SBenegaL

Category: Management

  • The Entrepreneur’s GPS: Finding Your Place on the Science-to-Market Continuum

    The Entrepreneur’s GPS: Finding Your Place on the Science-to-Market Continuum

    Remember that healthcare session where we were discussing different types of ventures (if not check out with NSRCEL)? You asked me for a source on the framework I explained, and since I couldn’t point you to one, here’s the version I wrote up for you. Think of it as your GPS for understanding where your venture sits—and more importantly, what approach might actually work for you.

    The Big Idea: It’s All About How You Create Value

    Not all businesses are created equal. Some live in labs, others thrive in markets. Most lie somewhere in between. The key is understanding where you are on what I call the Science-to-Market Continuum—because the strategies that work for a biotech startup will likely crash and burn for a neighbourhood retailer.


    The Five Stops on Our Continuum

    Let me walk you through each type, because knowing where you fit changes everything about how you should build your venture.

    1. Science Businesses: The Lab Heroes

    These are the folks creating breakthrough scientific innovations that could change entire industries. Think of a team developing a revolutionary crystal structure that makes drilling equipment stronger, lighter, and more durable than anything we’ve seen. The same crystal may be used in another industry for a different use!

    The Reality Check: You’re not just building a product—you’re proving that science works in the real world. Your biggest headache? Getting from lab bench to factory floor. And here’s the kicker—you often need a whole ecosystem of partners to make your innovation valuable to end customers.

    1. Technology Businesses: The System Builders

    These ventures develop specific technologies that can plug into existing processes and multiply outcomes. You’re essentially creating the engine that makes other businesses run faster or better.

    Smart Move: Many license their technology early (remember how Google’s founders licensed their search tech to Yahoo! before going solo?). This generates cash, proves the technology works, and gets investor attention for the bigger play ahead.

    1. Technology-Based Businesses: The Use-Case Champions

    Here’s where you bet big on a specific application of existing technology. You see the potential in something generic and decide to build a focused solution around it. Oracle turning database technology into enterprise gold? Classic example.

    Watch Out: If you’re not crystal clear on your use case, you’ll need to navigate the narrowing process carefully. Grab a copy of “Crossing the Chasm“—it’s your playbook here.

    1. Technology-Enabled Businesses: The Problem Solvers

    You start with a market frustration and then assemble existing technologies to solve it. The Taxi4Sure story fits perfectly—founders frustrated with unreliable airport taxis built their solution using available tech, inspired by Uber but adapted for Indian realities.

    Key Insight: Inspiration doesn’t equal imitation. Just because something works elsewhere doesn’t mean you can copy-paste it to your market.

    1. Pure Market Businesses: The Access Providers

    These businesses thrive on making things available when and where customers want them. Your neighbourhood store? Perfect example. Technology is nice-to-have, not must-have. The business survives on market understanding, not tech wizardry.

    Why This Framework Changes Your Game

    Here’s the thing that tripped up several participants in our session: using the wrong playbook for your venture type is like bringing a knife to a gunfight.

    Try running lean startup methodology on a science business? You’ll go crazy waiting for those long research cycles. Use a science approach for a market business? You’ll over-engineer solutions for problems that don’t need complex fixes.

    The Plot Twist: Nothing Stays Static

    Companies don’t stay put on this continuum. They move left (toward science) or right (toward market) as they evolve. Amazon started as a pure market play (online bookstore) and now has AWS (technology) and Alexa (science-heavy AI). Understanding these shifts helps you plan your next moves.

    Your Action Plan

    1. Identify where you are on the continuum right now
    2. Choose strategies that match your position
    3. Prepare for movement—know which direction makes sense for your growth
    4. Build the right team for your stage (scientists vs. marketers vs. hybrid skills)

    The healthcare ventures I meet often struggle because they’re stuck between science and market—trying to prove efficacy while building commercial traction. Recognising this helps you sequence your efforts better.

    What’s Your Take?

    I’d love to hear which part of this continuum your venture calls home—and whether you’ve felt the pain of using mismatched strategies. Drop a comment below and let’s discuss your specific situation.

    Want me to dive deeper into how ventures move along this continuum? Many of you asked about this during our session. If there’s enough interest, I’ll write up those dynamics in my next post. Just let me know in the comments!

    Found this framework helpful? Share it with your entrepreneur friends who might be struggling to find their strategic footing. Sometimes the best gift is clarity.

    ! Disclaimer: the draft above was created based on the full length draft I wrote up explaining each of the concepts using claude 4.0. If you want to read the orginal. Do reach out.

  • Trillon Dollar Coach – Eric Schmidt and others

    I had read about Bill Campbell, who had mentored several Silicon Valley founding teams, and when I learned this book was about him, I could not wait to get it and start reading.

    Quite unlike several other books, where the authors are working closely to put across their ideas, this one was more a tribute to their coach. Eric, along with Jonathan Rosenberg and Anal Eagle, takes you through their experience and the experiences of several others who had benefitted from the coach’s direction in their lives. Filled with several anecdotal stories, this book sheds light on what the authors feel were the key principles with which Coach Campbell operated.

    I find this a lovely read, which I guess I would like to go back to several times over the years to learn how to deal with people.

    Happy Reading!

  • Voltage Effect – John A List

    One of the rare books that I have read about scaling up of ventures. Written by a behavioral economist and an academician, John A. List, this book integrates the scaling challenges and the experimental rigor in its writing. I loved this.

    Building on his personal experience of working with Uber and then later Lyft, John touches up on several aspects that would be helpful when one is trying to understand the venture scaling from a relative distance. He highlights several key conditions for scaling, like the ingredient’s vs. the chef, the challenge of false positives, spillovers, the role of incentives, knowing when to pull the plug, and many more aspects.

    If you are grappling with trying to understand what some of the conditions could be that could answer if it is the time to scale and what you would need as ingredients before you start, this book will give you some of the answers. 

    Happy Reading!

  • The Culture Code- Daniel Coyle

    One of my quests is about how organizational cultures get formed. My search got me to this handy book, which I suggest entrepreneurs do read—preferably early on in their venture so that they give themselves the time to build the organizational culture and allow for its development before they get to the growth phase where it’s the recruits and culture that would take over more of what they are doing through direct intervention.

    Daniel in The Culture Code breaks down the process of forming a culture for successful groups into three phases. The first emphasizes building safety into the culture, allowing for people to develop trust. The second emphasizes the role of sharing vulnerability in building the exchanges that would allow for trust to strengthen within the team and develop cooperation among the teams. And lastly, the role purposes play in the continuation of the group performance once the team culture has begun to take root.

    I would recommend this one for all early-stage entrepreneurs.

    Happy Reading!

  • 7 Sutras of Innovation – Nikhil Inamdar

    Image of cover page - 7 sutras of innovation

    This book by Nikhil was sponsored by the Marico Innovation Foundation to study the scaling up of eight organizations to emerge as the top player in their own fields. No, it was not intentional that I went out searching for another book by Nikhil Inamdar the same year. It is just one of the coincidences.

    Given the mandate of talking about these eight ventures, I think Nikhil has done a great job of presenting the stories of the eight ventures. I loved reading the stories of the following eight companies in the book: Tanbo Imaging, Goonj, Rivigo, ISRO, Forus Health, Agastya International Foundation, The Better India, and St Judes.

    The academician in me, however, began asking the question, so what? What could we extract from these eight that we could generalize? This is one layer that I would have loved to see in this book. I understand it may not have been the objective of the book, but I feel it would have given it a sense of direction having read the stories.

    Happy Reading!

  • Business Model Innovation Strategy

    I recently completed reading the book “Business Model Innovation Strategy: Transformational Concepts and Tools for Entrepreneurial Leaders” by Raphael Amit and Christoph Zott and thought of resuming my age-old habit of writing up book reviews.

    I had picked up this book to read for two reasons:
    1. First, as a mentor, I generally prefer using the business models as a background framework (while sprucing it with the concepts from effectuation and the lean start-up method) when I am working with early-stage venture ideas. I felt there could be something this book could contribute additionally to my practice.
    2. And second, as an academician, I have extensively studied some of the papers that Amit and Zott have been developing as a stream of literature on business models. I was curious to observe how they would stitch their years of academic work into a book that a broader audience would read.

