Kate de Lautour
Almost every day I'm introduced to inspirational business owners doing exciting things in our region.
By exciting I mean new ideas, new products, new services.
To get these ideas up and running, there is a great deal of work to be done, to mitigate the risk of the investment. In the last two months, we have introduced six local business owners to the Icehouse national incubation manager Nick Egerton.
Nick is coming into Hawke's Bay on a regular basis bringing his specialist skills to these businesses as they take their idea from concept to, hopefully, commercial success,
There's no doubt commercialising new ideas is risky and unforgiving - 65 per cent of new products launched by established companies result in failure.
On the flip side, we are all aware of the rewards of successful products and services and the impact they can have on any company and the community.
There have been a handful of spectacular product failures over the years but perhaps the most intriguing failure I've heard about was a company called Iridium.
Led by Motorola, in partnership with 18 other organisations from around the world, Iridium built a mobile telephone system that would work anywhere. The cost of this gamble? A massive $5.2 billion! The company was aiming to build the "universal cellphone".
They believed individuals would pay a premium for a single phone number and voice mailbox that would operate in any part of the world. After seven years of painstaking engineering work, the satellites were in place and ready to take calls - Iridium was live. But there was one problem - nobody used the system.
The team at Iridium learned the hard way, burning through a massive amount of investors' money. These challenges could well have been avoided through the application of market validation techniques.
Market Validation guides the owner through a comprehensive four-stage process. It helps by:
-understanding and proving that a real market opportunity exists for new products and services
-providing information about customers' needs, product or service feature requirements and price points.
This enables accurate assessment of the viability of the product before further time and capital are invested.
Hawke's Bay-based web developers Mogul are one example of an innovative company constantly investigating new areas for growth. Mogul has developed a new product Strea.ma - a social media platform that allows event managers and businesses to share and promote user-generated content from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Google recently used Strea.ma for their annual partners' event.
Managing director Matt Miller told me market validation is providing them with a better idea of how to identify the right target markets for Strea.ma, what features the product should have, the channel strategies they should use, and how they should pitch the product.
"It's been a brilliant exercise so far. Until now, it's felt like we've been making up our strategy as we go along. Now, with Nick's help, we feel we're moving in the right direction. We're already incorporating a lot of the thinking into our product and the way we talk about it, and our audience is responding really positively."
While the Hawke's Bay Icehouse office is located at the Business Hub in Ahuriri, we are working with businesses from Central Hawke's Bay to Gisborne.
The benefits are rapidly filtering out via new and sustainable employment opportunities. For example, the team is assisting an exporter in Hastings who employs staff from Central Hawke's Bay. So, the business is being helped in the bigger centre, but its success is impacting on another part of our region.
The same goes for Ruataniwha. This dam, if it can be established, will have ripple effects for the whole of our region. Who will provide the safety vests for the workers, or the work boots? Who will fill the petrol tanks or provide the beds for the experts coming and going to observe the build?
And, when the dam is completed, who will provide the pelt processing for the extra stock units? Who will add value to the grain and vegetables that will be grown? Most of these products and services will be provided by the businesses in Hastings and Napier.
Do you know someone working on a meat chain or a business that will likely benefit? Chances are, if you think about it, we all do.
Another company which has done its market validation and is banking on Hawke's Bay is Jetstar.
As the Aussie-owned airline prepares to fly into Napier, it seems Hawke's Bay businesses are going to get some of the recognition and positive affirmation they so richly deserve.
Yes, we have some of the best wine and food in the world; yes, our businesses are forward thinking, exciting and sustainable. Now all we need is to get this message out to potential visitors, "Come and visit us and be inspired."
-Kate de Lautour is the business development and operations manager for The Icehouse Hawke's Bay based at the Business Hub. k.delautour@theicehouse.co.nz
-Business and civic leaders, organisers, experts in their field and interest groups can contribute opinions.
The views expressed here are the writer's personal opinion, and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz