The Company

Background

ProInnovate is a pre-revenue lean startup based in Edinburgh, Scotland that was launched with the supported of Scottish Enterprise and the University of Edinburgh through the Edinburgh Pre-Incubator Scheme (EPIS). After a period of initial product development and testing, it is currently building up to launching its first product called ‘Manage Us’. This is the first in a pipeline of online business productivity tools which are destined to lead this small company to high growth.

As an aligned strategy and funding source, ProInnovate is also providing consultancy services particularly focused at quickly locating problems and identifying fixes to organisational and technological problems in public sector organisations. The alignment of this consultancy with the overall company strategy is explained briefly below.

The ‘Reality Gap’

Despite technological advancement many of today’s organisations are incredibly inefficient. Taking the low hanging fruit of the most accessible business ideas and mixing them with popular business IT services our businesses struggle to cope with all the change and increasingly low moral and productivity. It is not uncommon now to walk into an organisation and find staff who have no interest in their job and have no real grasp of what their organisation does beyond their immediate tasks and targets.

There is a huge ‘reality gap’ between the state of organisations as perceived by upper management and the actual dysfunctional state at ground level. This reality gap grows as business strategies focus on moving the organisation even further forward rather than addressing the issues that already exist.

ProInnovate is focused on providing both services (principally consultancy) and products (cloud based business applications) to address this ‘reality gap’.

We believe that this ‘gap’ presents an opportunity to build a highly profitable business delivering productivity to organisations, particularly organisations in the public sector.

Our strategy

The ‘reality gap’ is a gap that is typically not perceived by senior management. In some cases, a realisation that ‘something is wrong’ may provide an opportunity for ProInnovate to provide consultancy services to identify those problems and provide strategies for addressing them. But in most businesses the reality gap will be very familiar to staff ‘on the ground’ and it is those individuals we seek to service through providing online services that are directed and sold directly to them. In some cases we will be providing proverbial low cost pills to ease the pain. In other cases we will be providing building blocks to solidly bridge the gaps.

Technologies

ProInnovate is driven by addressing business problems and innovative in it’s business model, but it is also innovative in its use of technologies. For those with a technical interest, ProInnovate’s first product will deliver simple ease of use built on top of HTML5, websockets, non-blocking IO and Scala (functionally oriented) back-end processing. Like businesses that work, ProInnovate’s technologies are designed to change and grow rapidly and robustly as user needs inform the development.