Enterprise Tribes: Supporting Emerging Tech Startups In the Age of Web 2.0

Failure to receive support early enough in the startup cycle is a challenge that has kept many promising technologies from ever making it to the market. Venture capital and angel investment have their place, but most financial capital cannot invest in high-risk ventures at the earliest stages. The fate of the typical entrepreneur has been to build his business through sweat, credit cards and friends-and-family investments. But now, social networking technologies are making increasing amounts of social capital available – significantly reducing financial costs faced by entrepreneurs. Mr. Koym shares stories of startups that use social capital in place of cash and the principles that benefit emerging technologies companies – whether bootstrapped or investor-backed.

One page abstract:  for Track 5:  Business & Economic Development

The sad truth standing in the way of getting many promising technologies to market is that most startup support programs don’t work early enough in the startup cycle to be significant at the times of entrepreneurs’ greatest need.  Venture capital and angel investment certainly have their place, but most financial capital cannot invest in high risk at the earliest stages. Until recently, the typical entrepreneur stood alone in building his business through his own sweat, credit card and the cash offered up by friends and family. However, social networking technologies now are creating opportunities to significantly reduce the financial cost of building a business, by making social capital more widely and easily accessible.  In this speech, Mr. Koym will share examples of startups that are leveraging social capital in lieu of financial capital and the principles that work for companies in the emerging technologies arena.

As a technology visionary, including predicting and ushering in web based eCommerce in 1994 and building the startup company that subsequently leading Dell Computer Corporation’s billion dollar eCommerce site in 1996; Predicting the usage of Linux in embedded devices in 2002, subsequently leading the deployment of this startup’s products across Schlumberger’s world wide network; Mr. Koym now is charting where social networking technologies are opening up opportunities to change the face of entrepreneurship, culminating in four conceptual shifts that he sees will drive change across the five domains of the individual, the corporation, the enterprise tribe, on demand services, and governments.

The Four Conceptual Shifts that Mr. Koym is predicting will show up in the following ways:
1.    Superempowerment of the individual, where individuals exchange the mythical stability of a corporate job for the stability of self-employment, producing an entrepreneurial mindset that creates a truly resilient workforce.
2.    New open corporate structures that allow much greater flexibility by coordinating many outside players in an open, yet not vulnerable, value chain
3.    The rise of the Enterprise Tribe- a presently emerging social structure where entrepreneurs connect and support each other much in ways resembling America’s agrarian past
4.    A “Chinese menu” of on demand, robust, Internet delivered services, organized by vendors large and small
5.    Governments that become agile, and in many times, partially replaced by grass-roots community efforts organized through social networks.

The trends that Clay has spotted in his talk and his book are the general idea behind the specific focus of the Rise of the Enterprise Tribe that you have been reading about at this blog. Collective action of coordinated entrepreneurs are supporting the group getting better in the entrepreneur community of practice called the Enterprise Tribe.

In the bygone days of innovation, large corporations — like RCA, Xerox and the old AT&T — maintained internal laboratories like Bell Labs. These corporate labs were essentially research universities embedded in private companies, and their employees published academic papers, spoke at conferences and even gave away valuable breakthroughs. Bell Labs, for instance, created the world’s first transistor after World War II — and never earned a dollar from the innovation.Almost no corporate labs based on the Bell or Xerox model remain, victims of cost-cutting and a new appreciation by corporate leaders that commercial innovations may flow best when scientists and engineers stick to business problems.

The one item that I believe the New York Times misses in this article, however, is the role of how smaller organizations and even individuals will fill out the ecology, bringing many of the technologies  to market much faster than large industry can.  NY Times writer Pascal Zackary hints at this when he says: “Will these partnerships produce products you won’t get from two people in a garage?” Mr. Birgeneau asks. “We don’t know that yet. It is an important question.”  Yet, it will take not just industry and academia… but also startups and skunkworks to bring these technologies to market in an efficient, time-realistic manner.

This article is further evidence of the shift from a Knowledge Economy to a Knowledge Ecology.

This is my emphasis- business partners presenting Nintendo with new technologies and ideas… not just the fairly predictable 10% improvement that most companies rely on.  Knowledge Ecologies are going to dominate successful products and services into the future as we can see happening with Nintendo!

Tags: innovation, enterprise2.0, ExponentialEntrepreneurship

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Tags: enterprise2.0, entrepreneurship

The first was its decision to let outsiders write programs and keep all the advertising revenues these might earn. This has led to all kinds of widgets, from the useful (comparing Facebookers’ music and film tastes, say) to the inane (biting each other to become virtual zombies). The entire internet industry reckons this was clever and is planning to copy it. This week MySpace said it would open its site to outside programmers. Google, which owns Orkut, a social network extremely popular in Brazil and parts of Asia, is expected to do the same soon. Facebook’s second masterstroke is its “mini-feed”, an event stream on user pages that keeps users abreast of what their friends are doing—uploading photos, adding a widget and so on.

Well they are half correct… but please wake up… although it might be “socially” helpful to “compare music and film taste” organizations and entrepreneurs AND THE BUSINESS PRESS needs to wake up to the real power of what is happening- social networking is allowing for completely new production models- ways of getting work done- to emerge.  I am surprised that as of yet business leading (and some of my favorite) publications don’t get it yet.  Here is a link to the Wall Street Journal, where they too, miss the point, comparing Geocities to Facebook.  Although the cautionary tale of Geocities getting bought by Yahoo might be helpful to understanding a bit of how a startup with promising technology was limited by the acquiring company (Yahoo), directly comparing Geocities to Facebook misses the big points of how Facebook is creating a new innovation opportunity- a new way of getting work done.  There is a parallel- but the parallel stops with an actual feature comparison, which Marc Andreeson points out on his blog.  Yet, Marc Andreeson misses the point that I am pointing to- that the real opportunity is not a feature by feature comparison- but that Facebook has opened up a whole new opportunity- that I am certain entrepreneurs will exploit in the future- Social networking, with the invention of the social graph- (a way to be connected to your contacts and friends) and the “mini-feed” is going to open up a whole new way of working together.  Individuals will be able to coordinate with each other much more deftly than they can today with limited project management tools and email.  Watch as this new future, based around social networking technology, disrupts much larger organizations, where “packs” of entrepreneurs are able to take on much larger bureaucratic organizations, coordinate their actions, innovate faster.  At Enterprise Teaming, we and our business partners are building the social architecture (not just software!) to usher in these new ways of entrepreneurs working together.

Please do let me know how you are using social networking technology to innovate in your startups and organizations… but please, stretch the technology beyond just sharing photos!

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Tags: enterprise2.0, Enterprise Teaming, entrepreneurship, social networking