Nice post by Steve Blank on the importance of teams in start-ups.

“The best ideas in the hands of a B team is worse than a B idea in the hands of a world class team.”

And I think one of the abilities of a world class team, is to turn this B idea into a winning idea.

“In a perfect world you build your vision and your customers would run to buy your first product exactly as you spec’d and built it. We now know that this ‘build it and they will come” is a prayer rather than a business strategy.  In reality, a startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. This means the brilliant idea you started with will change as you iterate and pivot your business model until you find product/market fit.”

These iterations and pivoting until you find your working business model is very recognizable and key to most start-ups. Almost no single start-up has it right the first time. And as far as I can see, one of the main reasons why large corporations have so much difficulties launching innovative / disruptive products and or services, is because they are not able to iterate and pivot rapidly. Most companies don’t have a culture that supports this process and the agility to play around just as long as is needed.

So either build an innovative culture like Google does, where employees have time and resources to try stuff out, or make sure you have a very open innovation cutlure, where you collaborate closey with start-ups and make use of their flexiblity, while they use your resources and distribution channels.