The “startup mindset” is an innovative approach to running and scaling businesses. The startup mentality focuses on agile strategies that were typically fostered in small companies and adapted into a way of doing business. An approach large firms should aim to adopt to stay relevant in an ever-changing business environment.

Thanks in large part to disruptive companies like Airbnb, Uber and Facebook, the startup mindset is now part of the modern business lexicon. The aspect of a startup mentality that corporates should focus on are; creativity, agility, an appetite for risk, change and disruption.

What is the startup mindset?

While the startup mindset is often thought of as just another tech term, larger and more established corporates are taking advantage of this fast-paced mentality. The approach is based on building, measuring and learning. It is a feedback loop of information that allows a business to create and launch new and existing products in an efficient, scalable manner.

The feedback loop can be thought of in 3 steps;

1. Build: Creating a minimum viable product (MVP) on specific assumptions of the product.
2. Measure: Launch the MVP and measure the viability of the product.
3. Learn: Either the MVP meets your assumptions, or it doesn’t. Either way, there is a learning loop which should be learnt from and adopted.

Read more about the startup mindset here.

How can your corporate start implementing the startup mindset?

Remaining relevant is a priority for most companies, but in a post-COVID-19 world, the need to adapt and scale quickly is a crucial part of business survival. This is how some of the top corporates are adapting and how you can too.

1. Audit your processes: Mapping out the current process that your business goes through to get a product to launch is your first step. How many people does the approval process go through and what is the purpose of each layer of the process? Do these processes attribute to your overall business goal?
2. Identify & measure time to completion: Once you identify your process, track your time to completion on certain tasks. Off the bat, we can guarantee you’re going to want to trim your operations. To streamline completion, you have to identify the fastest path to success. Evaluate and track it to create a use case.
3. Establish the best practice of communication and process: There will always be bureaucracy in bigger companies, but the key is to identify the areas you can streamline. These areas require agility in ways that the other departments might not be able to accommodate at first. Once you establish a best practice within one part of the business, you can use this as your test case for the next department to implement.

The benefits in larger companies

1. Decreasing the time to market: Businesses that are faster to market tend to have a better chance to grab a customer’s share of mind and maximise the product’s success. With a startup mindset, an MVP can reduce the time it takes between developing an idea and launching it.  This way innovation in the entire market is boosted.
2. Decreasing operational costs: The startup mindset forces companies to become more efficient in the way they manage their resources. It is easier to strip additional operating costs when you can identify the features that are not mission-critical.
3. Better customer experience: Through MVP, businesses can interact with customers in previously impossible ways. Using real-time data and feedback, companies can build and modify products that tie in with customer satisfaction scores. This will assist companies in servicing their customers better.