Founder paranoia forces innovation
Entrepreneurs’ intrinsic fear of failure makes their companies ultimately more innovative, a report reveals.
Innovation consultancy Previously Unavailable’s Big I, little i report says founders of businesses have a better understanding of innovation and how to achieve it than most business leaders.
Vaughan Rowsell, who is the founder and former chief executive of retail software company Vend, said a founder’s vision made them passionate, impatient and paranoid of failure. This motivated them to seek consistent improvement of their product and among their staff.
‘‘It is that constant fear that you are not going to be innovative, that someone else is going to be more innovative than you, and that is the stuff that keeps you awake at night,’’ he said.
Rowsell said he motivated all of his staff to allocate 10 per cent of their working week to thinking about ‘‘blue sky’’ ideas for the company to adopt.
He said founding bosses were more likely to prioritise future thinking than chief executives of large, traditional organisations who were easily caught up in day-to-day operations.
The report says: ‘‘Founder chief executives showed a natural tendency to project their thinking well into the future. They are consumed with what their customers will need in years to come.’’
The report commended My Food Bag founder Cecilia Robinson for encouraging her staff to say ‘‘yes’’.
Robinson says in the report: ‘‘So many times we find a way to say no to innovation.’’
Rowsell said internal innovation did not have to be led by the founder or chief executive as long as the employee leading it was invested in the future success of the company.
‘‘You have to have that engine house that drives innovation … You need to have someone who is materially invested in the business to drive innovation, because if your innovation is driven by somebody who could just resign tomorrow then that is pretty high risk.’’
If there was no founder or leader in the business to enforce innovation, it should be a responsibility given to every employee as an ‘‘insurance policy’’, he said.