I wrote a few months ago about the importance of keeping your eyes open for opportunities to grow and expand your business outside of your core markets and expertise by looking into “adjacent” areas which would afford you the chance to extend your product and service offerings into new geographies and across other dimensions and vectors without substantial new investments or even significant changes in the basic elements of your programs. See http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/five-reasons-your-market-is-bigger-than-you-think.html.
I called this basic concept “sliding to the side” which meant attacking readily-accessible and proximate markets along new lines which might include identifying and targeting who the new customers were, what the required and desired offerings might be, and/or where, when and how your products and services were going to be delivered in order to meet the needs of the customers and clients in these new markets. This was an idea based on looking outside of your traditional market and sector definitions and then moving in directions that might well be outside of your comfort zone, but which offered rich rewards if you were successful and only modest financial penalties (and probably some wasted time) if things didn’t ultimately work out. That was an inside/out approach to growing your business.
Equally valuable and again - something that’s right before your eyes (if you’re looking) – is the idea of lateral learning which is an outside/in approach to improving how you are doing things. Basically, instead of working to extend your areas of impact and influence beyond the virtual four walls of your business, here the new idea is that you explore, examine, evaluate and incorporate the best approaches and ideas you can find outside of your own shop and you pull them all into your operations as quickly and seamlessly as possible. You’re never going to have all the great ideas yourself or develop all the best solutions internally, so feel free to copy or steal the best of breed answers from anyone and any place you can. Just don’t copy their mistakes. Keep in mind that while education is something that is allegedly done to you; learning is something you’re responsible for doing for yourself.
I call this concept “lateral learning” and here’s the secret: you will absolutely learn as much or more from the people working around you (both in your company and outside) about how to step up your game and improve your prospects as you will from any mentor, teacher, class, book or lecture. When it works well, you discover that you’re looking at things you’ve always thought you’ve known and understood, but in new and exciting ways. Think of this process as stepped-up and hyper-intelligent osmosis – where you consciously increase the focus and the energy devoted to checking out what and how others are doing things – some even better in the moment than you are – so that you can ultimately get to the point where you look around and no one’s kicking your butt or doing your business better than you. Get started today and see what happens. There’s no limit to what you can learn if you’re not afraid to ask or too embarrassed or shy to inquire. But learning doesn’t happen by itself – it’s got to be part of an ongoing program and commitment to continually iterating and raising the bar.
And the fact is that you can try this strategy any place and in a variety of ways. But there is no better place to take advantage of learning laterally (from your peers, neighbors, role models and even competitors) than installing yourself in an active and constantly growing startup incubator (like our best-of-breed 1871 facility in Chicago) where there are literally hundreds of businesses in a single massive space and thousands of people working every day to create, develop and grow them every day. When most people talk about why young entrepreneurs should try to get into an incubator (or accelerator), they often focus on some of the obvious emotional components (“it’s lonely trying to do this stuff on your own”; “there’s a lot of energy and encouragement available in these places; etc.), but it’s the serendipitous learning and the amazing synergies and happy accidents that happen every day in these environments that are the things that will really make a difference for you and your company.
And, equally important, the very best incubators aren’t glorified coffee shops and co-working real estate plays; they are exceptional places that are purpose-built and run and managed every day to create a constant flood of educational opportunities, critical thoughts, game-changing ideas, new approaches and technologies which change and expand every day because new people are constantly moving in, moving up and/or moving out of the place. They may be growing or about to be going, but the one thing that’s for sure is that they are spending every day just like you facing the same kinds of challenges, coming up with new and novel solutions, and suffering all the ups and downs of the startup process that we know and love so well. And you can learn more from them – their bumps and bruises – triumphs, trials and terrors - than from just about any other source.
