Putting Ideas into Action
Entrepreneurs and movie makers have a lot in common. Both groups thrive on creativity and risk, each is responsible to their investors, they must translate creativity into reality and there is no guarantee of success. When it comes to making an award-winning movie, we intuitively understand all this. We accept that making great movies calls for creativity plus expert execution, and that these fundamental features of the artistic process are deeply intertwined. But when it comes to entrepreneurship, people tend to separate the two and the process gets messy and lack focus. They often seek and celebrate great ideas separately from the process of planning, organizing and executing. Our own experience shows that the opposite is true. Truly great ideas require great plans, and vice versa. Entrepreneurial creativity, planning and execution are all necessary elements of an integrated process. Master this process, and your venture can be a block buster.
Perhaps one of the strongest assets at IE Business School is their entrepreneurial spirit. Recently, IE celebrated their Venture Day, a series of keynote presentations by world-recognized entrepreneurs and a demo day for competing startups from IE University, IE Business School and their alumni network.
IE Venture Day has become an iconic event in the Spanish startup ecosystem, gathering investors, startups, students from all over Europe, Silicon Valley and Israel. This year, keynote speakers included Uri Levine, Co-Founder of Waze, 500 Startups’ Bedy Yang, Wayra’s Gary Stewart, and Busuu’s Bernhard Niesner, among others.
Entrepreneurs were able to interact directly with speakers throughout a series of practical workshops which were strongly based on Q&A from the audience in subjects like user acquisition strategies, mistakes in financing, planning for the exit, and pros & cons of accelerators.
In the startup demo competition, the professional network for young people – Tyba, was recognized as the people’s favorite and first prize winner of the competition. In addition, they also won people’s choice at this year’s The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam. The loyalty card app Stocard was the runner-up followed by 21st Century Bet who placed in third. Other finalists included innovative startups such as: Yaax Woolis, Golsie, BrandCont, ClubKviar, PeopleSports, Wadax and Scoutti.
During a keynote presentation, Daniel Daboczy, CEO of the Swedish crowdfunding platform FundedByMe, officially announced their partnership with IE to open their Madrid branch. Their mission is to expand across the globe and connect entrepreneurs with everyday business angels.
Additionally, this year marked the launch of IE’s startup incubator – Area 31. The incubator is designed for existing IE alumni with promising startups, providing mentorship and a coworking space for the members. Area 31 is also host to the weekly IE Venture Network events; an open and informal pitch slam event every Thursday for innovative entrepreneurs to present their startups to a panel of investors followed up by social activities and networking.
An example of this the entrepreneurship planning process can be found through Liad Rubin, one of the founders of Mashpan and an International MBA graduate. He has six years of marketing experience including working for Israeli tech start-ups. Liad is making things happen @mashpan who with team members Zubin Chagpar and Geoff Gibson created a convergence business for documents and files.
More than 8 months ago, the three MBA students, came up with an idea to help people find and better organize their documents, links and messages that are scattered over different services including Facebook, Dropbox and Gmail.
They took their idea to Venture Lab, IE’s startup accelerator program, which aims to develop ideas from IE alumni and students. The labs ten sessions touched different aspects of growing a business. During the lab, teams are carefully instructed and transformed as their idea is turned into a solid business proposal and executed into a live business. All throughout the process, they receive endless feedback from other teams and personalized, customized support of IE’s professors and mentors.
Much of their current success is attributed to the structured environment that helped provide the resources to push into forward in competitive structuring in the Venture Lab program. All teams are evaluated on the basis of their potential and concept. Once they are accepted into the program, they continue development of their startup competitively against other teams to IE’s premier Venture Lab contest. At semi-finals, students present an improved business proposal and end with pitching their ideas at to local and international venture capitalists on Venture Days tours throughout the world. On campus, finalists team compete against each other for the winning venture company of the year award. The program structure forces students to develop fast, improve our business model and demonstrate a tangible, working prototype in a short period of time.
Plan to Create, and Plan Creatively
Experience therefore teaches us that without a solid and compelling idea, even the best plans are a waste of effort. And without good planning, even the best ideas may go nowhere. The secret is to combine the two. Not to rely solely on the original idea. Nor to place all your focus on the business plan. But to combine these activities in a process of creative planning that will translates original ideas into tangible value creation. When entrepreneurs do this, the result can be a blockbuster. A great idea enveloped in an effective plan. We acknowledge this is difficult, because each activity requires different capabilities. To learn more about how innovation and planning are critical factors to startup success, we invite you to check us out at: http://business.ie.edu and http://entrepreneurship.ie.edu.
by Peter Bryant and Eliana El Hage
