“Most startups will end-up with something different than what they started with, so looking for that constant feedback and being coachable is essential. Don’t be too much in love with your idea, surround yourself with the right people. For your co-founder and core team – make sure commitment and motivations are aligned with yours, this is where things go wrong very quickly.”
First of all, we would like to thank Mr. Jean-Luc Scherer for agreeing to respond to our questions.
1) Let us start from a brief introduction of your role with the Innoopolis, often referred as a Digital Innovation Factory. Please tell our readers a bit about Innoopolis and what are its key offerings.
Our ambitions at Innoopolis is to work with innovation across two dimensions – on the one side we help corporates with their digital transformation efforts, and on the other side we work with startups and the startup ecosystem to build-up entrepreneurial capabilities and increase the success rate of startups. In both cases we take a systematic approach to innovation, that is we help them to adopt a more structured and scientific approach to innovation. At the end, methods like Lean Startup or even Design Thinking can be connected to a scientific approach as it is constantly about building hypotheses and doing experiments to validate or invalidate the initial assumptions. In both cases, we aim to help startups and corporates to move from idea to commercially viable concepts and even scale up these innovations.
Hence, our offering is centered around training and bootcamps for capability building and consulting / coaching, to assist companies and startups in their innovation projects. Contrary to many consulting firms, our ambition is not to sell more consulting hours, but it is to transfer innovation capabilities and fill in the knowledge gaps. Our objective is that corporates working with us should be able to stand on their own feet once we help them accelerate their internal innovation processes.
2) According to the LinkedIn profile of Innoopolis, you “help corporates getting more out of their innovation management initiatives”. But how important is innovation for the Innoopolis?
Innovation is crucial for any companies nowadays, and we aim to have innovation at the core of our DNA. What this means is that we are constantly experimenting, trying out new things to see what works best for the corporates and startups we work with. What we see works best is to provide corporates an experiential learning experience. So we would work with each corporate for a period of 4 to 12 weeks and take their teams through all stages of innovation process – from defining a strategic focus, insighting, ideation, prototyping and to finally ending-up with a Minimum Viable Product that we can then commercialize and scale up. Our approach ensures that a proper knowledge transfer is accomplished and employees are be able to re-run this process on their own. So far, we have delivered such projects in a couple of industries.
3) We know that you are also playing a very active role within the entrepreneurial ecosystem in UAE – you are the Startup Mentor with startAD in Abu Dhabi and in5 Innovate Center in Dubai. In your opinion, what is the outlook for entrepreneurship in UAE?
The work I do with StartAD is similar to the focus we have at Innoopolis, that is to help to build up entrepreneurial capabilities. The outlook for enterpreneurship in the UAE and the wider GCC region is good for 2 main reasons. First and foremost, the regional governments have made it a priority to support entrepreneurship and development of SMEs. Secondly, the first major exits and acquisitions of Careem earlier this year by Uber for more than USD 3 billion and the earlier acquisition of e-commerce platform Souq.Com by Amazon have shown that the regional startups can be counted on. However, relatively high cost of living and lack of funding have been among the main issues for startups in UAE and the GCC region. In addition, the market is not that big unless you target wider MENA region, which means that it is still difficult for entrepreneurs to succeed, but odds are rapidly improving.
4) What would be your advice for entrepreneurs who seek to start or scale up their businesses?
For entrepreneurs who are about to start their business – it is important to build the right habits, to constantly measure everything they do and, most importantly, validate, validate, always validate. Most startups will end-up with something different than what they started with, so looking for that constant feedback and being coachable is essential. Don’t be too much in love with your idea, surround yourself with the right people. For your co-founder and core team – make sure commitment and motivations are aligned with yours, this is where things go wrong very quickly.
For startups who are in the scale up mode, the most difficult is probably to stay focused on the target and be cautious with how to spend money. Scaling up quickly can be a problem when a startup suddenly increases its burn-rate while not generating enough cash. Unfortunately, with hyper-growth mindset of VCs, too many startups tend forget that only revenue will keep them alive in the long run. The other important thing, which is difficult to handle when scaling up, is to progressively introduce some form of governance, so that the founders and other core team members who were multi-tasking in several roles do not end-up becoming bottlenecks.
5) How about your advice for those who consider expanding to foreign markets?
The initial investment to move to another market is usually quite high as it often requires a local business license and a physical presence. I would recommend to make a proper analysis of the market entry costs and even perform some traction testing to see whether your solution would actually work in the foreign market. This goes beyond doing desk research, but actually requires some probing done with real customers. This is a service we also offer to startups. In most cases I would recommend startups not to open a local office before they have that first customer contract in hand. You can work with partners that could help you with the initial scouting and lead generation, this could help you save unnecessary costs. Another important factor to consider is that expansion to foreign market is often associated with additional fundraising. In such cases, my advise is to consider raising capital in the foreign market where you want to expand to. Doing so would allow foreign market investors be able to connect you with your first potential customers.
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Jean-Luc Scherer
Founder & CEO
Innoopolis
