New Skills
If you want to make the success of your start-up sustainable, then ideation should not be a one-off affair and the integration of your stakeholders should become part of your corporate culture.
If you want to make the success of your start-up sustainable, then ideation should not be a one-off affair and the integration of your stakeholders should become part of your corporate culture. This will enable you to bring your start-up into the growth phase in the long term. But how can start-ups maintain the alertness and openness they need?
“Shaping ideation and stakeholder integration through co-creation.”
Maintain the start-up spirit
Sven, Nike and Pete studied physics together with a focus on thermodynamics. On the basis of your joint research work, you developed the idea for a product that could have good market opportunities. Even before completing their doctorate, they found a start-up company. What binds them together and motivates you every day to give your all, is the belief in the brilliant idea and the product that can be developed from it.
They know stories like this and also know how they should continue in the best case scenario: The three young entrepreneurs find a committed investor, the product is patented and brought to market maturity, the first customers are found, series production starts, employees are hired and a success story develops …
So far, so good, but what comes next and how can the three avoid a dead end? For the past 20 years, I’ve worked in and for large corporations to make them better at what they do. You all started out as a start-up at some point. For most companies, the following applies: “We move in our comfort zone and do what we can. If we want to grow, we’ll do more of it. ” Diversification arises, if at all, mostly through acquisitions or random events.
Learn from the mistakes of the established
In large companies we work with the co-creation approach in order to bring about a cultural change that leads to more openness, the development of potential and the use of collective knowledge. That is not always easy, because as Peter Drucker tells us: “Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast”.
Furthermore, one can often observe that start-ups that have reached a certain size and reach their organizational limits with “management on demand” adopt classic structures in blind trust. One would like to call out to them: “Stop, take a deep breath, come together, think! – because the spirits you call are difficult to get rid of otherwise. “
What could prevent a start-up from taking the path of the established early on? How can founders manage to set the essential course and not miss the right turn when their company is a closed system that is completely focused on its goal and, figuratively speaking, does not look to the left or right? How can start-ups take an approach from the start that is geared towards their stakeholders and, as an open system, reveals key developments? How can they form a breathing, living organism that has its sensors in society, recognizes and uses opportunities?
Co-creation as an attitude and a method
If start-ups live co-creation as an attitude and method, they overcome inertia and randomness in their development. To achieve this, an integrative attitude is required in the company. A culture for which the exchange and connection with the ecosystem is THE way in which fundamental decisions are made. Hence «Ideation and Stakeholder Integration». We believe that ideation should not be separate from the dialogue with stakeholders, but must happen together with them. If they manage to live such an attitude in the start-up phase, then the next big challenge is to continuously maintain this attitude as a culture in the mature company.
Susan Barth, head of the STARTKLAR start-up center at Heilbronn University and lecturer for entrepreneurial leadership, observes that startups in growth phases are confronted with the following topics and are therefore often left alone:
– Rapid need for employees with a simultaneous lack of expertise in dealing with personnel issues and leadership – resulting in interpersonal conflicts and problems that capture attention and energy
– Strategic division of responsibilities and tasks in the founding team due to entrepreneurial complexity – often turning away from the original founding motive (e.g. building & inventing) and increasing dissatisfaction
– Focus on building functioning entrepreneurial structures – thereby neglecting important innovation and maturation loops in the development process
– Scaling pressure – therefore a stronger focus on numbers than on sustainable corporate development
The organizational psychologist advises startups to establish professional reflection processes at an early stage for strategic reasons. From their perspective, co-creation can not only establish an effective innovation logic in the corporate culture at an early stage, but also help to identify blind spots in one’s own development process in good time.
Co-creation has become a household word and is used carelessly to express when something is being worked on together. However, we are talking about the attitude and the co-creation method. Co-creation differs from agile methods, such as design thinking, primarily through their mindset and the implementation of this attitude in the co-creation process.
Attitude & Mindset: Connection and Integration
Connection and integration arise from an inner attitude. They are the very essence of co-creation as we understand them. At the beginning of our millennium, the greatest challenges and opportunities arise from complex relationships. Understanding them and solving them sustainably requires unity in the diversity of perceptions, experiences and thoughts. In traditional companies it helps us to overcome silos, in agile organizations it can help bridge the barriers between people in the organization and outside the organization.
Ideation: the difference between design thinking and co-creation
Ideation is particularly effective when it occurs in a way of learning with and from one another. The co-creation method includes all relevant stakeholders in the design process. Making assumptions about stakeholders in Design Thinking increases the speed and the number of possible iterations. Integrating the stakeholders into the process is a qualitatively demanding process that can lead to surprising insights. What is particularly important, however, is that results are achieved together with those involved. As a result, everyone involved looks at the challenge together and has a high level of commitment to the results from the start.
Design the overall process
The co-creation methodology designs the overall process in 8-stage co-creation workshops with the involvement of the stakeholders. Together they get to know their personalities, they perceive synergies and similarities, they understand how they can best work together as a team on the journey. But they also combine in the goal, they understand what the individual benefit of the goal and the common perceived benefit of the goal are for those involved. They get to the bottom of things together and let the new emerge. Every 3 or 4 months they meet for the next co-creation workshop to evaluate the previous process and the results and to set the course for the next iteration.
Contact: Dr. Georg Michalik; michalik@paracleteps.com