World Innovation Network

Next, the specific steps will be dissected. The launch is initiated by engaging with the markets. The markets are part of the five main players in the innovation landscape. Those five players are the markets, the makers, the minds, the money, and the movers. The convergence is king. Begin launching the challenge by engaging with the most important player, which is the corporates and governments representing the markets. The market element could be a corporate multinational corporation (MNC) that might be responding to a need of a particular partner. The need could be from a request for proposal (RFP) or a tender being issued by a government or a commercial entity. Also, the need could be one that is developed from a conference or an expo, or could be one of the many, many existing challenges which are already being brought to the innovation community through formal and informal challenge and prize platforms.

Next. these needs, wants, and desires are distilled into pain points. These pain points go through a rigorous, the rigorous SOLUTIONneering™ process, specifically the SOLUTIONsolving™ methodology, which dissects, decomposes, and deconstructs the specific elements of the problem, whether it be strategic or tactical. This readies the problem to be moved to the next step of the process. The next part of the process, before the challenge is even issued, is SOLUTIONstorming™. This brings a first cut at the problem through the Blockchain-of-Brains™ using the Brains-Without-Borders paradigm, which is a national brain-trust of networked subject matter experts (SMEs) that further define, characterize, decompose, deconstruct, and prioritize the problem. Now ready to issue the challenge. This is optimally issued via a hackathon type environment where all of the ecosystem and community players converge and collaborate interactively for a focused period of time with the benefit of the challenge producers, the corporates and/or government, being interactively involved. This will allow for not just an accelerated understanding of the problem, but the accelerated solving of the problem. A hackathon like environment with the individuals and the startups coming together allows for a true mash up to create new or evolved constructs of teams. Now, the challenge is issued, the solvers and the community begins working on the challenge.

The challenge is issued to all the participants attending, which are representatives from both the makers and the minds. The makers consist of existing startups, or would startups wanting to be startups, as well as existing established companies, which may not be yet startups. These may be more appropriately called scale-ups. Also, in the category of makers could be teams from universities. These groups of minds contain individual contributors, innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, and SMEs, as well as individuals from various national and federal and private and university laboratories. There will also be entities from technology transfer offices (TTOs). Technology transfer is very important to potentially accelerate the development of solutions by leveraging existing research and productization that has been completed or even just simply innovations or patents that have been produced by various entities like national and federal laboratories or universities that are seeking the opportunities of commercialization.

In this case, they will most likely not be deployed solely alone to solve the problem, although may be possible. Instead, more likely they will be used to augment and supplement a technology that the makers propose as the makers and the minds are working together. The makers will be pulling from the solution sourcing system. The solution sourcing system consists of extensively indexed and researched resources to assist in the solution creation process. This solution source consists of a database with extensive regional, national, and global directories of engineers, developers, and inventions as part of usually technology transfer or subject matter experts and advisors, other startups, as well as requests for grants and prizes. The corporate should be checked against some of the global requests in the challenge databases to ensure the ability for collaboration as the maker is developing the product. It will be collaborating with the fourth part of the SOLUTIONneering suite, which is the solutions scaling framework. The solution scaling framework is a done for you back office in front of the office infrastructure platform that brings together experts, outsourced and virtual members of the management team to aid in the acceleration of the building of the corporation. Along with the solution scaling framework, there are business building experts and innovative makers who can focus on the technical development aspects of building the product or service.

The third or fourth player in the challenge is the money, not just from traditional investors or angels, but also money from contracts, challenges, grants, and prizes that may be able to be garnered throughout the development cycle. By aligning this activity with one of the challenge requests, there is also the opportunity to engage with a corporate and secure a letter of interest (LOI) that would express the willingness to consider, not necessarily bound by or obligated to, but to consider a purchase at a time when the when the startup readies product. Having this LOI in hand ahead of time would significantly accelerate the startups acquisition of equity funding over and with traditional routes. The letter proves that this is a significantly de-risked company.

Further, the letter of interest may even provide opportunities for non-traditional, debt-based funding, possibly non-diluted funding, in addition to the traditional VC and angel routes. The last part of the money opportunity could be contracts, which through the various tenders and RFPs might be available to the start-up. Lastly, the makers, with the help of the solutions scaling system, can identify the perfect deployment partners. These partners are critical to help the maker scale quickly and be able to not just secure the interest of the corporate or government, but more importantly can execute in rolling out quickly. The partners will provide distribution and support, principally for the corporate customer. They include traditional and non-traditional partners with product distribution channels and distributors, as well as value added resellers (VARs).

Other distributors may be independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs). These could be excellent delivery teams and support teams. They already serve in these capacities for other entities.

Lastly, once the movers are ready, time to deliver the product or service to the channel and then finally the delivery to the market of the market driven laser-focused channel optimized product or service. The startup is now offering to the markets.

This simple approach remains superior to the current non-sustainable and inequitable method of startup product creation. Bringing the markets to the makers ensure much higher success than idea generation in a vacuum.