You might argue that colleges and universities are equally fertile environments for this kind of energy and excitement, information exchanges and aggressive testing of new ideas, and rapid change, but you’d be dead wrong. Sadly, our bulk of our higher education system is about the repeated regurgitation of conventional wisdom and the creation of self-congratulatory dissertations which purport to validate “new” versions of old and tired news. While validation is really important in parking lots, it has very little to do with change, exploration or discovery. And concepts like commercialization, monetization and moving concepts from the labs (and sterile papers and articles) out into the real and very messy world where they can make a difference in people’s lives are equally foreign ideas.
In addition, our universities lack just about everything that really matters to the process of disruptive business innovation and new company creation: (a) there’s no existential requirement to get some customers and sell something because the professors will always have their jobs and their tenure; (b) there’s no sense of urgency to make payroll because they always get a paycheck and there’s always another quarter or semester around the corner with a fresh crop of anxious students; and frankly, and most unfortunately, (c) there’s absolutely no reward structure in place at any of these places for the slightest risk-taking or for even thinking about making real changes in the way things have always been done. And if the sad combination of those things didn’t suck all the juice, mojo and enthusiasm out of these places, it’s also downright uncool at college for the “adults” to be passionate and excited about anything outside their academic ivory towers or to be seen as promoting or marketing just about anything. So it’s just not happening at So What U.
On the other hand, in an incubator, if you’re open to it, you learn by looking, listening and doing every day. This is because you get to free ride on three important trends that are driving rapid and radical change at light speed throughout the tech economy and even in more basic industries as well. Keep an eye out for these 3 drivers:
(1) Solution Migration
What’s good for the goose is often just as good and helpful for the gander (except, I suppose, right around Thanksgiving time) and so we are seeing more and more instances where a quick and effective technology solution (or even one that took years and millions to develop and perfect) in one industry (like precision drug dosing cartridges) is ported and rapidly migrates to other industries (like self-service food and beverage providers) overnight and with just as much success and impact. Smart players in almost every major industry (except the U.S. government) have figured this out and are aggressively pursuing these kinds of parallel research and investigation programs. And they’re also stepping up to invest in and buy more and more startups as M & A is rapidly becoming the new R & D.
(2) Cross-Industry Pollination
An entirely separate, but equally extensive area for lateral learning is more about behavioral benchmarks and expectations rather than technologies. Seeing what works socially in adjacent businesses; seeing what it’s reasonable to ask of and expect from consumers these days and what the quid pro quo needs to be; understanding the new dimensions of self-service and constant connectivity; etc. are all inquiries and directions of investigation that are crucial components of how you bring your business to the new digital marketplaces. Just because we haven’t previously expected customers to be responsive to certain changes in the way we do business or we have never before asked people to behave in certain new ways doesn’t mean that these aren’t very significant directions (and potentially opportunities for enormous savings) for your company. The trick here is to let someone else do the first round of experimenting and seeing what and whether anything blows up in their faces before you make your moves. Clearly, as a recent example, the Netflix debacle with Qwikster where they tried for two weeks to split their business into two distinct pieces and almost immediately lost hundreds of thousands of customers and millions of dollars kept a whole lot of other companies from jumping off a similar cliff with their pricing plans. It’s always better to let the other guys make the first mover mistakes and then to be a smarter fast follower.
(3) Inexpensive Adaptation
It’s not critical or essential that your version of a copied or borrowed solution be gold-plated or crazy expensive at the outset. Try it first with duct tape and chewing gum and see what happens before you bet the farm. You’ll learn a lot, maybe you’ll lose a little, but you’ll never know what can work for you if you don’t try. Just don’t put both feet into the pond until you know how deep the water is.
Each of these approaches offers value and opportunities for your company as long as you spend the time to think about what they can bring to your business. Keep in mind that the power and value of a change isn’t necessarily related to its size. Sometimes the most valuable and important aspect of these things isn’t about how much you have to change to make a difference, but exactly how little a change needs to be to make a big impact.
PS: “You Get What You Work for, Not What You Wish for”
