Scaling and Scalability

Five critical steps to scaling your business

1. Evaluate and Plan: Are you ready for growth? What are you now vs where you want to
go.
2. Find the Money: how much you need to support the growth you aim for. Internal funds:
initial sales, investment from family and friends. External funds: loans, partnership,
government grants.
3. Secure the Sales: look at the sales process. Where do you get leads? How do you
manage those leads?
4. Invest in Technology: create economies of scale, automate, system integration.
5. Find staff or strategically outsource: recruitment and hiring system, benefits and
payroll, and management.

Four tendencies of ceos which work for small businesses but may not when you
scale:
1. Loyalty
2. Task orientation
3. Single Mindedness
4. Working in isolation

Competitive Strategies (5 competitive strategies)

● Opportunity-driven business development
● Moving with speed
● Building distinctive capabilities
● Continuous and systematic innovation
● Differentiation

Challenges of the new economy (7 challenges)

● Globalization
● Shortening product and technology life cycles
● Knowledge–driven
● Volatility
● Rampant change
● Complexity
● Hypercompetition

Individual Creativity (7 individual creativity)

● Challenge assumptions: Do not take assumptions for granted, they may be based on
preconceptions or false opinions which are main impediments (hindrance) to generating
new ideas.
● Welcome chance intrusions (becoming involved): The creative thinker must be
especially aware and observant of everything that is taking place around him/her while
working on solution. Such awareness permits us to take advantage of lucky chance
occurrences or serendipity
 ● Listen to your depth mind: Creative thinkers develop the habit of listening to their
subconscious minds because our subconscious minds continue to work on solutions
when relaxed or even asleep.
● Suspend judgment: If you want to encourage new ideas, do not evaluate too early but
let the ideas flow. Creative thinkers are open to constructive criticism and surround
themselves with people who are not prone to premature criticism
● Use the stepping stones of analogy: Analogy implies a likeness or parallelism in
relations or attributes rather than in appearance. Many creative ideas arose from
drawing analogies from nature and using them for designing products or even
organizational structures. This habit teaches that there are other models to be found in
existing products and organizations without having to reinvent the wheel.
● Tolerating ambiguity (being open to more than one interpretation): Creative thinking
requires a higher threshold of tolerance for uncertainty, complexity, and apparent
disorder which habit helps to develop the qualities of courage, perseverance, and
patience.
● Ideas banking: Ideas banking involves developing the habits of intellectual curiosity,
observation, listening rather than thinking of what you say, reading, adventurous
travelling, recording ideas and experiences.

Team Creativity (3 definitions of team creativity)

● Set high goals and explicit (clear) set of results
● Inculcate (instill) a positive mood, and increase individual accountability and analogical
reasoning.
● Stay focused on the task, do not tell stories or explain ideas when no one suggested
ideas, restate the problem and encourage the generation of idea, and encourage those
who were silent to make a contribution.

Organization Creativity (9 organization creativity)

● Project planning: Assign small teams (2-6 people) to work on challenging portions of
the project while emphasizing the importance of creative solution and building a product
that delivers pride in accomplishment
● Facilitate a congruent environment: Leaders must manage risks and encourage
exploration of optimum solutions, adjust schedules, effort, and scope, while building trust
within the team and with the team supervisors.
● Tolerate ambiguity and do not force convergence (forming a whole instantly):
Managers must manage the associated anxiety within the group and not create more
anxiety by forcing convergence.
● Show incremental progress: Conduct demonstrations for internal partners and external
stakeholders which had theoretical support in that the demonstrations will increase
intrinsic motivation and early user feedback.
● Avoid the silver bullet syndrome: Explore new technologies before incorporating in a
real project but avoid rapid changes to development processes, because immediate
changes add to the burden of teams and can constitute a barrier.
 ● Select the best: Recruit the best people available for your team, and encourage their
creativity.
● Do not re-invent the wheel: Emphasize communication with other team
members and other teams within the organization and outside the
organization as communication was identified as a key contributor to
creativity
● Invest in learning: Cover creativity techniques, task relevant skills and
productive work styles, knowledge management technologies, and knowledge
distribution
● Emphasize having fun: Incorporating a sense of work and play was identified
in the research as a source of creative energy.

Promoting organizational innovation (4 definitions of promoting organizational

innovation)
● Diverse organizations promote creativity, innovation, and flexibility
● Requires a set of competencies and capacities that enable the organization to win
new business
● Management and control systems within the organizations must allow for diversity
and creativity; and time, financial and human resources must be made available, in
order to generate and test different ideas.
● Organizations must adopt the mantra of ‘innovate or evaporate’, because businesses
where creative thinking is not valued and nurtured, struggle to compete with more
visionary enterprises.

Entrepreneurial Process (2 definitions of entrepreneurial process)

● May be defined as the steps taken to form a new enterprise
● May be broken down to 5 Phases
- Idea Generation
- Opportunity Evaluation
- Planning
- Company Formation/Product Launch
- Growth

Idea Generation
● Everything starts with an idea. Before it manifests in the physical, it starts with the mental
(thought/picture)
● Ideas – description of a need or problem coupled with a concept of a possible solution

Opportunity Evaluation
● Is it worth investing in?
○ Money, time, other resources

Planning
● How to proceed with the opportunity
● Plans begin with simple set of ideas then grows in complexity as the business takes shape
 ● Create: strategy and operating plan

Company Formation/Product Launch Growth

● Process of choosing the right form of legal entity
● Creating Product/Service
● Generating Revenue
● Sustainable Performance

Business Model (5 definitions)

● Describes how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value.
● Represents core aspects of an organization:
○ purpose, business processes, target customers, offerings, strategies,
infrastructure, organizational structures, sourcing, trading practices, operational
processes, and policies including culture.
● Describes the process in which an organization adjusts its business model.
● Reflects a fundamental change in how an organization delivers values to its customers,
whether through the development of new revenue streams or distribution channels.
● Allows a business to take advantage of changing customer demands and expectations.

How to create a culture of innovation

- Give employees freedom to fail
- Encourage employees to test new ideas
- Allocate the proper resources
- Prioritize innovation from the top down
- Consider creating an incentive system
- Establish a team process early on

Innovation tools:
● Brainstorming tools: Helps in generating ideas for innovation
● Idea management tools: Helps in collecting the ideas during the brainstorming
session and in organizing them so when they will be used, retrieving them quickly
will not be an issue.
● Decision-making tools: Helps in structuring out the possibilities of the ideas
generated as well as the result they bring.
● Knowledge sharing tools: Helps the innovation group share information with
each other to help move the idea even further.
● Collaboration software: Helps in collaboration as well as in sharing insights
among the innovation groups.
● Innovation management tools: helps in managing the whole innovation
process from start to finish.