, what do you think? Are you a true innovator? What makes someone an innovator in your mind? Share your thoughts with the community in the comments below.

Tagged as: apple, become an entrepreneur, business, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, innovation, iphone, thoughts

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