Most leaders hope that innovation and creativity will flourish in their teams and across their organization. However, without a strategy for this to happen it is likely to be an aspiration rather than a reality. One strategy that helps to drive greater innovation and creativity, that has gained significant appeal in recent years, is “Design Thinking”. Steve Jobs at Apple is arguably the practical pioneer of this process in the business world but other major companies have adopted it too including Coca-Cola, Herman-Miller, IBM, Ideo, Nike and Proctor & Gambol. In addition it has been written about extensively and rendered to be highly accessible to all organizations by several academic staff at Stanford University. In this article we will therefore explore what design thinking means and how it can be adopted as an approach that leaders can draw upon.

Clayton Christensen’s disruption theory, first introduced in 1995, suggested that major innovation redefines the segment or market it is aimed at and many start-up companies (such as Google, AirBnB and Uber to name just a few), have taken this theory very much to heart in their business models and attitude to innovation. But in recent times a new model has emerged. In the book “Think Big, Start Small, Move Fast”, three professionals from the Mayo Clinic take a more skeptical approach to disruption theory. Nicholas LaRusso, Barbara Spurrier, and Gianrico Farrugia, all of whom work for the Center for Innovation (CFI) at Mayo, use their book to debate “what is real innovation” within their familiar health care environment, but then apply what they learn to the wider world. They conclude that although some innovation is disruptive, smaller or incremental innovations are also important and can count just as much in the long-term. So how does this more incremental innovation model work?

When we talk about leadership we often think about how well (or otherwise) an individual leads others. However, we give much less attention to how well the person leads him or herself or, put another way, to be best prepared to manage him or herself well or in a healthily balanced way and even more importantly to act as a positive role model for team members to emulate.

Having got a taste for it in my last article, I wish to be even more philosophically in this one, and, as such, I not only want to explore what it means to have an “entrepreneurial mindset” but also cover why I think it has the potential to save anyone’s life! Big claim!-but please bear with me.

When 30-year-old partners Jake and Patricia started to think about growing their side-hustle or part-time freelance business which offered quality photography to small businesses, a friend told them that they should use Osterwalder and Pigneur’s one-page business model canvas online. But having played with it for a few weeks and even watched a couple of explanatory videos they were no further ahead. Another casual conversation suggested a different one-page diagram that was easier to use called the startup launch assistance map or SLAM diagram (shown below) and the 2 founders immediately took to it because it was so easy to follow and entirely sequential as a pathway to explore.

To seriously consider taking the entrepreneurial leap already sets a person apart from the vast majority of men and women who will never come close to actually leaving the world of regular wages or salaries. However, the cold and often harsh reality of the risks taken typically come with that leap – when the last pay check is left behind and life is reduced to a single objective – make the business work. It is perhaps the most “arresting” moment in anyone’s working life and it can be overwhelming if you are not prepared.

Research suggests that entrepreneurs mostly seem to have 3 key traits:

• A strong belief about market opportunities (or an idea about a product or service they can supply). This is an ability to spot a market “gap”.

• A willingness to accept high levels of personal, professional and financial risk (something that research suggests that over 80% of people prefer not to do or find extremely difficult).

• The possession of a variety of characteristics which provide a skill-set for achieving success. This last one needs more detail but we will be looking at this more fully later in this article.

If we boil the initial decision to become an entrepreneur down to a few key characteristics there seem to be five that are most important-the will, the idea, the means, the support and the self-esteem. Let’s look at these in a little more detail:

In order to be an entrepreneur you will be carrying not only the burden of your new business but if you employ people, the burden of having to pay wages and support others as much as necessary. You will therefore have little time to worry about your own needs. Hence if you don’t much like who you are and need to be in any way selfish or need to get away from it all on a regular basis, an entrepreneurial life may not be for you. Entrepreneurs instead need to be other-centered in their views, have a positive outlook, exude confidence, should be able to take criticism, be pragmatic and be generally optimistic. Optimism is particularly important. Without optimism not only will the entrepreneur not believe in a brighter future but nor will any of the people working for him or her – an immediate recipe for disaster.

