The Next Business Generation Is Lean!

We fought over gut feelings or testing hypotheses.

We fought over harmful chemicals or natural products.

We fought over the failure of the BioCity cafe. 

This is a normal day at the Next Business Generation (#NBGNotts) programme where you put enough strong-minded entrepreneurs into a room, teach us about Lean Innovation principles and then let us batter out the conclusions in the form of disproving each other’s hypotheses, learning why people who bring in packed lunch sandwiches lie on Survey Monkey, and by combining our own experience and insight with learning about each other's market to see if that doesn't spark a new idea within us. 

With our office bases in the Lace Market, BioCity, CleanTech and MedTech buildings, the purpose of this programme is to create businesses that create more jobs in the sectors of digital sciences, clean technology and life science within Nottingham. It is run in conjunction with Denmark company Accelerace, who specialise in supporting innovative start-ups to succeed through Lean Innovation methods, and BioCity who is Nottingham’s success story within their sectors of business innovation and life sciences. 

“The best funded accelerator in the UK”, according to Toby Reid, the director of BioCity when describing this programme. It is also fully backed by the wonderful Nottingham Council, who also sent me on the Nottingham Roosevelt Travelling Scholarship only months earlier - thank you sincerely Nottingham for another wonderful opportunity! As Nick McDonald, a councillor who came in to discuss Nottingham Growth Plan, the initiative behind the programme, was clear in saying, growth in Nottingham is a priority. 

Nottingham right now has many opportunities. There are those in the creative sector with organisations like the Mouthy Poets and other initiatives in the Creative Quarter; the Nottingham Roosevelt Travelling Scholarship for under 30 year olds to pursue a project that benefits Nottingham in the USA for 3 months; and by having a clearly defined economic growth strategy with extensive support for new innovative start-up businesses. I am just plain fortunate that I happen to fit into all of the above categories then -- or even more fortunate that I am based in this vibrant and expansive city of Nottingham!

So, our kick off into the #NBGNotts programme was by a talk by Accelerace CEO, Peter Torstensen, who began sparking off our imaginations by explaining an experiment done on world-class athletes: it showed that 50% of them would take a pill which would kill them in 5 years if they would guarantee to win the Olympics in 4 years! He told us to metaphorically take that pill of this intense determination to succeed, but hopefully don't die.

He also gave us his impressive statistics of the start-up company survival rate being 94% when going through their rigorous start-up programme at Accelerace. BioCity has shown similarly impressive statistics of 91% survival rates of start-up businesses over 11 years. According to Start-Up Donut, there are statistical claims of more than half of the business in the UK failing their first year and 90% not even making two years. So, what is the difference between these innovative business being highly successful whilst in the UK tried and tested business are terribly failing? 

At this stage, I would say validating assumptions and learning.

The value of the #NBGNotts programme lies in a simple, yet, effective practical process called Lean Innovation that is used for innovative technology start-ups in Silicon Valley. Imagine bringing entrepreneurship under strict scientific ruling through rigorous experiments to be able to test and evaluate the validity of your idea before you steam ahead into investing, creating and prematurely expanding. Imagine finding the customer and letting them show you what is of most value before you define the product you create. Imagine learning all of this under one roof? Welcome to #NBGNotts!

Day two: we spent our day challenging each other as entrepreneurs to become rigorous scientists. As one of our dynamic speakers and coaches, Aamir Butt said, “We are learning the art of writing an hypotheses in the science of entrepreneurship.” We were presenting our ideas with the encouragement to change them completely once we get solid results that disprove our hypotheses, and were strongly advised to rip up our well written business plans as they are just words, not measurable and provable action. The coaches are so futuristic in their vision that they say business plans are archaic as they described successful entrepreneurs as being in a paradigm shift where quick cycles of failure and learning are the key.

It is such an innovative programme for the business world and it is right on our doorstep here in our city of Nottingham. On the Next Business Generation programme we are working with the most informed and talented coaches regarding this newly articulated, but tried and tested process of Lean Innovation.

So, I predict Nottingham may become the Silicon Valley of the UK. 

That is my hypothesis to be tested and falsified. 

(Note: Ok coaches, I know this hypothesis is not specific enough, numerical, actually written to be testable in a measurable, objective way ...but it is imagery for the purpose of this article so just this one time let me off!)