You’ve heard it time and time again. Hong Kong needs to step up its innovation game. Ecosystem leaders are unanimous when it comes to the importance of creating a culture that’s conducive to innovation – but besides all the talk, where is the action?
In the upcoming InnoFoco-organised ‘Innovation in Action Forum’ on May 7th, the conference plans on getting proactive on this front. Besides educating leaders from corporate and startup worlds on the barriers that Hong Kong faces on its journey to an innovative future, the one-day conference will also propose practical solutions through panel discussions and interactive workshops.
We had a chat with Trey Zagante, one of the panel speakers at the conference. Along with sharing ideas on the panel, Trey will also be holding an interactive workshop “101 Guide to Innovating with Startups.” The workshop will give corporates a crash course on the lean startup methodologies and offer practical suggestions on how to partner with startups. Trey is a firm believer in closing the gap between the startup and corporate world as it will generate far more exciting concepts and businesses.
“Within the startup ecosystem, we’re familiar with lean startups, the business model canvas and agile development, but a lot of corporates don’t understand the foundation of these basic concepts,” he said. According to Trey, while corporates are great at executing, they’ll have to take a leaf from the lean startup book if they want to create sustainable and disruptive innovation within their organizations. “We’re seeing a growing trend at the moment in corporates who acknowledge their bigger need to innovate and be more agile.”
In the past, Trey worked with Melbourne-based accelerator AngelCube (in conjunction with Techstars) and saw one enterprise tech startup struggle to fit into the traditional three-month, ‘Demo Day’ accelerator mold (as it is geared to support consumer tech startups) so he founded VentureTec – an accelerator that focuses specifically on enterprise tech startups.
“One thing a lot of startups struggle with is to get a seat at the table at large corporates, so we want to educate startups on how to build an enterprise tech company,” he said. “We want to teach them how to do customer discovery within large organizations, how to define what an enterprise-grade MVP looks like, and really shift away from that accelerator ‘demo day’ model.”
In his advice to local startups, Trey says to give the enterprise tech space a go, even if it’s not nearly as sexy as pursuing the consumer tech space. “The enterprise tech market is, in investment terms, double the size of the consumer tech market,” he said. “80% of the largest tech IPOs last year was enterprise tech, versus 20% in consumer tech.” Trey says that from a startup perspective, the enterprise tech market should be paid closer attention than it currently is.
If you’re interested in the enterprise tech space and want to learn how to collaborate with a large organization, the “Innovation in Action Forum” might be for you. More details on the conference here.
Trey Zagante on Startbase.HK: Trey Zagante
VentureTec on Startbase.HK: VentureTec
