Guest Blogger: Michael Battaglia, Operations Manager, International Council for Small Business

On 'Head in the Cloud: A New Playground for Entrepreneurs'

scalability
- n
the ability of something, esp a computer system, to adapt to increased demand.

Like one panelist plainly stated, ‘to make significant progress against the world’s problems, innovations must scale in order survive.’  Whether you agree with him or not, you cannot discount the idea that entrepreneurship is about disruption, about transforming innovations into real economic value. Today, mobile technology is considered the largest distribution network that has ever been created by mankind. This by default means access. Access to people, access to markets, access to change.  So, what better way to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2011 than with a discussion about innovation, mobile technology and the significance of the cloud.

Head in the Cloud: A New Playground for Entrepreneurs was a panel event hosted by ICSB and GBSN at the George Washington University School of Business (GSWB) on November 15, 2011 that really struck a chord with the overall mission of GEW - to celebrate the innovators and job creators who launch start ups that bring ideas to life, drive economic growth and expand human welfare.

Our panel of ‘disruptors’ were assembled to not only address how the advances in technology and telecommunications are changing the nature of entrepreneurship, but how the role of mobile technology has significantly increased the opportunities for entrepreneurs to make a difference. As Mohsen Khalil exclaimed during the session, ‘the market for mobile technology has now reached 6 billion people!’

In both developed and developing countries, the accessibility of mobile phones and technology has made possible a whole new range of disruptive innovations that bring ideas to life and drive economic growth. Entrepreneurs like Joel Selanikio of Datadyne.org are paving new roads to development and prosperity with award winning mobile applications like his EpiSurveyor -that enables the easiest, fastest and least expensive way to start collecting healthcare data. The EpiSurveyor, offered by Joel’s company Data Dyne, is used by programs in more than 170 countries to collect essential data for health, for agriculture, for business, for research, for conservation: anywhere people were using paper on a clipboard, they're switching to EpiSurveyor. Think of the possibilities...

Disruptive Innovation, as Clayton Christensen famously presented in his seminal book The Innovator’s Dilemma, ‘is a product or service designed for a new set of customers; they offer a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.’

Identifying and supporting these innovations has been Mohsen Khalil’s mission at the World Bank for years, where he invested in entrepreneurs in developing countries and advised governments on sector reforms and institutional capacity building to enable innovative environments. ‘The best ideas,’ as Mr. Khalil’s stated during the session, ‘can only survive if you can scale them. Scalability is a key success factor for any innovative idea. People all around the world are intelligent and motivated to be innovators, but the key question is whether or not they have the right enabling environment to bring their ideas to life.’

Today, innovations like the EpiSurveyor offer us access to information, knowledge, and opportunity in communities covering nearly the entire globe. Even in Sub-Saharan Africa - the least connected place on earth - there is a 50% penetration rate for mobile. Thanks to mobile telecommunications, entrepreneurs can bring their lost-cost silicon valley business models to the developing world, and as a result give capacity to people in countries where computers and laptops are scare.

As Pete Erickson of Disruptathon explained to the audience, ‘leveraging disruptive tools like cloud computing and open source allows entrepreneurs to put their focus where it’s more important; on their creativity and passion for solving problems in different areas of the economy.’ Drawing on his experiences with three (3) different technology start-ups in the dot.com age, Mr. Erickson sees tremendous potential for disruptive innovation in the mobile space. The barriers to entry are low enough for entrepreneurs that they can concentrate of their job of identifying the under-served market and going for it. Today, if you design an application for the iTunes store and it becomes a hit, the innovation can lead to a new business with a potential market size of 6 billion mobile users! Think of the possibilities...

For more information on this event, including the event recording and panelist bios, please visit: http://www.gbsnonline.org/news-and-events-section/events/head-in-the-cloud-a-new-playground-for-entrepreneurs.html.

In addition to important topics related to entrepreneurship presented above, the panel also touched on topics such as venture capital investment, emerging technologies, developing countries, mobile app development, electronic medical records, and the entrepreneurial experiences of today's mobile app developers.