Category: Commentary

Paul Smyth, one of the investment managers at eSynergy wrote:

if you are looking for funding in the next 6-8 months and you have a different idea – and that means properly different, something that isn’t a ‘me too’ with a different angle then come and speak to us.

eSynergy are the fund managers for NISPO the local government-backed investment fund. They have a proof of concept fund (vouched in arrears) and a VC fund (as well as two other funds, one for each university).

I wonder about the definition of disruptive though. Looking at industries which have been disrupted –

• who would have guessed that a company could make money in online search after the dot-com boom. We certainly had plenty of search engines but Google was disruptive with their own brand of “me too”. And they’ve retained that edge by investing heavily in disrupting industries where their competitors make money but giving it away for free (email, productivity, etc).
• who would have though that Apple, having narrowly missed death and chased the home movie market would have made a right-angle turn and chased the music market with such gusto to the extend that less than a decade later, they own it? Others were doing online music – just doing it badly. Others were doing MP3 players, just again doing them badly.
• who would have identified Amazon as truly disruptive, selling books online. Now, Amazon was founded in 1994 and now sells pretty much everything. They’re my default location for books, music, games, consumer electronics. They took 7 years to turn a profit and now have revenues of $24B. Were they disruptive? Ask booksellers on the High Street.
• who would have predicted that people would become addicted to the Blackberry device from Research in Motion which has turned a tiny Canadian company into a $15B company. RIM is weathering a hughe onslaught from other disruptive technology such as Android, iPhone and other hungry smartphone manufacturers. But they were the first with the vision that we’d want email on the go.

I am concerned that local investors don’t necessarily have the education and experience to deal with something that is truly disruptive as opposed to something that seems extraordinary. At BizcampBelfast earlier this week, Kevin Parker put the following definition on screen:

Invention is the process of turning cash into ideas. Innovation is the process of turning ideas into cash.

And I really like that definition. If you were reword it to indicate the difference between disruptive and extraordinary, it might read like this.

We may see and want the extraordinary every day, but we tell ourselves we need the disruptive.

I’d like to invite you to explain in the comments what is disruptive, how it affects you, how it makes you feel. And if you can fit a definition (not unlike the one above) into around 140 characters, then post into the comments. I’ll give a £10 iTunes voucher to the best one (so make sure to include your contact details)