Early Birds Cofounders Kris Poria and Jeff Penrose Talk with Rachel Jones at Kalkine TV

Cofounders of the Early Birds global innovation open ecosystem, Kris Poria and Jeff Penrose, were recently interviewed on Kalkine TV. The interview focused on the inspiration behind launching Early Birds, elaborating on its mission, its role in assisting early adopters and innovators across multiple industries, and its USP within the startup ecosystem.

Early Birds is an innovation ecosystem that brings together early adopters and innovators to solve real-world business challenges. Kalkine TV is a media publisher that brings together industry leaders, successful business owners, and market and equity advocates all under one roof to help its viewers discover insights about the stock market and discover multiple passive income streams.

When asked about the motivation behind launching the brand, Kris Poria said that the idea came to him when he was working for a large systems integrator in Australia. Jeff Penrose, who he knew from his time at Oracle, was working at a startup at the same time. Jeff’s company had an innovative solution that could have been used in Kris’s project. However, due to a desire not to use an off the shelf solution, the company Kris worked for implemented its own solution by building it from scratch, which ended up being a waste of time and not enough value for money for the client. After the experience, Kris and Jeff identified a gap in the market and the opportunity to create a platform where disruptive startup-scale innovators, early adopters, and subject matter experts could be brought together by creating an open innovation ecosystem. The name of the company reflects the advantage that the platform provides to early adopters of startup, scale up and mature innovative technology.

When asked to elaborate on the meaning behind the company’s tagline “Accelerate Actionable Innovation”, Jeff Penrose says, “The tagline is about solving business challenges with commercially available innovative solutions and services that come from startups across the globe and locally. The accelerate component is about resolving these challenges or seizing these opportunities within weeks rather than months. Actionable innovation occurs after we've defined a business challenge or identified an opportunity. We then move forward to curating options for the customer from our large database to quickly resolve these opportunities or challenges and move to the desired outcome which is the evaluation of a number of candidate solutions or services. The customs has many options including a proof of concepts or take steps to integrate the next technology into an enterprise solution based on a whole range of factors that we take into consideration with the customer.”

When asked to provide more information about the company’s role in bringing the different groups together, Jeff says, “Our open ecosystem has three parts. An early adopter is any private or public sector organization or person or group of people within an organization who are looking to create a service with increased agility. The second component is startups, scale-ups, and mature businesses that either register on our platform or we identify through our artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data capabilities. We have in excess of a million innovators on the platform right now. We've got a huge range of choices to evaluate and solve business challenges. The third component is SME consultants or subject matter experts. They are available to work with early adopters and innovators to define challenges and explore options and opportunities. So, the Early Birds platform and services allow each of these areas to register interests and communicate with each other through subscribing to the platform.”

When asked about the company’s unique selling proposition, Kris says, “Our unique value proposition, especially for the enterprise customer, is to assist them to become a self-learning organization with three key initiatives. The first one is continuous improvements across all business functions, not just IT. The second is resolving business and technical challenges as quickly as possible. The third one is to explore disruptive innovation because there are many actionable innovations, whether you are talking about process product or business models.”

Readers can find out more about Early Birds by heading over to its website at earlybirds.io.