To boldly innovate: crowd funding and project management

There was a time when daring was different. Back then, all it takes was an idea on your head and a little bit of knowledge on the field so visionaries would take off the paper the most incredible innovations. Sometimes knowledge was not even part of the equation, all it took was a dream and you would learn the rest “on-the-fly”. But times changed, and for as much as we still have old-fashioned innovators, many of those innovations we see these days are happening on a whole new context.

If back then all it took was an idea on your head and some spare change, today many of those innovations need bigger budgets, either for prototype development or for scaled production that would allow the whole enterprise to become viable.

Think: when Apple first started, Jobs and Wozniak had to go from door to door on many banks and sit with many potential investors, so they would be able to get the money needed to give birth to Apple. They had the idea, they had the knowledge, but they did not have the starting money. This factor held back, delayed or even killed many good ideas on the last decades, because you either find someone willing to risk their money on your dream, or you would spend years saving the necessary money, risking to lose the proper timing for your innovation.

With crowd funding, things changed. Even the standard form a project will be submitted into the crowd funding platforms provides a series of requirements that must be addressed, before it can be sent out to the public appreciation. The project must be studied on a deeper level, designed and presented on an attractive way, so it will catch the eyes of potential investors. And the innovator can be sure that, even though he put a real effort on the project conception, it will be criticized harshly before people decide to invest. And that is exactly the beauty of crowd funding.

With the usual exposition you get on platforms like Kickstarter or Catarse, innovations propositions need to be well built, studied, designed and, above all else, they need to have a clear, concise, objective and straight forward presentation strategy, so it can be analyzed by investors before they decide to give their money to the project. Many of those times you do not have the opportunity to clarify any questions or resolve any doubts. The potential investor will not reach to you for further information. You have to win on just one strike.

All the innovation context brought by crowd funding is very good for innovation.  Critiques to the format might say that such commitment harms the innovation spirit, creating barriers for innovators to be bold, since they worry so much about financial matters right on the first stages of the project. I do not agree.

With crowd funding, just having an idea is not enough anymore. You need to criticize, study, design, redesign, review concepts, change everything, start again, criticize once more, so in the end you will have a concise idea, well structured, allied with a well-built business plan, designed to be viable. And it is on this exact key-word that lies the difference between just another idea and real innovation: viability.

Project management specialized professionals are getting more and more important for innovation, since they hold the ability to structure ideas in a way they can be, in fact, analyzed, studied and criticized. They are the ones who break the process on deliverables. They are the ones who will be able to analyze costs, schedules and deadlines, the necessary resources and assets and, above all else, they will be able to analyze if the idea is viable and if it is, in fact, feasible.

And that professionalization is exactly what is creating the new golden age of innovation, with several new products and ways to do mundane or complex things rising every day, high-tech or low-tech innovations, some of those focused on intellectual production or even on the third sector. I have seen so many incredible projects, either to make the daily life easier or to bring to light new, cutting edge concepts, or even to make possible the publication of the most various books and research papers. Even TV Shows are been funded like this.

The big difference between the projects that worked out and those that did not was not only on the innovation, the idea itself. It was also on how well the project was designed, structured and executed. In spite of what some critiques might say, crowd funding not only provides the conditions so ideas can be brought into light, but when allied to good project management, it ensures that those ideas become true innovation, that those ideas reach their users and that those ideas change the world we live in.

And in the end that is what most innovators want, right? To leave their mark and to change the world, on their own special way…