Alternative thinking can overcome barriers to launching your start-up

INNOVATION in business is trumpeted as the key to survival, to scalable growth, to employee satisfaction, competitive advantage, and ultimately as the key to generating a tidy profit and whopping return for your investors. But you’re missing a trick if you contain that innovation to creating new products or services. Innovation isn’t simply about inventing the next lifesaving, world-changing, paradigm-shifting techno-wotsit. You could get a head start by simply innovating in starting up your business.

It’s now about innovating and disrupting the preconceived perceptions, and actions, required to launch a business.

There are clearly some elements of starting a business that can’t be changed. You need a name, a bank account, terms and conditions. But beyond that, the opportunities for disrupting the norm are there for the seizing.

Crowdsource the specific skills your start-up needs at the outset, equity-share with your suppliers, partner with your clients: the sky, or your imagination, and what is honest and above board, is your limit.

Faced with a driving need to provide a solution to the government cuts to spending on education, Morna Simpson’s idea needed a radical and speedy start-up response.

So the former academic-turned-entrepreneur Tweeted a message asking for help from programmers, marketers and media folk, and 22 people immediately responded to her plea to join what she called “sweatshop workshops” to build the technology platform she needed to launch www.FlockEdu.co.uk.

Yup, you heard it: sweatshops. Three weekends of unpaid coding and designing to bring the concept of “eBay for educators” to life.

Simpson, who also founded Girl Geeks, an online community for women and girls interested in technology, had her critics. There were those who suggested that asking people to work for nothing on their days off was nothing short of slave labour. What they didn’t know was that she planned to give shares to those involved when the company was launched. And neither, it should be noted, did the volunteers.

Simpson and a colleague developed the framework for the website, wrote a business plan and put everything up on a wall ready for her 25 volunteers to arrive. She gave them beer and pizza, they wandered around looking at the plans, and then they got to work. They did this for three weekends.

FlockEdu is now live, thanks to a bit of disruptive thinking, some enthusiastic volunteers and Simpson’s drive to make a difference.

“It’s alternative, but it’s rewarding. Everyone pulls together and the collaboration brings results that couldn’t be achieved if I’d tried to do it on my own,” says Simpson.

For freelance copywriter Leah Parker, the idea of launching lifestyle deals and offers online came long before the boom in the internet voucher market with Groupon etc, and finding funding to build her site proved impossible.

So she went against the norm and partnered with a web design company, giving them a percentage of equity in her company Saloca in exchange for a cost-price website.

She then partnered with one of her clients and is now paid on a profit-share basis.

Parker says the alternative approaches to finding funding have added huge value to her business, and the collaboration with another start-up means they can support each other through the challenges of growth.

When traditional paths have seemingly insurmountable hurdles, it makes sense to find another route. If you find a fellow traveller needing or volunteering help, then why not saddle up together for the journey?