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How to SEED Successful Student Start-ups
By Rafis Abazov
Updated March 31, 2016 Updated March 31, 2016Many universities around the world encourage business ideas from students and provide all kinds of support (often free) to student-led start-ups. This is a unique opportunity for innovative and forward-thinking students to set up their own start-ups—with the dream of coming up with a new Google, Facebook or Apple! After many years of observing and advising on students’ start-ups, I have developed my own formula, which I call SEED: Scrutinize, Explore, Evaluate and Digest. Here is how to go about it…
1. SCRUTINIZE the need for your innovative project
What is the common factor between Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg? On the surface the answer is very simple: all of them (and many other successful entrepreneurs) began their iconic projects during their university years and often only with the help of their closest friends. However, we have to dig deep inside their way of thinking, brainstorming and creating to understand the “magic bullet” of their success. Professors and students at business schools around the world have spent thousands of hours to deconstruct the mysteries of their success and to replicate their experience in the new environment.
In my view, the very first step is to scrutinize the environment to assess the needs of your future customers and clients: your classmates and the strata of students around you at your college or university. Indeed, every generation has different needs and only those who are insiders – who are inside this stratum (e.g. millennials among millennials) and are able to scrutinize these needs – can best understand their desires and habits and use this knowledge in building successful start-ups.
For example, as a part of my classroom exercise for the MDP/Global Classroom program at Al Farabi Kazakh National University (KazNU), my students – divided into four teams – scrutinized the needs of other students at the university. In the end, after a few weeks of teamwork and in-class and out-of-class discussions, my students-led teams and I came up with several business-worthy ideas. The ideas ranged from a special app for smartphones to inform the population about natural disasters in the countryside to the concept of a backpack with a solar panel to charge phones and other gadgets, adapted to the environment and realities of a developing country such as Kazakhstan.
Many years of experience in working with student start-up projects suggest that the next very important step in converting your idea into a workable start-up is to explore funding opportunities to finalize the ideas into a viable project and – if possible – into a workable prototype.
In the rapidly changing and extremely competitive business environment, often it is not enough to just show nice presentation slides and calculations on paper, as it might not work even for the most brilliant and potentially marketable ideas. A workable prototype will greatly increase your chance of success, and therefore it is critically important to explore all existing opportunities for support.
And here the university environment might be able to help. During the last decade, many universities have established business incubators and techno-parks as innovation support institutions with a single mandate: to support students in various ways to start successful innovation projects and systems or to create industry-science linkages.
For example, a techno-park at Al Farabi KazNU – created in 2011 as an industry-science collaboration center for commercialization and technology transfer – currently supports about a dozen student projects at once. It also provides space for brainstorming and for writing up business proposals for students’ projects and regularly organizes various workshops and seminars for students and faculty about various aspects of building start-ups and getting help for most prospective ideas. In fact, at many universities around the world, the financing of innovative entrepreneurs is built around four major sources: 1) in-house funds; 2) university-affiliated funds; 3) private alumni funds, and 4) private investment-angel funds.
3. EVALUATE how much support you need
A very important part of the process of start-up development is to realistically evaluate how much support you need for your start-up project. Just remember a historic fact about the importance of comprehensive evaluation: in 1976 Stephen Wozniak, an engineering intern at the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Company, built a prototype of the first personal computer. However, after a quick evaluation HP decided the idea was not worth investing in, and declined to support the project. Thus, Stephen Wozniak joined Steve Jobs to create the Apple Corporation – a company which is currently about 10 times larger than HP.
One big mistake that students (and other start-up beginners) make is to focus exclusively on monetary support for their projects. Yet, case studies from many countries suggest the importance of getting human resource support and technical assistance, such as patent application and registration (collaboration with your university’s law school would make a huge difference) and for the evaluation of market environment for the innovation. At KazNU for example, our MDP team working on start-up projects decided to outsource the budget evaluation both for a sample solar-powered backpack and for first trial manufacturing of this product, and to delegate this calculation to a professional accountant.
4. DIGEST all the information
In any project, there is a stage when you need to sit down and digest all information you’ve collected, all contacts you’ve approached and all opportunities you’ve explored. This is a very important stage when start-up hopefuls have not only to do the SWOT analysis (assessing Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) but also to decide where and how to move forward. At this stage it’s also important to digest the wealth of information you’ve collected into a good presentation for yourself and for all your friends, stakeholders and sponsors to get their feedback, comments and suggestions.
This is a stage when it is also essential to ask yourself honestly: is this project good enough for upscaling and moving forward as a serious once-a-lifetime opportunity? Or, is it a nice student-scale project which has provided experience and expertise in start-ups and satisfying your own ambitions, but not enough to become a large breakthrough innovative product? There is a need to bring together your friends and classmates – who by now have probably become your team – to have an open and free conversation for this decision.
Overall, it is important to remember that in building your first start-up it is equally important to build your first team of friends and classmates. This combination – brainstorming and working up on your idea and building a team for this and many other projects – will help you to be successful in creating start-ups and developing innovative ideas.
This article was originally published in March 2016 .
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Dr Rafis Abazov is a visiting professor at Al Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty, Kazakhstan, where he also manages a joint program with Earth Institute of Columbia University (New York, USA). He has written 10 books, including The Culture and Customs of the Central Asian Republics (2007) and has regularly contributed op-eds to The New York Times. Mr Abazov enjoys collecting rare books on British exploration of Central Asia and reading travelogues on Central Asia and the Middle East by Eugene Schuyler, Vladimir Bartold and Lord George Curzon. He has also authored photo exhibitions about his trips to Central Asian republics, Turkey and Afghanistan.
Contact info: Office 1400 Rectorat, 71 Al Farabi Ave., Al Farabi KazNU, Almaty, 050040, Kazakhstan
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