This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will develop a Software-as-a-Service platform to provide Assessment, Discovery, Monitoring, Benchmarking, Comparison, and Promotion of early-stage companies, initially in the information technology and clean energy sectors, in order to provide scalable support with predictable outcomes for entrepreneurs. Guidewire Group is developing the underlying technology platform, assessment methodology, assessment training, automated work plans, curriculum, and portfolio management applications that enable startups and those that work with them to more effectively grow their businesses.
If successfully commercialized, the application stands to significantly scale the delivery of business development and advisory resources to early-stage companies and deliver predictable outcomes that improve a company's likelihood of success. By aggregating assessed data on startups worldwide, the application will provide a global context that enables startups to compete more effectively in world markets and to connect more efficiently with a global Innovation Ecosystem that buys and sells services from and to startup companies. Moreover, by delivering the platform in conjunction with a suite of best practices curriculum and a global community of entrepreneurs, the platform will enable organizations that support and incubate startup companies to more effectively manage and map the training of their companies.
Over the 24-month span of this NSF SBIR Phase II project, Guidewire Group adopted an iterative approach of design, development, and market feedback to develop scalable, extensible Software as a Service (SaaS) (Web-based) platform to support the assessment, mentorship, and acceleration of startup businesses. This process, widely known as the Lean Startup Methodology, yielded significant market feedback from startup founders and the organizations that serve them, as well as from corporate interests that desired information about and access to the startup community. That feedback was the basis of design decisions that drove the feature set for the final release candidate, completed in December 2012. The platform, called Guidewire Fusion, is an open data exchange that brings scalability to the startup assessment, mentorship, and acceleration by enabling startups to self-assess their business using the G/Score ™ methodology, then privately share business information with trusted partners; and by allowing trusted partners to efficiently evaluate and provide feedback to startups. At the core of the platform is a business profile management system, allowing a startup founder to maintain a detailed company profile, manage the privacy of that profile and selectively share profile components with other individuals, organizations, or the public. Fusion allows a company to be discovered and/or engaged in third-party programs yet still maintain complete control over business information. This core functionality proved to be critical for the three target constituents of the Fusion platform, and enables a roadmap of future features and functionality based on the profile and security engine that meet specific requirements of each of these constituents. In addition to understanding well the requirements of our users and our economic customers, we gained considerable insights into what has become a rapidly changing startup ecosystem. Indeed, since the start of this SBIR Phase II project in January 2011 the national and global environment has evolved in significant ways: advocacy for entrepreneurship by public and private sector entities has increased dramatically as a response to calls for job creation and economic action; the rise of the angel investor class has poured hundreds of millions into newly formed startups; corporate strategy and venture organizations are increasingly turning to startups as a source of innovation. The most recent Halo Report Q3 2012 from CB Insights, a research organization that tracks private equity, shows a shift in distribution of investment across both market sectors and geographies. In short, while the startup ecosystem remains complex and fractured, the availability of expert resources to accelerate startups has shifted dramatically in favor of the entrepreneur. Today there are, for example, some 1,000 accelerator/incubator programs in the U.S. alone. This abundance creates a paradox for the Guidewire Group project: on one hand, easy access to assessment tools, mentors, and business accelerator programs suggests that the scale issue this project aimed to address has been resolved simply by the omnipresence of support resources. On the other hand, the crowded market suggests an opportunity to aggregate and normalize startup profile data, leverage analytics technologies to evaluate performance and make recommendations, and through open APIs use this data and analytics to fuel a range of applications that could support many actors in the innovation ecosystem: startups, partners, investors, service providers, corporate ventures. Through the course of the project, we expanded our understanding of the concepts of "mentorship" and "acceleration" to encompass business development activities that delivered targeted opportunities to the startup company. As a result, the platform has been architected for extensibility to enable a network of partners to provide services within the framework of the platform. Indeed, this project ignited a much bigger vision than scoped in the Phase II project proposal: to provide a single, secure, and open platform on which all actors in the startup ecosystem – startup companies, service providers, investors, partners, customers, and acquirers – could efficiently exchange data across a range of applications. Such a system works on several vectors: It provides useful services to all parties It incites startup companies to compile and share significant data, and to keep that data current It makes transparent the relationships among users, which has the effect of crowd-sourcing diligence and recommendations. Without such a system, the market for and value of a scalable assessment and mentorship platform for startups is limited, as is the data such a limited system would collect. Startups are willing to provide data if they believe there is some potential for reward (participation in a startup competition, entry to an incubator program, recognition of achievement/excellence). They will only maintain data and keep it current if doing so has on-going and direct business benefit. Without such incentive, the economics of maintaining a managed and/or curated startup database may be non-viable.
