antti.vilpponen.net

I was walking home last night from the Startup Christmas party in downtown Helsinki, organised by GrowVC and Aalto Entrepreneurship Society, I came up with an interesting way of looking at our innovation system from the national perspective. Innovation, as we all know, is an extremely hot topic among politicians as they try to dig into the best future sources of government tax.

As many know, I’m a huge fan of growth businesses and try to promote them through ArcticStartup with our team. I’m such a big fan of the whole ecosystem that I believe that we’ve only began to touch on the possibilities it has for our economies and ultimately, our society. We talked a lot about the Finnish innovation system in the Christmas party and while there were some appraisals, it was mostly criticism of some sort on how to make the system better. Pretty much the usual stuff if you look at anything in our societies these days.

This got me thinking about the difference in supporting innovation in regular entrepreneurship and growth entrepreneurship. While it is very hard to define the points in which a company becomes a growth company – let’s for the sake of this blog post decide that first and foremost it is the passion of the entrepreneurs that counts and after that the results the company has achieved on an annual level. Say a 10-15% increase in revenues annually could be thought of being a very growth oriented company.

One of the problems we face is that not many people are able to distinguish between these two – growth entrepreneurship and regular entrepreneurship. The latter could be said to represent the majority of the companies in Finland and in some way the capitalist system itself. Growth entrepreneurs are those who take incredible risks and have incredible ideas on how to change the world and make it a better place. Almost all fail, but a few successful ones are able to take incredible leaps and do wonders to the way we live.

Now, not to wander about too much, I’d like to focus back on innovation and how it is supported in many economies. While there are a lot of incentives and tools available for businesses to leverage risk with the help of the governments – they are usually equally shared among the entrepreneurs in the society. Some of the help goes to growth entrepreneurs and some of the help goes to regular entrepreneurs.

What’s wrong with this equation then? Well, my argument is this: innovation in large companies is like inflation – it’s natural and it always happens. If it doesn’t, the companies don’t stay big very long. All the competition in the field is innovating as well, to keep ahead of their rivals. It’s natural and built into capitalism for survival. Where as in growth entrepreneurs they are usually in non-existent markets where consumers don’t realise the need for such a product or service and there are always extremely high risks and non-existent chances of pulling the concept through.

So how does supporting innovation fit into this framework then? Well, if you look at large companies – innovation in them is like inflation, it’s built into the system – they are bound to do it anyway. My point here is that large companies should not be supported by government money that much compared to more disruptive and higher risk ventures. These are the unnatural companies looking to do something new, and a lot of life support is usually needed to lift these companies off the ground – if the idea in the first place is any good that is.

So to finalise my random rambling here, I do think we (and perhaps other countries as well) should look into our innovation system and take a few steps back to think about the ways we are spending our tax payer money. While I do believe these organisations are of great value, their clients could be thought out more specifically on the potential of return-on-investment. If you look at it, the returns on innovation in large companies are not usually that great compared to growth companies who are able to create thousand-fold returns in new or near non-existent markets. While many of the growth companies fail, I’d still bet my tax payer money on them in the future for innovation.

I’ve been working from home for about 1,5 months now. At first it felt really odd having to stay at home the whole day and not leave the house, but I’ve learned to live with this in a way that it feels pretty natural. I take occasional breaks and walks outside to clear my head. Not only would I need those working at an office as well, because I’ve found that I’m pretty productive working on my own.

However, I wanted to jot down some thoughts I’ve had in these 1,5 months on entrepreneurship and being in charge of every little aspect of your company. I also have to state that I’ve been the demon at ArcticStartup that argues, sometimes to the point of ridicule, to keep our costs down so we don’t use many external services to run our business. The only business service we use is a professional book keeper and all they do is the bare minimum of keeping our books in their proper order. So outside the domain of keeping our books sorted out, I take care of everything else there is to running a business.

While this may not sound like a very big thing, I do believe there is a larger question behind all this. When you’re forced to put your hands down and go through everything there is to know about running a business from taxes, government agencies, paying salaries to insurance and all the other stuff that there is – only then do you begin to understand the wrath of things you need to be on top to be successful. While it does not make any sense to do these things your self all the way to the multinational -company size – I believe it makes a lot of sense so that you understand how these things work together. Not to forget, there’s a lot of variety in each day.

