Tag: entrepreneurs

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This entrepreneur didn’t need an incubator to hatch a motorised surfboard business

English: Mavericks Surf Contest 2010. Français...
English: Mavericks Surf Contest 2010. Français : Édition 2010 du concours de surf de Mavericks. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chris Preston, an Australian surfer who damaged his shoulder a few years ago, has come up with a motorised surfboard for injured surfers would like to surf again.

Preston and his co-director, his wife Natalie, are launching Power Boards which will sell about 20 boards a month. Board prices, depending on board length, range between $4,200 and $4,700.

This is a great start-up story of an entrepreneur who spotted an opportunity and is motivated enough to make a go of his idea. It interesting that his idea came out of his surfing experience.

A surfing experience also led Anna Jerstrom, a Swede, to an idea for the Calavera range of bikinis designed to stay on no matter how rough the surf while on a surfing camp in Costa Rica. Continue reading “This entrepreneur didn’t need an incubator to hatch a motorised surfboard business”

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How entrepreneurs can benefit from innovation in these times

1005577_506641316068140_11700165_nGoogle X has launched its experimental pilot Loons project in Christchurch and Canterbury, New Zealand, a project that has mounted broadband transmitters on high-altitude balloons. The idea behind the project is to give people in remote areas access to the Internet.

This is a project from Google’s secretive research lab whose mandate is to come up with new technologies. It has been experimenting with a Google driver-less car, Google Glass, similar to a normal pair of glasses but with an HD display over the right eye, and an airborne turbine prototype works for electricity-generating propellers at high altitudes. Continue reading “How entrepreneurs can benefit from innovation in these times”

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How do you scout for ideas?

Wine-tasting
Wine-tasting (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It pays to look for ideas outside your usual routine. Perhaps you are tired of sitting at home, in your study using idea-generation techniques. Then get out and take a look around. Perhaps you’ll find new ideas or ideas to make money with the ideas you already have.

Observation is one of the best tools or methods for finding ideas. Go for a walk. Visit a shopping mall. Trawl through a mall you usually don’t shop at – go to a mall in a low income area or go to an expensive maul out of the range of your customers. Continue reading “How do you scout for ideas?”

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What happened to entrepreneurial spirit? Finding the entrepreneur in you

Kalk Bay Harbour, Cape Town.
Kalk Bay Harbour, Cape Town. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I was growing up in the seaside village of Kalk Bay, Cape Town, my father hired a spare outside room from the mother of a famous cricketer at the time.

The empty room was quickly filled with equipment that my brothers and I used for our watersports: surfboards, wetsuits, diving gear and fishing rods. I spent many hours in that room fixing surfboard dents or dings.

I didn’t know it then but this woman was being entrepreneurial by making some money on the side in her retirement years. Continue reading “What happened to entrepreneurial spirit? Finding the entrepreneur in you”

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From the road

Simon's Town (Photo: Chesney Bradshaw)
Simon’s Town (Photo: Chesney Bradshaw)

A young man hitch-hiked from Cape Town to the Eastern Free State to attend a funeral in a rural area. He can’t afford the taxi bus fare because the price has gone up. The rising fuel price is bringing the return of the hitch hiker.

A craft shop in Hanover, a pass-through town in the Karoo, displays crafted furniture, paintings and ornaments – all made with care and quality you’d previously only find in city stores. Even back water crafters have upped their game. Continue reading “From the road”

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Sustainability – a must-have or simply an add-on for start-ups?


When a partner and me launched a start-up in the grocery trade a few years back most of our initial time was spent planning – thinking about things like setting up a small distribution centre, identifying larger customers, working out whether our range was big enough and doing sums to see that our sales would be profitable.

As soon as we got going, all our time was spent rushing out to customers from early in the morning until late in the evening, selling and distributing our products. We had almost no time to think about our strategy, financial objectives and marketing.

If you have been involved in setting up a start-up business, then you will know that a new business venture is a complex process which involves spending a lot of time on planning and preparation. Once you get started, your time is eaten up by serving customers, checking your expenses, cash flow and re-ordering. Continue reading “Sustainability – a must-have or simply an add-on for start-ups?”

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This SOB boss taught the wrong way to be tough

Hondeklipbaai
Hondelipbaai (Photo credit: www.alltravels.com)

Before sunrise the wind was blowing so strong that I knew we couldn’t take our diving vessel up the coast to dive for diamonds.

I didn’t bother to get up. I had grown up in False Bay and when the wind blew this hard we wouldn’t risk going out fishing on our ski boat.

Here on the isolated West Coast the Atlantic Ocean would smash tons of water against the shore when the sea was big and dangerous.

I heard knocking on my door. It was my fellow diver who announced that we were going to sea. I had better get up and come down to the jetty in a hurry. I told him this was crazy and that I’d tell this to our boss. His face told me that I was looking for trouble. Continue reading “This SOB boss taught the wrong way to be tough”

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What you need to know about age and innovation

Ideas at any ageA reader asked me this great question a week or so ago:

QUESTION: I’ve read about all these innovators below the age of 30 forming new businesses, mobile apps and Internet businesses. What chance has someone got if they are older? Is it too late after a certain age to innovate?

CHESNEY: Right off I’d say that age doesn’t matter at all. But at the same time who’s going to argue that youth doesn’t have a strong head start? Especially when it comes to energy and drive. And the reason why so many young people are making it especially in the online world is because they have grown up with the technology.

Continue reading “What you need to know about age and innovation”

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It took 5,000 ideas to take this product to market

James Dyson came up with an idea for a bagless vacuum cleaner — inspired by an industrial cyclone at a timber mill — in the late 1960s.

After five years of testing and more than 5,000 “mistakes”, or prototypes as engineers call them, his vacuum cleaner concept was ready to take to market.

But all the big brand manufacturers slammed doors in his face.

Why?

Their business model was selling vacuum cleaners and bags — which made them lots of money.

He had to eventually launch his vacuum cleaner himself – in 1993.

He became a billionaire.

It’s hard not to admire this guy. Think of the many rejections he had to face. Imagine having to deal with all the people who must have thought he was crazy.

“What’s important is that I didn’t stop at the first failure, the 50th, or the 5,000th,” he wrote in a news magazine. “I never will.”

Such persistence is incredible. How many times have we come up with promising ideas and keep working on them for years?

In my case I had an idea for a website similar to www.ideaaccelerator.co.za that I started in 2005 for entrepreneurs. But I packed in it after a year because of competing interests.

It was only in 2010 that I decided to start a new blog on the easier WordPress platform. Keeping the momentum for the first year was difficult but now it has taken on a life of its own.

Persistence, someone said, is to the character of people as carbon is to steel. It’s hard to define but so essential for bringing a product or service to life.

How often do we have ideas and just give up at the first obstacle? How far would you go in pursuing your idea for a product or service? Would you keep at your idea for several decades until you finally brought it to market? Could you keep going, refining your idea after 5,000 mistakes?

Look at it this way, each one of Dyson’s 5,000 mistakes actually involved coming up with a new idea each time. It’s a myth that innovation is one single event or flash of inspiration. You sometimes need to build ideas upon ideas as you refine your product or service for the market place.

It’s ironic that Dyson was forced to sue one of the companies that had rejected his design years back. Success leads to copycats.

Want to come up with and develop ideas of your own?

Tune into www.ideaaccelerator.co.za for ideas and articles.

Stay inspired

Chesney Bradshaw