Now what is the correlation between common sense and Research & Development? Common sense is the self-actualised, untaught ability to understand and weigh in on situations like most normal people would do with no high-level application of complex education. At the heart of every R&D exercise is a basic common sense approach to solving a problem or making something better than it was before. The particular technical innovation may require the complex education alright, but the core of it revolves from the common sense approach. For example, let’s look at a common staircase. The staircase itself is an innovation to get safely from one floor to another.
But one brilliant mind thought, what if I can make the staircase move? Then people wouldn’t have to, but would still be able to get from one floor to another. So, the common sense approach is used. The technical complexities in executing involve specialized knowledge and R&D, of course. But the idea does not. It is purely common sense.
Common sense does not always have to result in the cut and dry, brass tracks alone overview. It can also lead up to applications that build on imagination, provided you let curiosity play a little. This will slowly progress to a research mindset that, in turn, will produce the white papers. White papers are the internal blueprinting that any organised setup will come up with as a step-by-step documentation of what has to be done to achieve the goal set out with the product or service. And so, the process starts. Incubation in the context of startups is the process of maintaining favourable conditions for the development of the business idea to its final form. Just like a chick hatching from an egg in an incubator, which provides the necessary conditions for it to do so, a startup is thus born; a small entity, with the white-paper as their roadmap. The small entity can grow big or go bust from their initial first stages of operating. The determining factors will be market demand, effectiveness of solution in terms of the product or service offered and how cost-effectively the operations are managed. These must be assessed carefully by you, the entrepreneur. Do not be swayed by emotions here. Do your homework carefully. It is important to be able to ride the momentum that a new launch typically offers and use it to evolve into a sustainable model that will ensure a practical demand-supply for the startup to not go bust. There are no fixed rules as to when you graduate from a startup to mainstream as such, but mostly when you’re no longer flailing to stay afloat, have a steady supply of the product or service you’re offering and a stable revenue stream that is enough to continue the process you’ve established, you can safely say you’re there.
A startup may not seem to be a big-boy contender, and you could feel like it’s not as glamorous a place to be in compared to big-spender launches with all the bells and whistles, fancy office spaces, thousands of square feet of production units, a big manpower team, etc., but know that you’re making an impact. You are playing a significant role in the economic growth of your city’s business & employment ecosystem, either way. Plus, your added advantage that the big guys don’t have is the easy maneuverability that you have, to change the whole market scenario overnight. With a typically small setup, startups are in a position for quick turnaround from ideation to implementation, and can bring in that one smart innovation quickly to the market. This means the startup has the power to stir up the market, change the dynamics overnight where competition may be concerned. Consumers would benefit too as providers scramble to one-up on the innovation. So, startups positively impact the economy, people of the towns or cities they set up in, as well as consumers. We only have to see the examples of once-startups like Infosys and how they almost singlehandedly changed the IT landscape of Bengaluru, how Alibaba brought Hangzhou onto the economic world map, how Microsoft changed the fortunes of Redmond and the way Google completely transformed Mountain View, California. While they were small when they started, eventually, they transformed the places their operations were based out of. Work opportunities were created both for those starting out in their careers as well as experienced professionals. More people came in for the employment opportunities and other sectors such as housing and local businesses boomed as well.