The reason is pretty simple as well, when you understand the ins and outs of the machine completely you’re running, only then are you able to take well calculated risks and push the machine itself to the edge to take the most out of the opportunity you have at hand. That’s something I’m really looking forwards to, taking this machine called ArcticStartup for the ride of my lifetime.

I’m in the process of finalising my presentation for Canada 3.0 – a conference held in Stratford, Canada on digitalisation of the society and pretty much everything around it. I’m travelling there together with Lari from Culminatum and talking about commercialisation of digital innovations. I’m going to be there representing both Gyllene Skor and ArcticStartup – bringing in knowledge from the Nordics.

I’m going to be talking about what the ecosystem here in Finland is and how that supports digital innovations and their commercialisation, both in startups and larger corporations. Furthermore, I’m going to be positioning my talk to the private side of the society. I’m going to talk about entrepreneurial experiences regarding the system we’ve built here in Finland and how entrepreneurs and corporationas are, for example, leveraging their R&D costs from organisations such as Tekes.

If you had 30 minutes to talk to the leaders of Canada on digitalisation of the society and economy – what would you like to tell them? What is the most important thing in your opinion for them to take into account when planning the future of Canada?

I stayed up late planning my European motorcycle trip last night. I found some amazing curvy roads in the Alps, Northern Italy, Austria and Switzerland to be specific. However, this brought up a question in my mind – something that the current GPSs can’t yet do – how do you find inexpensive accommodation in areas you’ve never been to before? Especially if you have little possibility to do any planning before hand?

Back in the early 2000s I had a business idea that I’d begin building mobile travel guides with the help of locals in the Nordic countries. At that time I was working with World66 guys to create mobile guides from the material they put on their sites. Back then mobile phones didn’t read PDFs that well, so I created their mobile guides in another format. Nevertheless – the reason behind this was of course the fact that mobile internet was still in its infancy and it was very hard to find information when you were on the road (unless you visited an internet cafe and had a visit online with a proper computer).

So how do you come across a problem like this? You create small files that readable with mobile devices, such as a phone, an iPod or a PDA. The files are updated in real time from the database of services such as wikitravel and world66 (both sites are community updateable so the information is, or at least in theory should be, up-to-date). Well, the sad part was that I never moved on with my plan back then – it was hard enough to find people to believe in my idea, let alone find a partner to move forward with the business idea.

Back to last night. I was looking at the curvy roads in Switzerland, Austria and Northern Italy and wondering if they’d have any hostels around that area. Even though I’ve been working for several years, I prefer to stay in hostels when ever I’m on a roadtrip or something similar. Why? I don’t need the luxury the hotels give me and more than usually, the hostels are really good standard and have safety boxes etc. to store your belongings. Last, but not least – you meet the best people in those places and they have a ton of stories to share. So I was looking for hostels and visited my favorite site for that – Hostelling International.

At the same time I was chatting with my friend who moved to Montpellier with his family for a few months and whining about the difficulty to find sights, places to stay at, places to eat at, etc when you’re on the road. He shared my thoughts. I was clicking around the Hostelling International website when I found their mobile hostel guides that they make available on their site for travellers. It goes hand in hand with the idea of living inexpensively (when was the last time you were overseas and roamed 5 to 10 megs data?). The guides are even laid out so that they are easily readable on a mobile phone – instant win!

This brought me back to thinking about the original business idea I had in the early 2000s. Since then, there have been some attempts at doing this but not that many have succeeded in it yet. I think people still prefer books, and I agree – I do too. However, I don’t have the luxury of carrying books with me when I’m on the road with my moto. I’ve got about 60 litres of space to carry my belongings – that’s not too much for three weeks, hence the digital guides that take no extra physical space. Also, books weigh quite a lot, so I’m going to with printed maps etc.

I reckon there’s still a lot of demand for mobile solutions in the travel industry. The travel industry is relatively well saturated with different online solutions, but I haven’t seen that many mobile solutions (online or offline) yet. Nokia is taking it’s steps with Nokia Maps, which has still some way to go – especially when it’s hard to understand how I can add points of interest to the database and how business owners are able to update their information. Google is slightly further with this, updating its database from the public but there is a flaw using the service internationally – the operators. Roaming data costs make the service off limits for the average consumer.

There’s definitely room for improvement – any tips on good mobile travel companies?

Photo by regolare (CC: by-nc-nd).