Lead to Win Blog

this article was previously published by the Ottawa Business Journal on October 30

The use of two phrases has increased significantly recently: “creative company” and “healthy business ecosystem.”

But what do these two phrases mean? A creative company harnesses creative individuals and organizations worldwide to develop and sell market offers for which their customers are willing to pay. Creative companies are small, innovative, flexible and deliver value to customers, partners, themselves and their communities. They also rely on business ecosystems to grow. Creative companies will do well in the new economy.

Take the example of Zeebu Mobile, an Ottawa-based startup.

Zeebu’s two founders, Dan Gagliardi and Anthony Rizk, are out to create a new market niche using the Lead to Win ecosystem. Zeebu Mobile’s application, named BabyGO!, entertains children taking an object that often distances parents from their young children: the BlackBerry.

The company wants to turn your BlackBerry from a business tool into an educational and entertaining device you can share with your children.

The application, which was developed in consultation with early childhood education (ECE) experts, intercepts all key presses including incoming phone calls and e-mails and displays colorful images of the letters while announcing their names and sounds.

As parents of young children themselves, the two founders experienced firsthand the need for entertaining diversions at times. By observing their own children’s fascination with their parents’ BlackBerry devices, Anthony and Dan realized the potential for a completely new family of mobile applications.

Extensive discussions with other users, parents and caregivers confirmed the concept.

“It’s only natural that young children want to mimic mommy and daddy and that includes exploring the BlackBerry device,” Zeebu Mobile CEO Dan Gagliardi said. “But in our search we noticed that there were no suitable applications available for very young children and parents were worried about the potential for valuable data to be compromised or for spurious phone calls to be generated by their inquisitive minds and active fingers.”

And just last week, RIM selected Zeebu’s application as a featured app at their App World store. This is significant, given that innovation is the most important factor for the selection of featured apps.

But what about “business ecosystems”? They’re comprised of companies and individuals that use an out-of-the-box platform to create and deliver value to their customers. In a healthy ecosystem, companies and individuals concurrently collaborate in the production of common assets and use these assets to develop market offers they use to compete in the marketplace.

The organization responsible for providing the out-of-the-box platform is referred to as a keystone. A keystone organization attracts talented volunteers to collaborate in the production of the assets and delivery of services required by the creative companies, provides ecosystem governance, and maintains the health of the ecosystem.

But an ecosystem, like any organism, is nothing without its health ? and a healthy ecosystem must have a large number of diverse participants, attract investment, be stable, and create new niche markets. Keystones of healthy ecosystems are lean and effective.

A business ecosystem provides various benefits to small creative companies: access to deal flows and opportunity fulfillment; customer pull for rapid innovation; lower sales and development costs; fast and favorable access to sophisticated capabilities worldwide; no lock-in by powerful companies or investors; lower cost of entering new markets; and high quality mentoring.

Finally, an ecosystem is successful when companies and individuals can generate greater profitable revenue with it than without it.

Canada’s capital region benefits from the high paying jobs, investment and talent retention made possible by creative companies and the ecosystems of which they are a part.

The freely available BabyGO! application will soon be complemented by a premium version offering extended functionality, customization and personalization options for a modest licensing fee. The company will continue to offer free basic functionality and licensed premium editions as it releases other activities and applications, extending the product family across the full 0-9 age group.

Zeebu Mobile and 70 other local technology companies are part of Lead to Win, an ecosystem designed to launch and growth creative companies in Canada’s Capital Region.