Adrian Pica

The innovative power of small teams

People talk about innovation in all areas of activity. Whether they are working in the corporate environment, education, government and even small business.

And they all look at startups who prove to have a tremendous success innovating, disrupting existing industries or creating new ones.

The truth of the matter is though that there is no simple recipe to innovate, but there are a few patterns that can be observed.

And one of the most obvious things we notice when we look at startups, is that they operate in small teams.

Innovation happens in small teams because they can move with increased agility, pushing projects forward. Individual responsibility feels much stronger, and people feel motivated that their direct input is immediately incorporated. You get the feeling that you either give it 110% or things will not happen and in a small team you can hold each other responsible for your work. According to Jeff Gothelf,  teams should be small, collocated, dedicated and self sufficient.

The feeling of ownership and autonomy will boost the intrinsic motivation of the team members. And if the people in the team are smart and competent, they will seek out new possibilities and scenarios with a determination hard to replicate otherwise. The inner mechanisms of the self-determination theory should be mastered by top management in search for innovation.

It’s hard to innovate when you need to get stuff approved in committees or the chain of command is long and decisions are being made far from the team working on that project.

So, when you’re setting up a team that should work on a new project, remember that there is a reason why small startups can achieve so much with so few team members. Remember the 2 pizza rule that Jeff Bezos implemented at Amazon! He was saying that teams shouldn’t be larger than what two pizzas can feed.

I’ll talk more about innovation in the next posts, so if you want more of this, you can subscribe to get notified.

Delaying gratification - basic principle of entrepreneurship

The importance of delaying gratification is often overlooked when we talk about entrepreneurship. We now live in a world where reward mechanisms have been embedded into regular and repeated tasks that deliver a predictable outcome. 

We get grades in school for our learning efforts and we are constantly checked for the expected progress along the way. We get a monthly paycheck for the work we perform and often times we are allocated a monthly quota of achievements and tasks to perform.

The way society acknowledges success is by measuring our ability to fit into this action/reward mechanism that evolved along with humanity. And all this is happening because of our illusion of safety that comes from regular, predictive behavior. But this linear causality is something we only really find in man made processes, such as schools or jobs.

However, the biggest achievements of humanity in general and innovation in entrepreneurship in particular, come from a different way of approaching life that relies on the non-linear reality of the world around us. Artists, entrepreneurs and often times, researchers, spend a lot of time working without getting that immediate reward for their effort. 

They are unable to give a socially accepted answer to the question: how was your day at the office?

That’s why it’s so hard to be motivated to work on such long term goals if you are not comfortable with delaying gratification. But knowing that this is the best way to create amazing results, I sometimes wonder why so few people embark on this journey. Or why the majority of the people engaged in typical action/reward activities perceive this pursuit as failure.

I’ll end this with a quote that I really enjoy: “It’s tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb. “The Black Swan.”

Don’t fall in love with ideas

I get that a lot. Founders (especially first time founders) are extremely attached to their idea. That puts them in a delicate situation, because they’ll tend to ignore feedback from mentors but even from users and they’ll have a hard time pivoting.

A secondary effect is that they’ll try to be protective with their idea and instead of going to the market early with a rough prototype, they will focus on building a product instead, which is almost always a waste of time and resources.

What they should know is that ideas by themselves are worthless. The point of any entrepreneurial endeavor is not the idea, but the problem that it solves for a customer. And it’s been proven that testing out early stage prototypes is the best way to learn about your customer’s needs.

So, building those prototypes, also known as MVP (minimum viable products) is essential. There are several techniques to build MVPs and you can find some of them here.

“Prototyping is the conversation you have with your ideas” - Tom Wujec. 

Why is this better?

If you are working on your own startup/project, chances are you have competitors and other people already had the same idea.

But that’s a good thing. If you don’t have any competitors and nobody came up with that idea before, you either need to do more research or there is probably no market. Or you are incredibly bold. 
So, you discover your competitors and the first thing that you should ask yourself is the same thing that your users will ask: Why is this better than what your competitors are doing?

When you describe the differences between your product and everything else out there, you can choose one of the following 3 ways to do it:

1. Different product attributes - way faster, incredibly cheaper, takes less space, biggest screen size…

2. The way it’s distributed - on demand, 5 min food delivery, one click order, same day house delivery and so on

3. The service that you offer - 1 year money back guarantee, lifetime warranty, 24/7 support, personal assistant, etc.

Ideally, that should be the exact pain people are having with the existing solution. And your “different” has to be way better!