A recent survey suggested that the following five items represented the issues that small business owners and entrepreneurs struggle with most:

1. Slow or lost sales

2. Unpredictable business conditions

3. Late paying customers (or failure to pay at all)

4. Falling real estate value

5. Inability to gain credit or the high cost of credit

Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail and what, if anything can be done to tackle them.

Although many businesses come into being with only founder funds and/or the relatively small “seed” investments of family and friends (and then pull themselves up by the proverbial “bootstraps” until revenues are strong enough to fund the growth of the enterprise), most businesses will seek outside or non-family and friends investment at some point if they really want to “scale”. Unfortunately, when they get round to doing this, the vast majority of businesses are not as well prepared as they could be and do not think carefully enough about what investors are typically looking for in most cases when those possible investors hear that a company needs money. In other words, businesses need to fully appreciate the key criteria by which most investors agree to part with their cash and in this brief article we want to describe the eight major ones that are often most critical.

New “start-up” businesses are said to be the key to future prosperity in the world. Businesses that have been around for 25 years or less already account for over 50% of all employees in the US for example. These are not only startups of course but they are nonetheless young companies which have a “startup feel” to them. Add to this that startups are often a “hot-bed” for new innovation and technology and that they are frequently substantially changing the way that the world will operate in the future, we should probably pay more attention to who can work most successfully in a startup or young company climate and how they can best build relationships, especially among the founders.

While the entrepreneurial world is very familiar with so-called “birthing” or launch events (especially when these are pitching for investment), full of excitement and optimism about the future as they talk about their new product or service and how it is going to change the world, until recently there have been few approaches or events which consider why start-up businesses fail (even though up to 90% of them do within 2 years according to recent research on new startup ventures across the US). This is partly because in the popularly followed “lean start-up” thinking the concept of “failing fast” means that we quit a market as fast as we are able before it sucks too much money or time and entrepreneurs are encouraged to move on, often immediately to the next startup venture, in many cases, without too much “soul searching”. The problem with this is that we may not have learned the important lessons of why the failure occurred so that we can be better prepared next time. This is why “Start-up funerals” have arisen as a trend in the US and UK in recent times and in this article we’ll look briefly at what benefits such an approach can offer to would-be and existing startup founders and entrepreneurs.

In the early stages of a companies’ existence (e.g. a startup or early growth organization) it is inevitable that the team is relatively small and people need to wear what might be many “hats”. This means that a CEO may do all the main sales and business development work necessary and the COO handles everything else (including all hiring and firing, for example). This can work well, for a while, because the business is small and the few people in it running things are relatively well aware of what is going on across the business. However, very quickly, and especially as employees are added to the team, everyone’s role becomes more specialized or specific and the team can lose some cohesiveness. In these circumstances, considerably more effort needs to be invested to ensure that everyone is pulling in the same overall direction.

We hear a lot about the need to be more innovative in business these days in what is often described as a fast-changing world that may leave us behind if we don’t. But the word innovation is not that well understood or defined in many people’s mind and in this brief article we therefore want to take a closer look.

Startups come in all shapes and sizes and so do the founders that start these new companies. In addition, the path that each company takes can be very different depending upon factors such as cash to operate, early customer adopters, people dynamics and even plain luck, just to name a few. However, despite the differences it turns out that there are many common challenges for startups and their founders and in this brief article we therefore want to explore five of these.

Entrepreneurship is a French word meaning “one who undertakes innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods.“ This may result an entirely new enterprise or may be part of revitalizing a mature organization in response to a perceived opportunity or possible gap in the market. The innovation piece of the process then means that there is always some level of creativity or new thinking, and not just a “me-too” approach or one that offers very little that is different.

The Startup Launch Assistance Map (SLAM), illustrated above, is an 8-step sequential process, starting on the far left, moving across the center to the far right, establishing the key boxes needed to consider product market fit, and then going clockwise thereafter. This map is a simple but powerful way for startup teams, individual ideators and founders, and even more mature businesses with new products or services, to assess their thinking and hypotheses and judge whether or not they have an idea that can commercially scale.