Innovation forum
Start-ups pitch for place at next year’s conference in Cork
‘THE only thing that is guaranteed as a start-up founder is pain!’ said Olaf Birkner, a tech founder himself and an advisor in digital technology, opening a day-long Innovation Forum at the EAS conference.
In his talk, titled ‘How to get yourself noticed’, Birkner outlined typical mistakes people make when launching new ventures, and offered practical advice.
Innovation comes from education, and the amount of people able to create innovation and bring change to the world is increasing ‘tremendously’, because of the improvement of education on a global scale, he said.
For start-ups, the next two decades would be even more stressful because of this increased competition, he warned.
‘With this knowledge explosion on a global scale you have to get noticed. It’s all about communication.
‘Name in a sentence what the value of your company is in the world. Make clear you communicate what you are doing,’ he advised the fledgling business leaders.
‘In the beginning, the company doesn’t exist yet so you, as the founder…have to attract people to you.
‘Do you have the backbone to do this? Failure can cause severe damage to your financial situation and also to your happiness. It is not easy to handle.’
He said that even successful founders can be unhappy because they are doing sales not science, and not everyone is bullet proof enough to take on this responsibility.
He advised young companies to focus on the facts of their propositions, not on unproven hypotheses.
‘Start-ups treat hypotheses as facts: be a hypothesis killer and separate them from facts.’
Birkner also stressed the importance of inviting people with experience – ‘the masters’- into new businesses.
‘There is an incredible power in the combination between the master and the apprentice. The young ones have the passion and can take the risk.
‘The older ones are not ready to suffer so much any more but they have the connections to open the doors. The combination of young and old is the core of start-up success.
‘Fill up your start-up with masters,’ he said, suggesting that founders set up an advisory board of people willing to share their knowledge.
His final point was to employ a full-time sales team.
‘Get out there! You need people who love to sell. One of you has to be out there the whole day, Monday to Friday, selling. It’s not a parttime job. Don’t have three engineers in your start-up and no sales people. You need one guy who loves the road.’
The forum, the first of its kind at an EAS event, was organised in partnership with Hatch Blue and the German Startups Association.
The EAS said it wants to promote and support start-ups and emerging business models in the aquaculture sector, by matching ideas to those that can push the development of new companies and new products.
‘With all the new knowledge presented at our events, we have a wealth of possibility for innovation and value creation to help develop the sector.’
The first EAS Innovation Forum featured 12 start-ups, each of which was given a platform to present their technologies. These included converting wood into fish feed, early warning systems for harmful algal blooms, nitrogen sensing solutions, selective breeding, and using seaweed to reduce methane gases from livestock.
The pitches were assessed by panellists with aquaculture or finance backgrounds and, at the end of the day, they selected the two companies in which they would most like to invest one million euros.
The winners, who will each get a free booth at the next EAS conference, in Cork in October 2020, were the French microalgae producer Inalve (which, incidentally, recently won first prize at the Aquaculture Innovation Forum in London), and the Aquaculture Health Lab rapid diagnostics research led by Brian Quinn of the University of the West of Scotland.
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