Innovatia

PREPARE FOR HELL Dr Adir Shiffman is brutally honest about what’s involved in growing a start-up: endless problems, endless disasters, endless catastrophes.But, if you can solve most of these challenges effectively, you end up with a high- quality company. I nnovating is, mostly, not fun. Except in the most financially reckless of times, the idea of the start-up as a resource-rich juggernaut is entire- ly fictional. In reality, embarking on a disruptive, innovative endeavour means creating something previously untried that will likely fail, or trying again where others have failed. Consequently, founders and early-stage start-up employees ex- perience a tremendous amount of stress. A daily dose of relentless anxiety severely de- grades happiness, damages health and strains relationships inside and outside work. Hence, start-ups should be the exclusive domain of those helplessly addicted to innovating and creating. That said, the preparedness of these innovators to embrace the risk of failure is vital for any country seeking to sustain a prosperous and happy society. In the current information age, technology com- panies simply deliver more – more jobs growth, better quality jobs and higher value exports –

also help themselves by developing a high de- gree of resilience and perspective. The first lesson is how to face reality. Doing so early is the founda- tion upon which good decisions are based. The difference between an optimist and a pessimist should lie not in their acceptance of problems, but rather in their perspective on possibility. The Failed Pessimist imagines endless storms and so never leaves harbour. This is no person- ality for a founder. But nor do all optimists make good founders. The Failed Optimist is equally ill-suited to innovation as they acknowledge the storm only after the ship is smashed upon the rocks. In contrast, the Successful Optimist will acknowledge the storm on the horizon, and then set sail regardless. They have assem- bled a strong crew and have confidence that together they can make sound decisions and adapt quickly to ensure safe passage. This perspective lies at the heart of the best founders, and often it is the presence of just such an unexpected storm that challenges a capable founder and crew to innovate in even better ways. Helping founders see reality while maintaining the confidence to press on is fundamental to sup- porting an innovation ecosystem. The science author Steven Johnson once not- ed, “if you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect”. A case in point is the recent Austral- ian approach of aggregating founders into clus- ters, aiding collaborative development of ideas and assisting founders with perspective. Found- ers can provide one another with an external perspective that helps them accept reality, while reinforcing the optimism and positivity that are inherent in the founder character.

these early stage businesses to give founders the best shot of beating the odds and succeeding. The corollary, of course, is that founders must

than any other industry. Given that almost every successful technology company began as a frag- ile start-up, it is vital that government supports

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INNOVATIA

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