bwagy, the blog of Ben Young

This is a term I learned during my uni years.

The concept is that in an academic argument you use others research & findings to back your own.

Essentially by standing on the shoulers of giants before us we leveraged our argument and made it that much stronger.

I like this metaphor and it is just as applicable in business.

Who do you have talking about you? or even better are you viewed as a giant? (such that people want to stand on your shoulders).

If not you should seek to stimulate this, how can I leverage myself / our business by standing on the shoulders of giants?

You’ll see organisations do it by showing their customers off, we work with so and so multinational or authors do it frequently by getting other great authors to write the introduction.

So how can you stand on the shoulders of giants to help you?

With a start up how do you legitimise?

What makes this concept real? how can we communicate that? how do we convince people that in all likelihood we will never meet but conduct business with?

Quotes, press releases, buzz, real physical address, photos via flickr, blogging, techcrunch mention..

All different routes.

How about a standard, a brand, voted for by the industry, like the Intel Inside brand.

A brand that reinforces legitimacy and rewards action.

Certain actions provide points, and start ups are only admitted once they have met criteria set by the community.

A brand that says we are a real business and are here for the long haul.

Now I’ll be the first to say, this isn’t for everyone, and if you are facing legimacy problems maybe there’s something bigger wrong.

However there is a real market need.

I don’t think this is quite the answer, but it’s less wrong than no answer…..