The Ever Evolving Utility of Intelligent Automation Technologies...
Perry C. Douglas
June 5 2024
The Globe & Mail dropped an article this morning (June 5, 2024) titled: MaRS slashes top ranks as government-funded innovation agency looks to reset mandate under new CEO. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-mars-discovery-district-job-cuts-reset-business-model/.
MaRS Discovery District has just slashed its senior ranks and says it is resetting its business model, however, Canada’s largest innovation support hub faces a real funding crunch and technology as its biggest competitor. The MaRS value proposition has been increasingly diminished over the last several years.
According to the Globe & Mail, the Toronto organization cut about 20 jobs this week including many at the top ranks. Including the departure of chief delivery officer Krista Jones, who was being paid a staggering $346,000-a-year and Chief financial officer Nicole Barry, who was being paid $326,000 annually.
MaRS’s Chief executive Alison Nankivell said in a statement to The Globe, said that MaRS, in an effort to ensure its long-term sustainability, is “resetting our business model, which includes seeking to significantly increase engagement with the private sector and philanthropic circles while we continue to partner with all levels of government.”
However, they have presented no answer for the digital revolution — AI, advanced data analytics and software tools have eliminated the need for fancy hype-driven consulting organizations like MaRS. MaRS presents very low or no value against the many enabling technologies and general access to information; allowing people to do it themselves.
The platform of spaces and programs offered by MaRS can’t compete with the awesome intelligence capacity, capabilities, and speed technology offers entrepreneurs to learn and build businesses.
MaRS’s value now is essentially a piece of real estate. So it makes no practical sense, in the information age to pick up and spend time at MaRS. Virtual works really well and saves cash-strapped entrepreneurs money — transportation, food, and time not to mention aggravation. No serious entrepreneur is going to waste valuable time going down to that space when everything is available at the click of a keystroke.
Why sign up for a six-week program/course, when you can save an incredible amount of time and money doing it in six hours of research online?
MaRS made the classic mistake of believing it can simply copy a concept that works elsewhere and make it work in another environment. Trying to emulate the Silicon Valley venture environment has proven elusive. The Bay area is an organic development, with a unique environment and culture. You can’t replicate it with a 1.5 million square feet building.
MaRS was part of an evolving trend that has ushered in a new entrepreneurship development industry of incubators and accelerators, wrongly assuming that top-down enterprise engineer was doable.
As Andrew Bromfield, CEO of Formative Innovations says, “Entrepreneurship isn’t a social club and Academics can’t teach us shit about hustling.” That just about says it all!
The research also shows these types of intelligentsia and arbiter incubators…accelerator institutions like MaRS don’t work. The top positions usually end up filled with former founders giving talks and MBAs, but mostly with the upper echelons of academia and consulting. The organization now exists in survival mode — the continual justification of its existence.
Counterintuitive to Entrepreneurship
MaRS like the rest of these organizations has an “application” for entry process, which means they are looking for a specific set of characteristics; breeding uniformity, counterintuitive and counterproductive to entrepreneurship.
Many incubators and accelerators also take on a boot camp approach with cult-like manifestation and the bigger ones lure entrepreneurs with investment dollars. The capital acts like a conformer, to the ideas of the more powerful partners or key decision-makers of the organization. Therefore, there is no correlation between acceptance into these organizations and future success.
According to iterate.ai, that used the ‘big three’ accelerator programs to analyze and determine value: ‘Techstars, Y Combinator, and 500Startups’. Those three invest in a wide variety of startups with the hope that a couple will land.
Here are the results:
Unicorns: are privately held startup companies with valuations of over $1billion — the pinnacle of success for any startup. Only 138 out of the 9749 startups that have gone through the ‘big three’ have achieved unicorn status. This accounts for a 1.5% rate of unicorn status.
$100M+ Valuation: 371 of the 9749 startups accelerated by the ‘big three’have obtained such a valuation. Thus accounting for an approximate 3.8% rate of an accelerated startup achieving a $100M or more valuation.
Moderate Success: These are startups that have achieved neither a valuation of $100M+ nor have died, but are performing relatively well and have some profitability. For these startups, 1053 accelerated startups are within this category, or approximately 10.8.
Walking Dead and Dead: Accounting for the largest share of outcomes for any accelerator program, ‘walking dead’ are those startups that have neither exited nor closed down but are stuck in stagnation. Within this category, a substantial amount — 6698 of the 9749 or 68.7%, are the ‘walking dead.’ The Dead category is approximately 15.2% of the accelerator graduates.
The numbers are virtually the same for those startups that don’t formally engage with any accelerator/incubator (A/C) etc. In short, organizations like MaRS make no difference or create any quantifiable value that can justify the time, cost and risk of using them.
So entrepreneurs are better off doing it themselves, with a little effort and help from software.
The amount of new MaRS-like organizations has gone through the roof, since they first began to enter the scene back in 2005, over 3,000 accelerators were advertised globally in 2021. Today, accelerators are run by everyone and their grandmother; governments, corporations, universities, non-profit organizations, and more.
Entrepreneurs must think and build faster than ever before, therefore, they must have access to the most relevant and reliable information and tools. Intelligent solutions that can turn data into insight and insight into strategy, for competitive advantages.
Harnessing the uniqueness of each entrepreneur’s innovation and ingenuity.
For serious entrepreneurs with real-world potential, wasting time in the MaRS space won’t work in an ever-evolving do-it-yourself technology-empowered world. Real entrepreneurs must engage in authentic entrepreneurship, not academic pursuits that provide only misguided feel-good events and comfort. This produces a false sense of advantages being gained via accelerator models.
Entrepreneurs must look for effective tools/solutions that give them the highest utility, functionality and capacity building with their venture. Furthermore, a defined framework process of identifying the winning conditions for your idea’s successful outcomes is most important — identifying the whitespaces of opportunity.
About 6ai Technologies
6ai Technologies www.6aitech.com is redefining how business strategy is done and how risk is managed in the age of AI. 6ai is an easy do-it-yourself, 6-step-by-step software that enables business development.
Anyone can use it without needing any specialized training or complex technical skills or software to learn.
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