A Look at Startup Studios
The Future of Sustainable Development?
It is no secret that large corporations struggle with innovation. Their top-down, bureaucratic approach is simply too muddy and stifling causing slow-moving and incremental progress. At the other end of the progress spectrum lies the disruptive and fast-moving startup. At least, this is what things look like in the world of consumer products and tech.
Traditional international development looks a lot like a large corporation: slow-moving and lacking innovation. That’s a big problem, because the current charitable, top-down and outsider-driven model simply isn’t working. As a result, we are spending billions of dollars on solving major social issues, yet we are struggling to find large-scale sustainable solutions.
Even though the technology exists to make it so, 1.8 billion people still don’t have access to clean water. This is unacceptable.
Sustainability is critical. Charity and aid do not lead to long-term solutions to the problems they seek to address. Businesses, meanwhile, have to be keenly focused on sustainability and growth. Bridging the charitable and for-profit gap is the social enterprise; a company where social mission and profit are inextricably linked. These organizations are centered around the end-user, the customer, and must provide services or products that are serving their needs.
Social enterprises are highly motivated to provide innovative, human-centered solutions that are scalable and sustainable. These are complex ventures, and concept-stage support for entrepreneurs from accelerators and incubators is proving inadequate. A relatively new model, the Startup Studio, is an emerging enterprise support platform with potential to remove barriers for innovation. This in turn could help us move on from charity, to the development of real market-based solutions to some of the biggest global problems.
A Startup Studio is an organization that builds multiple companies from scratch. This model provides an ideal base for rapid innovation thanks to in-house resources and risk mitigation. Investment in these companies now exceeds $7B, and their successes are reflected in the recent exit of Dollar Shave Club, started by Science-Inc, of $1B.
At Archimedes Project, we are exploring the startup studio model to launch social enterprises that will disrupt the sector of international development. To this end, in coming days we will take a closer look at the following components of a successful studio:
- An established venture development platform
- A clear studio sector or geographic focus
- A dynamic core team
- Sufficient startup funding
To learn more about these components, follow our startup studio series.
Brad is a firm believer in the power of social enterprise. He is a current intern at the Archimedes Project looking at the next generation of this clean water and sanitation social enterprise. He will be pursuing an MBA at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto starting in the fall.
If you are interested in the role of lean startups and human centered design in disrupting international development, we are always glad to talk: fulcrum@archgrp.org or @ArchGrp