    I feel the book has done justice to the academic work on which it has built its help, and I see a lot of integration with several strands of literature from strategy, innovation, effectuation, opportunity discovery, lean, and many more. This got me to enjoy the book as an academic reader.

    Wearing the practitioners’ hat, the book does a decent job of communicating the broad ideas and seems to have structured the flow well. The numerous examples are well placed in illustrating the concepts. However, I would have liked a few linkages to tools and material that would have elaborated the ideas for application. In some ways, I feel the book let go of the chance of delivering a higher value to the practitioner audience as the blue-ocean strategy had done. I guess this may have been because the practitioner variant of business models had come into the market several years ago, as the book – Business Model Generation.

    Personally, for me this book has provided some useful concepts that in collate my desperate thoughts from my application during mentoring sessions, and also highlighted new ideas of how I could present some of my learning to the audience of entrepreneurs. I promise to work on this one soon.

    Overall, I think if you are willing to do the hard work to connect the concepts to the application. This book is a good read. Otherwise, it leaves a wide-open space for practitioners like me to extend its application and utility into our own domain areas.

    I got my copy of the book from: https://amzn.in/d/6xVSMgN

    Happy Reading!

  • Zero to One – Peter Thiel

    I just finished an extremely interesting book on entrepreneurship by Peter Thiel – Zero to One, and thought of sharing what I look as take away from the same.

    For me the books sheds light on some of the subtle but important factors that would compose a high impact tech ventures. The essence of the following questions is what the book really delivers.

    1. The Engineering Question – Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?
    2. The Timing Question – Is now the right time to start your particular business?
    3. The Monopoly Question  – Are you starting with a big share of a small market?
    4. The People Question – Do you have the right team?
    5. The Distribution Question – Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?
    6. The Durability Question – Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?
    7. The Secret Question – Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?
    I would recommend this book to every one who is thinking of starting a tech venture, and may be re-read it!

  • Crossing the Chasm – Geoffrey Moore

    One the classics that most mentors ask their technologically enthusiastic proteges to read through is “Crossing the Chasm”. Moore through his years of experience working with numerous technology startups focuses on the very specific challenge faces by early stage entrepreneurs – “The Chasm.”

    The Chasm refers to the phase when the business has to make a transitions from its early adopters (called the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) to the larger mass market (including pragmatists, conservatives and laggards).

    The challenge of this transition phases requires the entrepreneur to take tough calls and show the necessary tenacity to be able move past the Chasm Phase. Crossing the chasm is an essential phase for the venture to be able to really become a market leader and a force to recon. Moore doesn’t stop by highlighting the characteristics of the chasm, but also provides a few tactics for these early stage startups are extremely handy for those who are facing the challenge of this transition.While I find the book extremely relevant, there are however nuances one would need to develop for the Indian market scenario where the B2B market scenario is not yet well established. Some of the startups have been able to make the leap and generate a sustainable business venture or create an exit for themselves have been able to do it through interesting tactics and focus shifts. I shall possibly write about these in another blog, and keep this short.

    Recommendation: I would just follow the numerous wisemen ahead of me and make a recommendation for all aspiring entrepreneurs to read through this book. This book is best read with other handy books which talk about the startup challenges- “The Lean Startup”, “Running Lean”.

    More about the book at the following Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm

  • Good Strategy Bad Strategy – Richard Rumelt


     
    Strategy is loosely used by every other person who intends to communicate the possibility of an underlying plan or something they find hard to understand! This is a generally held notion and often I engage into a debate saying that is not strategy! They then ask what  is strategy and used to wonder how do I communicate in precise terms. I think I found my answer with this book.

    Strategy is not vision, its not possessing an audacious goal. If someone attributes these piece-meal to be indicative of some strategy rest assured this is an incomplete understanding. A good strategy consist of a kernel (composed of three parts – A good diagnosis, A good guiding policy and finally coherent action). Rumelt goes on to show why a good understanding of strategy is important and essential to gain an advantage in business.

    To all those people who ask me if there was one book which could help them understand what strategy really stands for here is a classic by Richard Rumelt. Rumelt compresses the rich academic scholarship into this book buttressed with real life situations that he came across as part of this life as a faculty and a consultant.

    If you haven’t read it yet and want to understand the essence of strategy, this is one book you have to have in your library. 

    There is a website that you might like to access built based on this book: