My views in respect of the structure of the proposed Local Enterprise Offices (LEO)

From my experience of mentoring startups perceptions are key, the perception of confidentiality, independence and impartiality is of the utmost importance. A key strength of the County Enterprise Board structure is autonomy, flexibility in response to local needs and the trusted advisory function of the board of directors(which gives the Boards the ability to tap into local knowledge and energies). These are core values that need to remain in place within the proposed LEO structure.

While the detail of the proposed entity structure for LEOs is not clear any step that involves the loss of the involvement of hundreds of locally-based  business people, and others, that  participate on a voluntary basis in the work of CEB Boards and Evaluation Committees, should be avoided.

Potential conflicts of interest: While completing my Dissertation I interviewed a number of local authorities. They referred to the fact that if those paying commercial rates see any support/preferment  by the County Council of individual SMEs (that have the potential to compete with them) there is a significant backlash. While CEBs currently observe the requirement to avoid displacement as much as possible it can be a fact of life in supporting the growth of innovative micro-enterprises.

The One Stop Shop has to be about focussing expertise where it can have most impact

In speaking to contacts in the enterprise support sector the introducation of the “One Stop Shop” concept is generally welcomed and the associated expectation of joined up thinking on enterprise and innovation is also welcomed. However the “One Stop Shop” policy does has potential downsides, namely dilution of expertise and focus. While attending the annual conference of a prominent EU support agency last year, I attended a debate on whether the agency should move from its stated policy of being a “One Stop Shop” to specialisation in prioritised sectors and activities. Speakers felt that the “One Stop Shop” policy had stretched resources too thinly and prevented in depth specialisms developing within the agency.

What services should the Local Enterprise Offices offer?

Resource limitations may force the proposed “One Stop Shops” to make a decision on operational specialisation (for example becomming specialised in offering advice and referrals as opposed to filtering applications from start-ups for grant supports). While the overall level of start-ups in Ireland is in line with the norms of economies we wish to emulate, the quality and sustainability of many of these is questionable and could be improved. In talking to my mentees they receive ample supports when on the incubation programmes but at the end of the programme are somewhat cut loose. Unless they fit into Enterprise Ireland’s pre High Potential Start up support programme the roadmap for their growth is not defined.

Indeed perhaps current policy is excessively focussed on the startup phase as opposed to the development phase of micro businesses. While the “Action Plan for Jobs” identifies “Better support for indigenous companies to improve their performance” as a priority it cites the Enterprise Ireland Lean programme as catering for this priority. However this programme is limited to current EI clients and quite specific in its application.

In contrast to when the CEBs came into existence, Ireland now has an infrastructure of  approximately 22 Incubation Centres located in strategic locations around Ireland. They provide considerable specialisation in terms of start up support.

Due to the focus of many CEBs resources on startups they often don’t have sufficient time or resources to focus on the business development aspect of their mandate. Arguably more “winners” in terms of employment will emerge from the support of sustainable early phase businesses as opposed to startups. However the provision of specialised business development supports are sparse in the Irish enterprise support landscape.

Therefore one could argue that specialisation should take place where the start up support mandate of Incubation Centres is broadened to the task of identifying sustainable, high growth potential startups from those referred to them by the LEOs. This would enable the LEOs to develop strength in capacity building/development of micro-businesses providing Ireland with a cohort of growth businesses capable of creating sustainable jobs. From my research I believe that the specific programme that could best aid LEOs in this objective would be the creation of a national Business Development & Innovation coaching programme.  

The opportunity should not be missed for LEOs to add value to the Irish enterprise ecosystem

Any new services facilitated by the LEOs must be about sustainable job creation irrespective of whether they are in prioritised sectors or not. In speaking to one SME owner recently (emplying 10 staff) she felt that the policy of “If you are not in certain sectors or exporting we are not interested in you” is a big challenge for her business.

The link between expert interventions in the area of small business development and innovation and sustainable growth is widely accepted. When I was working on a national project with the Enterprise Europe Network last year for DG Enterprise our goal was to identify the obstacles that prevent Irish SMEs from engaging in innovation.

Of the 33 individual recommendations that arose from our focus groups 14 concerned a need for a role best summarised as a “Business Development & Innovation Coach” and 8 concerned the lack of education provided to SMEs development of their businesses and innovation. Commercial business development & innovation consultants are too expensive for the majority of small businesses therefore there is a market failure in this space which the proposed LEOs could productively address in the national interest.

