Enhancing the entrepreneurial journey at Mitacs with focused software applications
Sonia Martins
ENTI 559.7 WINTER 2019
The best part of using entrepreneurial technologies such as Asana, Slack, Airtable, GSuite, Wave, to mention but a few, is the effectiveness of these tools, while costing close to nothing. One of the top reasons why people don’t start businesses despite their excellent business ideas is money (Banks, 2018; Freeman, 2015). Traditionally, the cost of installing software in the hardware forms (through disks and drives) adds to the financial burden of entrepreneurship. The use of such traditional software equally required employee training, as well as added costs of maintenance and updating. The emergence of software as a service (SaaS) has reduced these costs to the bare minimum, while making entrepreneurs more efficient and competitive (Freeman, 2015).
Mitacs is a not-for-profit organization with the aim of building partnerships between academia, industry and the world, in ways that promote innovation in Canada (Mitacs, 2019). Mitacs has worked with over 60 universities and 4,000 companies all around Canada. Mitacs has two umbrella teams, the leadership team and the business development team, with 25 offices around Canada
Angelo Nwigwe is one of the Business Development Director, who has been on Mitacs’ Business Development team for about a year now. With an educational background in Health Sciences and a Master of Biomedical Technology (MBT), he is able to utilize his understanding of the scientific concepts involved in clients’ projects and his understanding of business development processes of biotechnology companies to provide the necessary guidance needed by start-ups or potential start-ups in the area of biotechnology and beyond. With his expertise, he offers business advice and directions, ranging from the market evaluation to the process of intellectual property, that contribute to the successful establishment of these start-ups or potential start-ups.
Angelo is no stranger to the impact of entrepreneurial technologies, and admits the contribution of these entrepreneur technologies to the successful execution of his work as a Business Development Director. Angelo equally acknowledges that the multitude of entrepreneurial technologies available can be overwhelming. Critical activities as a Business Development Director for Angelo include sharing large files with team members or clients, collaborating collectively on a document, communicating effectively and efficiently with clients and team members across the country, and booking meetings more efficiently. He has since focused on just a few technologies that optimize activities critical to his work.
Slack (Slack.com) has improved Angelo’s efficiency of communicating, especially externally to researchers working on different projects. Slack is becoming popular among many teams and this is no surprise considering the well-thought-out features of communication Slack offers. One of the features Angelo utilizes in executing his work is the ability to organize conversations in channels. Angelo uses the channels to organize the different clients he interacts with, making it easy to converse with clients without the lengthy back and forth email chains.
Although Angelo uses Slack for quick conversations with team members of Mitacs, Slack remains primarily for external communication with clients. Conversations can be tracked easily and important content can be easily searched within channel conversations. Slack has more features such as voice or video calling, sharing screens, integrated file sharing that employees of Mitacs could exploit, however, other entrepreneurial technologies are preferred.
Skype (Skype.com) is the primary tools for internal communication among Mitacs employees. Having locations across Canada, Skype has significantly reduced travel costs for the company, while achieving quality conference meetings. The video call and screen sharing features Skype offers is preferred to Slack, possibly because Skype has been around longer and was already in use before Slack existed.
This decision to stick with Skype, even when Slack offers similar features is commended considering the switching cost from Skype to Slack. Entrepreneurs should realize switching between technologies is not required if the new technology is not significantly different and does not offer unique features of great importance to the business’ performance.
One Drive has been useful for Angelo in sharing large files with clients and team members. Collective work is done on projects such as drafting business plans, evaluating financial statements, etc., through one drive.
A primary reason Angelo mentions for choosing one drive over other popular options, particularly google drive or GSuite, is that One Drive syncs better with their outlook emails. This also contributes to their use of Skype, which is also a Microsoft product.
Another significant part of being a Business Development Director is meeting clients in-person. Finding a time that works best for Angelo and his clients had been a struggle until he was introduced to Calendly. With Calendly (Calendly.com), Angelo is able to share his calendar with clients, allowing the clients book only available dates on his calendar that work for them, so he is not double booked.
Angelo is also able to set buffers between his bookings, such that he has enough time to get from one meeting to another. Calendly, along with the other entrepreneurial technologies used by Angelo has significantly impacted his performance as a Business Development Director. Angelo’s experiences with these tools enables him recommend some of these tools to the businesses, start-ups and potential start-ups he works with.
With the rise in SaaS, entrepreneurs are consistently flooded by multitude of technological tool options. These technologies require very minimal training, which some of these technologies offer freely in form of videos, step-by-step instructions on how to use certain features, frequently asked question sections, and sometimes an online help to answer questions users may have. With such ease-of-use, entrepreneur can readily adopt these SaaS options in optimizing business activities within their ventures while maximizing profits (FinanceOnline, 2019). The accessibility of these technologies has significantly removed the location restriction of performing certain tasks (FinanceOnline, 2019). Angelo, the Business Development Director, acknowledges the impact SaaS has had on his ability to access important files whenever need be, in spite of location. Most businesses equally recognize and leverage this accessibility SaaS provides. Businesses are increasingly cutting down on establishing physical locations for the execution of business activities and allowing their employees work from whatever locations they want. The ability of SaaS tools to sync well with one another has encouraged companies selectively customize tools to their business activities. These technologies have tremendously reduced the financial costs associated with running a venture. However, not drowning in all of the numerous options come with skills and focus. Knowing what you need as a business is an essential starting place in deciding what tools to use.
SaaS revolutionizing the way business is done is no longer news. Although Mitacs is about 20 years old, my conversation with Angelo reinforced the fact that these technologies are not only useful for start-ups, but also well-established companies are utilizing these very tools to maximize their competitive advantages in their respective industries. Focusing on a few SaaS technologies that best fits your need as a company is equally vital. New ventures are highly encouraged to seek the opinions of SaaS experts for the prescription of SaaS tools, which best fit their needs. Business development experts have equally identified the usefulness of these tools for maximizing the success of the enterprises they work with and will have valuable advice for new ventures in this regard. Governments are equally increasing their support for innovation and entrepreneurship (Banks, 2018). More funding is now available for new ventures. The judicious utilization of this fund is paramount. The responsibilities of entrepreneurs include identifying the entrepreneurial technologies that minimizes their costs, while maximizing productivity and profits.
References
Banks, A.S. (2018). How can I start a business from nothing? Forbes Innovation. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/12/07/how-can-i-start-a-business-from-nothing/#44a4765410fe
FinancesOnline. (2019). How SaaS is changing the way entrepreneurs do online business. FinancesOnline Reviews for Business. Retrieved from https://financesonline.com/how-saas-is-changing-the-way-entrepreneurs-do-online-business/
Freeman, S. (2015). 4 ways SaaS can make entrepreneurs more efficient and competitive. Entrepreneur. Retrieved from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248766
Mitacs. (2019). About Mitacs. Mitacs. Retrieved from https://www.mitacs.ca/en/about
