Digital Circle

There are several formulae about ideas and implementation and how they are interlinked. One of my favourites values the idea and implementation equally but as multipliers - so that a £100 idea when combined with a £100 implementation might be a £10000 product but a £1000 idea with a £1000 implementation might be a £1000000 product. It’s possible to mix and match as well - you can take a £10 idea and give it a £100000 implementation or vice versa. This way we see that ideas by themselves are essentially not worth very much and only achieve their full value when combined with great implementations. And implementations can be the make or break for even a good idea.

This last week I’ve been shown several different models for idea/implementation mashups. The model for some of these might be Paul Graham’s Ycombinator.

Y Combinator does seed funding for startups. Seed funding is the earliest stage of venture funding. It pays your expenses while you’re getting started. They make small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%). They also make introductions to potential investors, help to teach founders how to pitch a product and they aim to do all of this over three months.

A concept I was playing with a few months ago fed from this. The concept, Code4Pizza, was that when you’re a student (16 years - mature student), the majority of your costs are already being met but the things you might really value as someone with ideas might be the opportunity to network with similar brains, get training, mentoring and access to decent computer systems designed for work rather than play. The sort of person it’s aimed at is the person who hacks his own web site together while others are sitting around playing Grand Theft Auto. The ‘workplace’ would be open ideally from 4 pm until 11 pm and allow access to the compter sustems and mentors based on merit. As for the pizza? One delivery of food (pizza, sandwiches, whatever) per day around 6 pm just to keep them working. The whole thing is meant to be centred around the proposed Co-Working space in Belfast (more on that in the next 7 days) and funded by local companies interested in seeing the outcomes. We’ll see if that comes to pass but in the meantime there are two other up-and-running projects in this space:

Contrast are a Dublin based web development outfit with a host of impressive past clients. This month they’re launching their App School (closing date on Thursday 16th October).

Contrast are taking one lucky idea to App School. We’ll pick an idea submitted by an Irish startup, charity, non-profit or individual and teach it how to be a fully-grown app. We’ll build it in one week and we’ll show everyone how we do it. And, we’ll cover 95% of the cost.

Anyone with an interesting idea for an app, based in (the island of) Ireland and matching any of these criteria:

• small startup,
• charity,
• individual with startup ambitions or
• non-profit.

We’re not likely to pick you if we know you could afford to pay for it yourself; we want to give everyone else a chance. Also, if we know you’re in a position to promote the app and make it work after we’re done, we’ll be more attracted to working with you.

There’s also The Big Idea funded by Invest Northern Ireland and Shell.

The Big Idea, supported by Invest Northern Ireland, is a national competition to find and fund innovative young people like you. The programme challenges young people from all over Northern Ireland to come up with creative business solutions to improve their place of learning, business or local community in some way. The competition crosses five sectors; primary schools, secondary schools, FE colleges, universities and those outside formal education.
Closing date for all final submissions is Friday October 24th

The latter, while only open to individuals between 16 and 30 (or 35 for social entrepreneurs) is yet another attempt to help focus ideas into implementation. We’re experiencing a downturn in the economy which will be deep and multi-sector in it’s impact but the correct response is to innovate out of the downturn - to find other ways to bring in wealth and offset the current crisis.

Tags: entrepreneurs

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 4:40 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.