You have a great idea and have developed a product.  Now you want to protect it. When I ask entrepreneurs how they will do this, they usually talk about patents and continually improving their technology. They're focusing on the wrong thing - the tip of the iceberg only.

Successful entrepreneurs are usually working on three horizons at once: 1. the now - their current products for the current market; 2. the next - products for emerging markets; and 3. the nascent - thinking and working towards the far future.

Every month I see startups who are failing because they have not evolved. Every startup ecosystem goes through three distinct stages. Startups that do not evolve to fit each stage will die out. So what are these stages?

It is essential for every entrepreneur to keep “scanning the horizon” - seeing what is new in technology, business, and society as a whole.

I encourage beginning entrepreneurs to rather tackle small, achievable projects first.  This allows them to rapidly gain a full set of skills across a complete project, as well as building up contacts, credibility and confidence - rather than getting bogged down, and run down, working on an huge endless project.

Many startups become isolated and insular, focusing on their product to the exclusion of all else - like the squirrel in Ice Age, who is so preoccupied with his nut that he never really interacts with any of the other animals.  This is not good, or healthy.  These startups are cut off from the support, camaraderie, flow of ideas, and connections that can prove so vital to a product’s success, and from a vital source of ideas for new offerings.

I've been spending lots of time with new startups, from pro bono mentoring to judging pitches at the competitions.  Lots of the ideas sound plausible but often suffer from a fatal flaw - the numbers have not been done.

How well do you understand the ecosystem in which you are working?  What will happen next in this space?  How will the forces shaping it affect your venture?

We've spoken in previous newsletters about the strategy of the flower - making sure that your core service or product is surrounded by a set of world-class services (the petals of the flower) to make up a compelling "whole product". But, it's not enough to just build your flower. You must also make sure that your company and its "flowers" are well positioned in the total ecosystem of your industry.

Your business is stuck, bogged down, cannot move forward...  That’s when many of my clients come to me, so this week we’re going to look at how a de-coupling strategy can help some ventures to move forward.

In my last article we spoke about S-curves, the underlying lifecycle of all innovations, and how important it is to manage transitions from one S-curve to another. Explained in terms of curves, it sounds so easy.  But it isn’t.  Every curve represents something - a project, a venture, a dream, a team of people - that we have loved, cared for, poured our life into.  And when these things change, we have to change too - and that is not easy.

Farmers know when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, for the best crop.  Is there a seasonal code to guide people developing innovations? There is.  Every innovation follows a lifecycle called an S-curve.  Understanding S-curves will help you to take the right actions at the right time.

I’m consulting in the winelands. The estate has ambitious plans to create a virtual online community with all sorts of measures of engagement. I’m not sure this is a good idea…

In this blog we’re going to look at finding the best market for your product. “But everyone is the market for my product”, is what many startups tell me. And, “our market is 50 million people, and if we can capture just 1% of the market…”. Wrong approach! Trying to mass-market your offering from the beginning is doomed to failure.

Imagine the confusion that the platypus caused for scientists - a mammal that lays eggs, has the bill of a duck, the tail of a beaver and otter feet.  How to classify it? The same confusion cripples many startup products.

To succeed a new venture needs to play at least two and maybe three very different games at the same time… a short game; a mid game; and a long game. Neil uses real-life case studies to provide insights to help you play all three games well in your own startup.

“I must have made a mistake”, I thought, “this company has been written up in the Wall Street Journal as one of the most exciting startups in audio technology.  This cannot be their website”.  But it was their site.  A site that looked like one created in the 1990’s.  Doing damage to their image every day.

I’m sitting with a startup team helping them prepare for a critical sales presentation.  Errol is not present, so we don’t have his correspondence with the client.  And no one can find the phone number of the consultant coordinating the evaluation for the client.  It’s a mess!

Every business has a central challenge.  With my first business it was this: We were distributors for several famous software companies, reselling their products in South Africa through a network of partners that included IBM, Unisys, NCR, Accenture, DiData, etc, often as part of large systems solutions.

It is the early 1980’s and computer monitors have a uniform monotonous green text running across them.  But someone has studied calligraphy at college, and dreams of bringing beauty and elegance to computers….