At the University of New England's SMART Region Incubator (SRI), Director Lou Conway helps entrepreneurs build services and products from the ground up and she's reflected on the skills of founders and those who support start-up communities.
"Any business or incubator is a community that depends on relationships or partnerships," says Lou. "And partnerships rely on respect for shared values. To me, the most important skills, personally and professionally, are attentiveness, discernment and generosity."
But how can you demonstrate such skills?
"Attentiveness is the capacity to pay attention, notice, engage," Lou says. "It's having an outward mindset, a curiosity about others and your own inner world. When you begin to understand how you think differently from and similarly to others, you can begin to have empathy for them.
In any workplace you need to be attentive to customers, your team, your investors. You could argue that's why some large businesses are stagnating and even declining, because everyone gets too comfortable and stops paying attention to possible improvements."
So where does discernment fit in?
"This is the adjudication of what's relevant and meaningful, and what is trivial and false," Lou says. "Figuring out what matters is what founders of start-ups and our SRI team do each day. This community is built on discernment, decisiveness and making an active contribution.
It's more than critical thinking and problem-solving in action; it pools your values, your understanding of the abstract as well as the detail, and your ability to figure out an outcome."
However, in today's world we're at risk of becoming disconnected from others as we focus on transactions rather than relationships. Which is where generosity comes in.
"Acts of generosity arise from genuinely communicating and sharing ideas, and doing so with kindness," Lou says. "It's the hand-written note, asking after a colleague's welfare, a shared lunch, recognition of how others contribute to the whole. Every workplace could be enhanced with a big dose of kindness, by asking ourselves what is the kind thing to do, as opposed to simply what will achieve the desired outcome."
For Lou, these three essential - and intrinsically linked - skills are fundamental to developing and maintaining a strong start-up community. "They represent the stake in the ground, the way a person or organisation likes to operate; they translate into the business culture and are the heartbeat of innovation," she says. "Building community and growing a culture to support innovation is a shared responsibility, and these skills are at the core. Fundamentally these are skills we can seek to develop professionally and personally our whole life through!"
