Upstreamward
Upstreamward
A consultant focused on Innovation & New Business Creation with a 35-year career spanning from a late-stage startup to a global corporation in various management and leadership roles.
Extensive experience in driving internal entrepreneurship and innovation harnessing the entire organization’s disciplines such as marketing and sales, R&D, partners and suppliers, and the organization workflows; for building new business opportunities, as well as assimilation of Innovation Mindset and Strategy as organizational genetics.
Strong background in both technical and business aspects, including execution of partnership agreements, Intellectual Property (IP) generation and protection, and collaborations with technological institutes. Inventor of 50+ patents, and writer of image processing software.
Why Upstreamward? True and disruptive innovation is never easy. It is about breaking paradigms, moving against the current of consensus, and bypassing crowded downstream markets. Upstreamward represents the relentless spirit to undertake a journey that demands resilience and continuous effort — pushing toward the source to fundamentally solve problems and uncover the most valuable opportunities.
A high level of business innovation is measured at the bottom line!
A high level of innovation means that the customers are willing to pay a premium for the created products and services and that the company can provide them with lower costs. This kind of successful organization is achieved where innovation is everywhere: in operations, marketing, R&D, and the leadership team. This can only be achieved when innovation becomes a genetic part of the organization.
The way to close gaps to achieve the above is not complex but requires some education and mentoring over a period of time.
A sustainable healthy business should keep a continuous flow of new businesses from ideation through early-stage internal startups, market introduction and integration into the core business. This flow is growing the current business, widening the core, and adding more profitability by stepping up the value chain, as-well-as replacing lower-growth and outdated products and services.
As an organization grows and becomes more structured and focused on efficiently driving a few scaled businesses, it often gets into a situation that the flow of new business struggles to progress along the track to the finish line where it is added to the company portfolio.
This situation requires a structured solution that is tailor-made to the specific organization, and the handling of many peopleware aspects for a frictionless assimilation.
Keeping the exclusivity of the business and protecting the R&D investments is highly related to the organization's IP (Intellectual Property) strategy and its ability to deploy it across the organization. There are many practices beyond filing patents to protect the IP and get exclusivity of the business, which organizations can practice and effectively customize per case.
For startups, the hourglass is ticking fast. A very small startup team should simultaneously handle many critical missions such as: solving challenging technological problems, showing a viable market, and seeking the next investment to slow down the ticking timer.
To increase the odds of success, the startups should get multiple perspectives to select from involving experienced people for deep diving into the new business and adding clarity by top-down and bottom-up analysis of the addressable markets and their related business potential, creating a clear path between technology and the next investment phase, to the future revenues streams (beyond what they might currently have), finding additional business opportunities, addressing partners and corporates, setting an IP tactics and strategy, and more.
Startups and new businesses, embed a lot of uncertainty. The risk for investors is of making the investments a guessing game. The deal flow funnel (leads review, initial meeting, and due diligence) narrows down the leads from the 1000’s to only a few who get investments. As the invested time in each of the leads is very short, there are good chances to miss some good opportunities.
There is a value in gaining an additional perspective with a high level of creativity to locate a few non-trivial business opportunities which from a creative perspective can be a real gold nugget.