Guerrilla Innovation
What do you get when you cross a lack of funding with a desire to create some great web aps?
Guerrilla Innovation of course.
Guerrilla’s the world over, the revolutionary kind rather than the mammal; tend to be lean, hungry and innovative. Not because they are smarter than the average bear, but because they have no choice. The scarcity of certain resources like food or funding causes them to look elsewhere for ideas. They find low cost innovative ways of doing things because they want too, but because they have to and survival depends on it. Perhaps in part economic circumstance in part necessity will in fact spur the proliferation of an already strong open source software community or rather communities or tribes built around different open source ideologies; Ruby, Django, Java, heck even Microsoft is moving in the open source direction.
Canada is experiencing a surge in open source software guerrilla innovation. The tools to develop the software are free and readily available. There is an abundance of talent and resources in town to leverage and with the downturn it is a time to think about starting your own web ap using the simple three step; Great Ap, Price, Profit formula for success. Software start-ups are being forced to become successful in their own right and personally I think that may in fact be a good thing creating stronger businesses with real customers. The year 2000 may have brought on the bubble babies but 2009 will bread a tough and sinewy “burst” baby forced to fight for survival from day one. Perhaps survival of the fittest will end up producing some solid long term prospects for our little start-ups of the burst. Each cloud has its silver lining.
Ian Graham
Ian: great post. I agree that people are much more creative with limited resources.
On interesting twist on the guerrilla analogy is that most successful guerrilla movements have had major financial and logistical backing from a major power: for example, the original guerrillas fighting Napoleon in Spain were funded and supplied by the British, and during the Cold War, most guerrilla groups had backing from the U.S., China, and/or the USSR (sometimes via Cuba). I don’t know that that carries any lessons here, though.
Thanks for the comment David. Interesting observation about the major financial and logistical backing for guerrilla movements. I agree.
I consider TheCodeFactory in essence a guerrilla organization focused on innovation in a lean and entrepreneur friendly way. Using your analogy; if TheCodeFactory is Spain and Bureacracy is Napoleon who would my Britain be?
Perhaps in the end it is better for theCodeFactory to be Switzerland.