 How would it work: An outline of the role of Business Development & Innovation Coach

The objective of such a programme offered by the proposed LEOs would be to seek to engage as many companies as possible in the the sustainable development of their business and engagement in the discipline of innovation from an early stage. The coach would need to be a practitioner themselves as opposed to an advisor. The individual actions that the BDI coach would undertake under this programme would include:

1. Get the message across to SMEs that innovation is not necessarily technology/R&D intensive. SMEs need to understand that innovation embraces a while spectrum of activities such as knowledge management, product design, management practices etc. Innovation that has an impact on their profitability can take place in any aspect of their business.
2. SMEs want practical solutions that will contribute immediately. Many SMEs are  constantly told “In business you need to keep re-inventing yourself” however support in approaching this challenge in a structured way is lacking. The trained BDI coach would agree with the client which tools from the spectrum of BDI tools and applications now available would have the potential to have the most impact in the short term in the cleint business. The Coach would follow up over a period of months via virtual meetings on Skype (to save the “time poor” owner manager travelling time) to ensure that these tools become embedded in day to day work practices of the client.
3. The programme would be available across the spectrum from post Incubation Centre start ups to non EI companies up to 50 staff. The key criteria is are they sustainable rather than the sector they occupy.
4. The BDI coach would be familiar with the complete range of relevant supports across all the agencies and could help the client engage with the supporting agencies and get going successfully with relevant innovation within their businesses.
5. The coach would be outcomes focussed. A key performance indicator for each BDI coach would be how many successful SME BDI case studies they generate per annum. This will help provide evidence to Ireland’s SME base that business development works and that innovation doesn’t have to be risky.

Innovation in provision of services

 When established in 1993 the CEBs involved two significant innovations, the formalisation of supports to micro-enterprise and a concommitant relaxation of the previous mainstream industrial policy emphasis on manufacturing and internationally-traded services in respect of these micro-enterprises.

In my opinion the introduction of LEOs must involve a simliar commitment to innovation in provision. This can be achieved through the introduction of a national programme of Business Development & Innovation Coaches interventions. There is a good case from a national competitiveness perspective to ensure that all small and micro-enterprise in Ireland receive training and coaching in professional business development practice and engage in continual improvement and innovation.

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/item/25388-dublin-web-summit-launches

Photo: From left one of my mentees on the Enterprise Ireland mentor programme Gerard O’Sullivan (http://www.latersocial.com/), a college friend Jillian Godsil (www.practicepr.ie ),  Mark Loud ( http://www.seocompany.ie ) and Paddy Hayes (www.cst-international.com ).

At the event I also picked up a copy of KPMG’s guide to

GrowingandStartingYourTechnologyBusiness

I will be working with Dr Charlie Cullen and Keith Gardiner on this project.

Dr Charlie Cullen is head of the Multimodal Interaction Group (MmIG) in DIT, principal investigator on national and European ICT research projects, and a lecturer and supervisor on the MA in Digital Media Technologies course in DIT.

Keith Gardiner is a Senior Researcher in the Digital Media Centre in the Dublin Institute of Technology. His area of expertise is Location-Based Services (LBS) with an emphasis on Mobile Spatial Interaction (MSI) where he has published extensively in recent years. His research interests also extend into the areas of Multimodal Interaction and Spatial Audio research.

The technology – MobiSurround is a surround sound auditory user interface for location-based-services on smartphones. Specifically, the MobiSurround project developed a surround sound virtualiser on a low bandwidth smartphone device to deliver location-based-services to the user using a spatialised auditory user interface.

HOTHOUSE INFO SHEETS mobiSurround

Here are his slides - Agile-Prod-Mgmt-Weds 18th 2012

Last Thursday I attended a great workshop moderated by PA Consulting and hosted by Bord Bia at their Vantage Programme day.

I learnt a lot from the PA Consulting talk, slides attached for the interest of all small businesses that want to get their “innovation function” functioning.

Bord Bia Vantage Innovation Programme Workshop Dublin 18 Jan 2012 (1)

I was out with Sinead Heneghan last Wednesday helping get the Irish Institute of Training and Development up and running on Twitter. We also looked at how to measure the impact that their Twitter presence has (using Klout and monitoring click through rates on bit.ly).

It’s a great way to communicate immediate opportunities/news with a large audience of members in an era when email in-boxes are over flowing.

Here are our first couple of Tweets http://screencast.com/t/wBNi4uYJA

Identifying the sweet spot for our offerings

This is the process whereby we identify the type of customers we want to do business with in this business area. By doing this we can save a lot of time on sales quotes that are not going to turn into orders. It also means that we do not take on clients that are going to be more trouble than they are worth.

