It was an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything,” by Steve Blank, that caught my attention more than ten years ago, and led to the invention of The Start-Up Game™.
He described a lean start-up as “favouring experimentation over elaborate planning, customer feedback over intuition, and iterative design over big design up front” in its development.
Living in Israel, in the Start-Up Nation, and founding ImagineNation™ as an innovative start-up aiming to shake up corporate learning, I have gained a wealth of hard-earned, sometimes painful, knowledge, wisdom, and experience.
As a global corporate educator, trainer, and coach, I have been prompted to ask myself, in light of the emotionally charged situation arising from the current Israel-Hamas conflict, how we might find ways to release the collective pain, anger, and hostility to discover new approaches to thinking differently about start-up entrepreneurship.
– How might we better serve humanity, both now and in the future, as a collective?
– How can we focus on harnessing the rapid pace of technological advancements to improve the quality of people’s lives?
– How can we motivate ambitious and energetic individuals to participate in start-up entrepreneurship with the goal of co-creating a peaceful and sustainable world for all?
This is especially relevant in a paradoxical world where Israel’s per capita GDP has surged by an astonishing 73 per cent over the past decade, while Australia’s figures are declining.
Sources of inspiration
OurCrowd investors, Israel’s leading VC investment firm, heard from Izhar Shay, a prominent figure in Israel’s high-tech community and a former Minister of Science and Technology, at a conference in November 2023, that his son, Yaron, was killed while heroically defending a community in southern Israel against the Hamas onslaught on October 7.
“For every fallen soldier, for every murdered civilian, let’s put together a new, innovative start-up which will be the product or service that will serve thousands of companies and millions of people around the world,” he told an OurCrowd investor briefing. “Let’s put together the infrastructure for a better world.”
Despite the heartache and despair he and his family faced in losing his precious son to Hamas’ onslaught, Izhar Shay was thinking differently about Israeli start-up entrepreneurship. He is doing this by embracing and embodying the essence of one of Judaism’s key concepts, which refers to various forms of action aimed at repairing and improving the world; “tikkun ulam”.
After the October 7, 2023, Hamas’ attack and the subsequent Israeli retaliation in Gaza, foreign investment in Israel dropped significantly, and the government pumped millions of dollars into the tech industry to attract investors. Currently, a rebound is firmly underway, mainly due to Israel’s resilience in using adversity as an opportunity to channel its creative energy towards inventing radically new innovative solutions. These are fuelling Israel’s recovery by leveraging the growing global interest in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, both of which are Israel’s latest strengths that have now been tested on the battlefield in Gaza.
Inventing The Start-Up Game™
Drawing on global hostility to explore new perspectives on start-up entrepreneurship, I applied my knowledge, wisdom, and experience to turn adversity into an opportunity by innovating like an Israeli and creating “The Start-Up Game™” based on the principle that “anyone can earn to innovate.”
It is an immersive board game that combines achievement, competition, and an AI learning component. This guides players, in small teams, to think, behave, and act differently by safely exploring the language, key mindsets, behaviours, and innovative thinking skills of successful entrepreneurs and innovators within a socially responsible start-up environment.
The game provides a safe, playful, and energising space for players to experiment, take strategic risks, iterate, pivot, and co-create sustainable, future-ready, innovative solutions to survive and thrive on the innovation rollercoaster ride in an uncertain and disruptive world.
The Start-up Game™ is ideal for corporates, academic institutions, high schools, and small to medium-sized businesses to introduce the language, key mindsets, behaviours, and innovative thinking skills. It is an engaging, blended and experiential learning activity at innovation and strategy off-sites and in leadership development programs, cross-functional team-building events, culture change initiatives and sustainability and innovation workshops to:
– Promote collaboration through playful experimentation and teamwork.
– Help people understand innovation and foster an innovative culture through entrepreneurship.
– Encourage the use of innovative thinking, decision-making and problem-solving to tackle real-world challenges and business issues.
All of these traits, states, mindsets, behaviours, and skills can be learned; there is sufficient evidence-based research, and real-life successful examples to provide the social proof that start-up entrepreneurship can be learned.
It simply requires people to open their minds and hearts, to let go of rigid, linear and binary perspectives of the world and embrace being and thinking differently.
To be optimistic in co-creating innovative and sustainable environments that embrace the dynamic forces of technology and innovation, in the face of violent hostility, despite the immense challenges that remain. Find out more about The Start-Up Game.
