We guess that the story of other high-tech startups is similar to that of Blue Cromos. Someone identifies a problem that needs solving or an improvement to be made, has an idea of how to do it and access to capital to finance building it into a sufficiently convincing product or service to attract the capital needed to grow and break through in the market.
Everybody isn't lighted up by the same kind of spark
As long as you're on your own in this process, or a very small team of enthusiasts, the feeling of wanting to prove your idea is often fuel enough to motivate you to work those long hours and handle the uncertainty of starting something new.
But as you need to build an organisation around the idea, that kind of spark may not suffice the further away you work from the original, core, team. As start-ups rarely are ripe with funds, salary isn't usually a big motivator. Possibly stock-options, foregoing money today for the chance of making it big in the future. But more often, the driver is a professional challenge of exploring the limits of your professional skills and of what others have done, or it's the big WHY, probably related to the problem the idea is intended to solve. Or both, of course.
What is your Why?
As we wrote recently, we at Blue Cromos feel good and strongly about our Why. We work both on fighting counterfeiting and on paving the way for effective handling of Digital Product Passports, intended to lead to more circular products with less negativ environmental impact. Making life hard for criminals, easy and fair for consumers and serious producers, and contributing to future generations having a liveable planet are pretty good "Why's", we think.
What is your Why?
If you work in a hi-tech company or a startup, do you feel that you work for a greater good?
Or is professional challenge your primary driver?
We're under the impression that Why and Values are especially important for the younger generation, exactly the group of people sought after by startups and hi-tech companies. While it used to be enough, some decades ago, to offer "safe employment", by now everybody have realised that "safe employment" is about as rare as a "free lunch".
So, if you want to make it easier to find and onboard the talents you desire as a hi-tech or startup, you had better have a good Why and be clear about it when recruiting.
Why focus on Swedish hi-tech in the headline?
For two very simple reasons:
Blue Cromos is a company originating in Sweden
Sweden overtook USA last year (2023) as the world's second most innovative country in the Global Innovation Index by World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)
We would encourage other hi-tech companies, not only in Sweden of course, to work not only on their splendid solutions or on their grand financial future, but also on their purpose. We're convinced that having a great and explicit purpose will benefit the first two aspects as well.
It's not our business to tell others which purposes to work for, but a starting point could well be where you look, early on, for that problem to solve. Can your skills help safeguard our planet for future generations, reduce extinction of species, fight criminality, feed the hungry, preserve water, support democracy, free speech, telling facts from fiction....?
A few examples that comes to our mind (maybe not all hi-tech, maybe not all Swedish, but still):
Making beer from old bread instead of throwing it away
Re:meat - Cultivated Meat
GravityLight
Ocean Cleanup
Do you have any similar examples to add to our list?
Image by BlackSalmon on iStock