Startup Strategy, Growth, and Innovation Articles

Innovative Entrepreneurship: Managing Business Risks

What if you could prove your startup's value before having a finished product? A new methodology is transforming how investors evaluate early-stage startups, focusing on strategic validation rather than traditional metrics. While you're sticking to outdated valuation methods, startups with weaker products but smarter validation strategies are attracting smart money that's slipping through your fingers. Don't let your innovative idea get undervalued–learn how to demonstrate its worth at each development stage.

The AI Revolution: Eight Deadly Trends

Is AI as-a-Service (AIaaS) an emerging commercial industry or another bubble? Is it a defining trend or hype? While buzzwords come and go quicker than we can blink, actual game changers frequently emerge from the obscure world of defence research and development (R&D). To stay ahead of the curve, one should closely monitor the activities of defence agencies. Learn how to separate the real deal from the nonsense and understand the game-changing AIaaS revolution and emerging commercial industries.

Decoding the Innovation Puzzle: Four Layers for Strategy in Use

Gaining a comprehensive grasp of the diverse types of innovation is crucial for devising impactful innovation strategies that foster growth and set your business apart in the market. By examining recent examples encompassing dimensions, degrees, levels, and forms of innovation, the goal is to offer practical insights that empower you to customise your innovation approaches and tackle the obstacles present in today's ever-changing landscape.

How to Eat an Elephant: are innovations the space technologies or ways to find simple solutions?

When you run a business, the pressing tasks can hold back an opportunity to understand abstractions. At the same time, you need to keep up with the times, as competitors will never be forgiving if you miss. At this point, you understand what "innovation" means, and here it goes - ventures, startups, R&D, blue oceans, design thinking, hypotheses, agile, user experience, etc.

How to Keep the Business Alive: 4 Hidden Traps to Escape

Growth is never too easy, especially in times of fast changes. Even successful companies face sudden and unpredictable difficulties in achieving it. Time-tested business models are losing their competitive advantages. Disruptive technologies seem to appear out of nowhere. Those companies that are so good at what has made them successful fall victim to their success. Why is this happening and how not get into this trap?

Why Innovation in Business Is Inevitable: Four Factors That Can not Be Ignored

What will your company be like in 10 years if you stop finding new ways to improve production and operation processes, improve products and services? The answer is obvious - the company will die. However, it is important to understand what the impetus is for finding new solutions and creating new products. It is likely to face obsolescence and potentially, extinction. Innovation is not just a buzzword; it's a survival strategy in a rapidly evolving market. Here’s why continuous innovation is imperative.

Two-In-One: Cross Points Between Military Start-Ups and Private Business Sector

As military technologies demonstrate a deeper penetration into our everyday lives, they become an integral part of it. Nowadays everyone may launch their own business by adapting military technologies to civil use. However, we face some logical questions here: which technologies have come to civil use from the army ...

Military Startups: Myths And Reality of Cooperation With the State

There are a great many myths about the defense industry. Perhaps, one of the most deep-rooted is its closure. Myths of the deftech exist all over the world since the weapon category refers to something secret. However, the defense industry includes also other technologies that do not relate directly to deadly weapons ...

Ukraine Will Have Its Own Silicon Valley One Day

This article delves into the nascent state of venture business in Ukraine, exploring why it remains underdeveloped despite the apparent need for innovation. It scrutinizes the existing ecosystem, highlighting the lack of essential components like pre-seed funding, experienced angel investors, and supportive legislation. A key point discussed is the misconception that innovation solely stems from unguided creativity. Contrasting this, the article emphasizes the need for a structured and predictable approach to innovation, as exemplified by the American DARPA model and Silicon Valley's development.

Brain Drain, Demographic Crisis in Ukraine and Possible Solutions

Ukraine has been facing a sad situation for the last three decades. According to official sources, 350 thousand engineers and scientists were involved in R&D in 1990. Today, this number is less than 50 thousand. I mean people having special higher education and working in the R&D area. To survive, some of them switched to trading, construction and other earnings for their livelihood. Some of them have died. Others left for the USA, China, Israel or Europe. The brain drain has not stopped yet. We have the problem of science and R&D ageing.

The Strategy of Innovations Development in Ukraine Part II. Action Plan

The European Commission’s recommendations on the modernisation of research centers and four reports of the World Bank describing further steps of the Government, that are intended for the relevant new research & development (R&D) laws, were published in recent years to launch the innovation-based economy in Ukraine, its further development and switch from raw material production to exportation of knowledge-intensive and hi-tech products with a high added value. The aforementioned documents analyze the innovation component of the Ukrainian economy and purport global changes in laws. Furthermore, the initiatives of the Reforms Office ...

The Strategy of Innovation Development in Ukraine Part I: Introduction

80% of developments in the USSR defense industry were carried out in Ukraine. Thanks to such a big school of scientists and developers, Ukraine remains among the world leaders in the field of development and production of military and dual-use products. Today the state financing of new developments in this area is poor since the bulk of financing is spent on maintaining the combat capability of existing weapons and equipment of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Therefore, this traditional state monopoly was handed over to private investors, opening doors for local and foreign businesses to step into this typically closed, highly marginal market.