Stepping into new arena with a zeal to emerge as the best? It is but inevitable to have complete industry knowledge, of the things that go around, of the changes that you can bring about, and of everything you can do as an innovator, disrupting challenges.
Wouldn’t it be easier if you had a helping hand, more like a guiding light to that lit your pathway towards better-ness?
Featuring for The Enterprise World’s this issue of Enterprising Companies of the Year is EarlyBirds, a company that guides you with the right tools.
Before this Interview with Kris Poria, Co-Founder and CEO, here is a short glimpse of the company.
Company Overview-
The Early Birds Marketplace is a Business to Business (B2B) marketplace for Innovators (Startups, Scaleups and mature) and Early Adopters to exchange value early on. Innovators are able to list their innovations with Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or product/solution and configure offer starting from US$ 500 up to US$ 25,000 for each sale.
Early Adopters are able to search and buy innovations in their industry and business functions based on what business outcome these provide. Early Adopters are able to list Challenges in the marketplace to request potential solutions from Innovators. The marketplace provides escrow capability to reduce risk for both sides as well as capability to provide feedback for both parties.
Interview with Kris Poria-
“Success is not a destination but a journey at personal, professional and spiritual level”
1. Brief us about at the company, what inspired you to start the company?
Kris Poria, Cofounder of EarlyBirds, stumbled upon a gap in the market for big companies to work with start-ups that had innovative solutions, he realised a platform needed to be launched, to marry the two together, along with enabling start-ups and early adopters to exchange value early on.
Along with his co-founder and business partner, Jeff Penrose, they launched EarlyBirds – a global platform and business model that connects tech innovators, start-ups, along with independent experts, to share expertise and knowledge, to enable businesses to upscale quicker.
EarlyBirds helps companies by providing capability solutions within a trusted networking platform to millions of businesses around the world. The platform allows early adopter technical issues to be solved quickly by experts providing solution options. This is complimented by innovation programs, products, and services on offer to allow newish companies to see what the global market is doing. Finally, subject matter experts are welcomed onto the platform to work with customers to deliver business-focused outcomes. This helps improve the innovation lifecycle and enable any products or services to come to life quicker.
2. What are the products or services the company focuses on? How are your services different from those in the market?
EarlyBirds transforming organisations into self-learning org by:
- Continuous learning across all business functions
- Solve business and tech challenge quickly
- Explore disruptions including new technology, process and models
- Solving Wicked Problems
Above is delivered with help of EarlyBirds Ecosystem (Innovators, Subject Matter Experts (SMES) and Early Adopters) using its platform and innovation programs – the Challenger and the Explorer. The Challenger program is to solve one business or technical challenge at a time and the Explorer program is to provide ongoing innovation as a service to the whole organisation.
EarlyBirds platform scouts over 3M global Innovators, have over 100 SMEs and now over 600 organisations registered on the platform.
EarlyBirds offers two options to the market – Self Service platform subscription that customers can search Innovators to identify solutions or innovations to solve their challenges or SME assisted programs to deliver a solution to any business or technical challenges or ongoing innovation as a service.
3. Please tell us about your team.
EarlyBirds founding team includes Kris Poria, Jeff Penrose and CFO James Palmers. All have worked in the global market with small to multi-national organisations. EarlyBirds also have specialist technical team and Subject Matter Experts that are well known in the industry along with 14 advisory board members. Together team has a deep experience across three key area of focus – Early Adopter, Innovators and Subject Matter Expert covering all key industry sectors.
4. Please brief us about your professional experience.
Kris has started his own businesses and worked in sectors including ICT, Media, Real Estate, Education as well helped customers in Public Sector, Financial, Energy, Education to name a few. Kris has done various roles from Software Engineer to leading a business and has worked in Asia, Europe, US and Australia.
5. What are the key achievements of your business journey?
EarlyBirds on a journey to deliver to its purpose “Engaging Society in Actionable Innovation!”. We have coined a framework called Edzlity (Edge and Agility) that helps organisations to become Self-Learning organisations. We will continue to keep building products and align our services to deliver these outcomes with our platform, products and programs. We have been able to build a full ecosystem to identify over 3 million innovator organisations, over 100 Subject Matter Experts and over 600 organisations using our platform so far. We are able to onboard tier-1 public and private organisations working with us in Australia and continue to expand.
6. Any client experience you would like to highlight?
We are working with large public and private sector organisations in Australia including 2 of top 10 ASX listed organisations and large public sector agencies. Our clients’ feedback is that we are helping them to accelerate their innovation capability, speed and solving their wicked problems with our platform and frameworks.