Guidelines for our ideal client:

• We want to target clients with a minimum spend of E2,000 per annum.
• We want clients that typically have some technical ability(i.e. will not be a massive drain on support)
• We want clients that need us to perform some managed services for them(which are higher profit)
• Client is in urgent need of the solution (i.e. we want to avoid spending a lot of time on clients that are only browsing or looking to screw their current provider at the renewal date with a cheaper quote).
• We want to make a minimum gross profit of 50% on all services provided to the client. In some cases we will accept lower than this where we are not involved in much of the work(e.g. backups by Serve Centric).

What industry sectors would our ideal client typically be in:

• Web developers
• Media/advertising/PR
• Software development
• Web services providers
• Clients that understand the quality proposition (i.e. that you get what you pay for) and are prepared to pay for a quality, reliable service.

What sectors would not represent our ideal client at this time

• Slow decision makers/long sales processes such as government departments.
• Low tech companies with no internal IT function.
• Single server colo clients with low bandwidth usage and no scope for selling additional services.

 Devising the list of core versus custom features in dealing with sales quotes

 It is commonly accepted that when clients are considering a purchase they indulge their fantasies and dream up everything they would ideally like in the new service. However the client’s customer requirements list will rarely take account of how practical it is or how much it will cost to provide to them.

Therefore when assessing incoming sales quote requests it is important that we have a clear idea in our mind of which of the list of requirements are on our core list of supported items (e.g. hard drives, server space, bandwidth, power) and which are custom (load balancing, RAID 5,JSP, custom software installs etc). Having a core list enables us to turn around sales quotes faster and helps us standardise our offering.

What we need to do is draw up a list of Core Features that all clients would typically benefit from. Any requests that deviate from the Core Features list are then considered Custom Features and quoted for accordingly.

When deciding how to proceed in the case where the client has requested Custom Features the following will decided on whether we provide it or not:

1. Is the client prepared to pay a commercial price for it?

2. How many clients are seeking the same feature? If a lot of customers are requesting the same feature we may need to consider moving it to from the Custom list onto the Core List and pricing it accordingly.

On Thursday (19th Jan) I visited DkIT Regional Development Centre (www.rdc.ie) on the occasion of the celebration of 10 years of the Novation Enterprise Platform Programme at the centre. Garrett Duffy (Enterprise Development Manager at the centre) kindly took time out on a very busy day to give me a tour of the facility.  Some great Irish businesses have come out of the Centre over the years  (Digiweb, Redmere,Barracuda FX and Mcor Technologies to name but a few) and many more are lined up on this year’s Novation programme.

Being in the home town of Digiweb I made sure to catch up with my friend and mentor Colm Piercy for lunch. 2012 looks like being another record year for Digiweb.

At the NEPP celebration I also had the chance to meet Gerry Moan (Managing Director of Constructive Intervention and founder of Smart Start) and hear about this year’s new intake on the Smart Start programme – see www.smartstart.ie . I particularly like the Smart Start professional structure of using competition to gradually identify the best of breed in the start-ups they support on each programme –  http://screencast.com/t/njO24eQeVQc

This blog post outlines nicely what is involved in changing the behaviours of SME owners – with thanks to http://paul4innovating.com/2012/01/04/the-value-of-having-an-innovation-coach/

You go through four stages

Unconscious Incompetence- this is often a self reflection stage where the coach and the person receiving the coaching simply reflect and draw out areas of incomplete knowledge. You raise them from being unconsciously there.

Conscious Incompetence- From these reflections you gain insights, you begin to explore tested tools and techniques, you begin to frame new references that are relevant, you begin to explore and experiment. You are looking for growing confirmation that it has value.

Conscious Competence- As you begin to ‘grasp’ differences this enables the exchanges between coach and person being coached to look at the alternatives with a growing confidence and some ‘matching’ begins to occur. These new conscious understandings begin to become relevant and within the discussions you can see an emerging path for action beginning to emerge.

Unconscious competence- the final part where the impact of what has been learnt, understood, investigated and explored has a real personal impact. It seeps into the make-up of the person and changes there ‘going forward’ behaviour. These see different patterns, they comprehend innovation meaning differently than their original perspective and these ‘new’ competences enter and become more automatic, unconsciously simply occurring, as the way to manage innovation going forward as the value ‘gels’.

In December I had a meeting with Minister Bruton (Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation) to brief him on findings from my Dissertation relevant to the work of his Department. My Dissertation examined the practical issues involved in the Higher Education-Enterprise Innovation Interface in Ireland using the Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire as a case study.

My recommendations that were relevant to the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation included: