FightBack Now summary

Consider Airbnb for a moment. Instead of owning brick-and-mortar hotels, it’s a digital platform where people can rent out their homes to guests seeking lodging - and over the last few years, it’s seriously disrupted the traditional hospitality industry. Uber and Apple’s AppStore, both popular and profitable, also link consumers with services via virtual means. All these companies are examples of platform businesses - firms that connect buyers and sellers, but don’t produce anything themselves. These businesses are perhaps the single most important new model created by the digital era.

So should today’s business leaders seek to emulate these success stories and build their own virtual platforms? Well, it’s not that simple. The same criteria that make platform businesses powerful, also present unprecedented challenges.

One of the most basic and essential roles of every government is ensuring the health of its population. But at the moment this has become quite a challenge. Climate change, pandemics, and unhealthy lifestyles have halted or even reversed trends in improving global health in rich and poor countries alike. How can this be turned around?

Here’s the key message: Collaboration creates better outcomes.

You’ve doubtless heard politicians and business leaders discuss initiatives to boost and support entrepreneurs – their creativity, willingness to take risks, and drive to build new things make them an essential part of solving problems. At a time when the world needs more new ideas than ever, it’s only natural that people’s thoughts turn to entrepreneurs.

These policy discussions generally focus on a specific kind of entrepreneur: young start-up founders like those of Apple and Facebook. But don’t be fooled by this vision. Entrepreneurship is everywhere if you know where to look.

How exactly are corporations supposed to build the future? You’ve probably heard of incubators and R&D departments and all sorts of initiatives to develop the next big thing – and if all else fails there’s always just buying innovation with a promising start-up. 

But the authors suggest Corporate Venture Building (CVB) is a better way forward. This combines the best parts of several different models: it has the mentorship and financing of a start-up accelerator, the idea-generation of an innovation lab, and the stability and institutional knowledge of an internal development team.

Don’t be intimidated by CVB – when you get down to it, it can be implemented in just three steps. First, identify a specific problem that an entrepreneur can tackle. Next, build an efficient team and give it space to work, knowing that some adjustments will be needed. Finally, plan out how you want to scale the business up.

Here’s the key message: Finding an attractive opportunity, and developing a plan, are key to CVB.