ONOW selected for Frontier Incubators
Joining a virtual cohort of 10 members in early to emerging stages of development
Global leaders in the entrepreneurship incubation field will train and mentor Frontier Incubators participants.
We’re pleased to announce that ONOW has been accepted into the Frontier Incubators Virtual Cohort, launched by the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This program has been described as an incubator for incubators, and we’ll receive regular personalized guidance from expert mentors who have been there before!
The question of scale is one we’re going to wrestle with as part of the Frontier Incubators program. After running more than 30 cohorts, and more than 350 startup launches, we’re anxious to break down our model to more effectively leverage our resources, our staff, our curricula and our unique ability to create digital tech for entrepreneurs in our Development Lab.
In the social impact space, the big theme is “scale”. Scale has been turned into a normative value in and of itself. The message is that whatever you’re doing you need to impact the largest number of people with the fewest dollars possible. Some would even call you unethical for taking scarce development dollars from other scalable projects.
Social enterprise is increasingly dominated by this utilitarian thinking. And utility requires a manufacturing process that scales. It’s a high standard for startup social enterprises, especially when it is so evident that massive NGOs aren’t exactly paragons of efficiency.
Unfortunately, entrepreneurship doesn’t scale very easily.
We launched ONOW in 2012, but I was doing similar work in Myanmar as early as 2009. At the time, the language of a Base of the Pyramid incubator wasn’t anywhere in my mind. Back then, I sat alongside a Myanmar entrepreneur, read up on her idea, designed the market research effort, stressed over the differentiator, wrestled with how to go to market, and worked with her on her business and financial plan. The importance of a high touch coaching-style interaction was obvious, because building entrepreneurship skills must be a highly personalized experience.
I would’t have called myself an entrepreneur yet, and I read everything and tried to adapt it for use in Myanmar. There was absolutely no access to finance, venture capital, no bank lending and no microfinance yet, so we ended up pitching to some friends and pooling some funds to invest in the small fashion business. Exhilarating.
At the ONOW incubator we launched three years later, we have constantly iterated our approach. We realized early on that #LectureMustDie because it is a waste of everyone’s time. Our program is now more cost effective and more standardized and more repeatable than ever before, and it still rests on the unit basis of a one-on-one coach experience. We’ve worked with hundreds of very small enterprises to help them startup, expand and “scale”.
But the truth is, we haven’t really been able to scale ourselves. The Frontier Incubators cohort is going to get us further down the road! We can’t wait to meet our Program Mentors!
Thanks to the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for the opportunity to join the Frontier Incubators Virtual Cohort! In nearly seven years of base of the pyramid incubation, we’ve mostly gone it alone, read a ton, and iterated and iterated and iterated. Joining this program has us positioned to take it to the next level, and we intend to make the most of this opportunity!
