Above & Beyond: How design thinking can improve/maintain a lively startup community with Zhenni Liang of Skåne Startups
Continuing on the theme of entrepreneurship from our previous Above & Beyond talk with Stefan Ytterborn, we were joined by Zhenni Liang from Skåne Startups recently to talk about what it takes to maintain a thriving startup ecosystem that both encourages and fosters entrepreneurship. Founded in 2015, Skåne Startups is a grassroots organization that provides networking opportunities between founders and investors within the Skåne region.
Compared to capital cities like Stockholm or Copenhagen, Skåne — Sweden’s southernmost region, which includes Malmö — might seem like a fairly unassuming place for tech innovation. However, the region accounts for roughly 1 of every 10 investments into tech companies within the Nordics and has an established history of successful acquisitions. In fact, one of our former clients Modcam, a Malmö based startup making machine learning startup that provides intelligent vision solutions, was recently acquired by Cisco Meraki in late 2020.
Skåne’s attractiveness as a tech and innovation hub is a testament to the tight-knit community initiatives — like Skåne Startups — and community leaders — like Zhenni — who have built, grown, and maintained the ecosystem throughout the last decade or so.
But, keeping the community alive and thriving is no easy feat. Our discussion with Zhenni centered around common pain points caused by how resource-intensive it is to maintain a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem. Effective networking in the region depends heavily on human connections. This requires community leaders — or what Zhenni calls “super connectors” — to stay vigilant and up-to-date on who is in the community and how the needs of that community are changing over time.
Since understanding the evolving needs of users plays well into our design wheelhouse (particularly with our UX design teams), we had lots of ideas to exchange with Zhenni about what improvements and possibilities design thinking could bring to the process of maintaining a startup ecosystem. Highlighted below are some key takeaways.
👩💻 Bring meaning to automation
Given the success and allure of the region for startups, Zhenni pointed out that scaling up the community was a complex task for Skåne Startups at the moment. While automation is usually one component of scaling up, in the case of maintaining a community, automation cannot necessarily replace the super connectors and leaders who maintain the tribe, so to speak. Not only do these individuals keep detailed tabs of who does what within the community but they also facilitate meaningful connections between members. The question really becomes, where does machine automation fit in among a tribe of people?
Our Digital Design Manager & Senior UX Designer Ana Barbosa pointed out that to address the challenge of using automation wisely when scaling up, one likely needs to focus on the small, granular details. “We would need to really map out the current journey of community members and identify pain points where automation would actually help. We trust this process would bring insights around what could and should be automated because we do deep dives like this daily.”
While seemingly paradoxical, focusing on small details rather than the bigger picture when scaling a community safeguards a sense of being a “close-knit” community rather than sacrificing it for the sake of efficiency.
🚺 Allocate resources to drive positive change
Just because a startup community is thriving does not mean that all members thrive equally. Indeed, the Nordics may have better gender equality measures than other parts of the world, but female founders remain underrepresented and underfunded compared to their male counterparts. While the issue of male versus female ownership is complex (we recommend you read Ownershift’s report “Why isn’t ownership between men and women equal yet?” to learn more), Zhenni mentioned that part of the reason that women struggle is how the investment industry approaches male versus female founders. “Male founders are asked about the opportunity areas of their products whereas females are usually asked about potential risks and how they would negate them,” she explained.
Skåne Startups allocate much of their most precious resource — human connectors — toward an initiative for female entrepreneurs called Women in Entrepreneurship (WIE). WIE focuses on empowering female founders by providing important networking opportunities as well as knowledge sharing to prepare them for working successfully within the current patriarchal framework of investors.
While allocating resources to increase diversity efforts is valiant, both Zhenni and several Abovers discussed the need for more intersectionality within these efforts. “I think it’s important to use knowledge sharing within an ecosystem or community to instill entrepreneurial mindsets to those people around us. And by an entrepreneurial mindset, I mean to solve actual problems in the community, not necessarily just to start a business,” said Fanny Carlsson, Senior Service Designer & UX Manager at Above.
🌍 Share knowledge & expertise outside of the ecosystem
The “actual” problems Fanny mentioned brought up an important point of reflection in our discussion. A person’s definition and perspective of what constitutes a problem, particularly one that can be very lucrative, is highly cultural. Zhenni, who is originally from China but has spent time in Latin America as well as Europe, pointed out that some Nordic startups aren’t solving “painful” problems anymore: “I’ve seen that startups here aren’t solving truly painful problems when you compare them to founders in Africa who are building emergency services (e.g. 911 or 112) for residents to dispatch ambulances. That’s something that doesn’t even cross your mind living in the Nordics!”
The subjectivity of “actual” or “painful” problems within entrepreneurship ecosystems calls into question whether knowledge sharing and expertise can be transferred across cultures and communities. In other words, would it be possible for Skåne Startups to share its established networking practices and the technical know-how of the community members with startup hubs across the globe tackling basic problems that we take for granted here in the Nordics (like calling emergency services)? Moreover, what kind of learnings from other startup communities could Skåne Startups bring back to the region?
Our talk with Zhenni reminded us that both design & startup ecosystems share a major common point through the innovation processes that we both encounter on a daily basis. Despite these commonalities, the design “world” and startup “world” largely exist independently of each other. If there’s anything to be learned from our talks about community building, it should be that there should be a closer collaboration between design thinking and entrepreneurship to make sure the right problems — “painful” or otherwise — are being solved.
Above & Beyond events are held internally for the Above team. The learnings and take-aways are written by Renee Semko Gonzalez and edited by myself. I can only hope that this article (and every other article we share) offers you as many ideas and inspiration as it has our team.
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