What do you need to start a successful business? Common sense would say business smarts and of course the know-how to succeed in your industry. But what if you only have the former?

The rise of serial entrepreneurship has brought about the era of the non-specialist entrepreneur. These entrepreneurs are generalists who specialize in starting, operating, and scaling businesses and not in the ins and outs of the industry they’re looking to disrupt.

You’ll find them across all industries, with the most lucrative being those still on the cusp of their technological revolution. If your aim is to build and scale a successful business, why would you enter the overcrowded world of dating apps or food delivery? It’s the (let’s admit it) ‘less sexy’ industries like manufacturing, construction, and real estate where the real potential for disruption and success lies.

Agritech in particular is a great example of an industry that was lagging behind in terms of tech adoption but is now experiencing a boom, with entrepreneurs applying new technologies to solve the biggest challenges facing farmers.

But can non-specialists actually be successful in industries they don’t fully understand? And, perhaps key to this question, how do they actually gain trust from customers who are experts in their field?

We spoke with three Agritech entrepreneurs from X-Europe ‘s Deeptech accelerator program about why they chose this field, how they broke into the industry, and what it took to develop and scale a successful business as a non-specialist.

Could Agritech be a gold rush sector for serial entrepreneurs?

The global population is set to reach almost ten billion by 2050. In order to feed a population of this size, we’ll need to produce 60% more food .

The problem is, farming is also one of the most taxing activities on the planet, taking up 70% of freshwater resources and 38% of the world’s land surface . The conundrum we find ourselves in is the need to increase food production at a rapid rate, while also decreasing our impact on the environment.

Investors are already pumping money into this fast growing industry. In 2019, the global Agritech market was valued at $17,442.7 million and is projected to reach $41,172.5 million by 2027 .

According to estimates by McKinsey&Company, with the rise of frontier connectivity technologies like LPWAN, 5G, and LEO satellites, roughly 80% of the world’s rural areas will be connected by 2030. This means greater access to data for the farming industry and a realm of new digital tools. The endless possibilities that increased connectivity could bring has the potential to add an extra $500 billion to global gross domestic product.

All of these factors make the industry ripe for disruption. But what if your only farming experience comes from playing hours of FarmVille?

Are tech expertise and entrepreneurial smarts enough to break into a completely foreign industry?

Alban Pobla, CEO of Dilepix, is the perfect example of an entrepreneur who doesn’t want to limit himself to one field. Instead, he’s used his expertise in robotics to explore new possibilities across industries.

And that’s exactly what he did with Dilepix . The company’s software solution combines computer vision, deep learning, and robotics to help agricultural businesses solve a wide range of challenges including detecting crop diseases and weeds, fighting off pest invasions, monitoring livestock, making machinery more precise and autonomous, and more.

For those who believe specialists are the only ones with the know-how to break into an industry, Pobla and his team are proving them wrong. As he explained, their experience and knowledge in the latest technology and how to apply it to different markets has actually really helped the team see problems from a different perspective.

He shared that the key to closing the knowledge gap when breaking into a new industry is to get out there and start talking.

Winning over trust with the experts

Even with all the latest cutting edge technology in the world, as an outsider, it must be difficult to convince farmers who’ve been working in the industry their whole lives to try new ways of doing things. How do you win over their trust?

Tamás Bodnár, CEO of Agroninja knows this struggle well.

His company’s first product, beefie, is a user-friendly application that solves what some might call a very large problem in the cattle industry. Like paying taxes, weighing cattle is one of those necessary evils that takes time and causes stress for both the animal and the worker tasked with leading and keeping a stubborn steer on a scale.

With beefie, farmers can simply take a photo of the cattle in question with their phone, without having to disturb them from their grazing. Within 20 seconds they’ll have an accurate reading of the animal’s weight.

When it comes to converting that trust into higher volumes, Bodnár admitted that, in the Agritech industry, it’s difficult to grow by word of mouth. He explained that, even if a farmer is happy with your product, they’re unlikely to spread the word to other farmers in the area as they’re usually not as extroverted as your typical influencer.

The Agroninja team also tried connecting with national bodies like agricultural chambers, breeding associations, and agricultural ministries, but this didn’t have as big an impact as expected.

Instead, the company’s (quite unexpected) breakthrough came from a small article in a Dutch agricultural magazine. Somewhere along the way it was picked up by Brazilian farmers, translated into Portuguese, and as Bodnár described, Brazilians soon ‘stormed’ their website. Now a lot of their customers and newsletter subscribers are based in Brazil. The jump from their much smaller Hungarian customer base to Brazil opened up a huge market for growth.

You may be surprised to find there are a plethora of trade magazines and media for the agricultural industry, even drilling down to niche topics like cattle herding or poultry. A placement in one of these publications could just give you the reach and credibility you need.

Convincing customers to take the first bite

If you thought convincing farmers to adopt new technology was hard, imagine trying to convince the wider public to add a pinch of grasshoppers to their daily diet.

Hargol FoodTech grows grasshoppers for human consumption with their main focus being in two sectors:

As CEO Dror Tamir explained:

Even for a completely different and unconventional niche like grasshopper farming, Tamir shared that the same tried and tested business rules still apply.

Like in any other sales process you need to understand the needs and pain of your customer. We did a lot of research into the pains of the meat industry, the fitness industry, and the benefits grasshoppers can provide.

The first thing we learned was that it’s important to keep the message focused and simple. Customers’ attention nowadays is very short. The second was to prioritize the benefits and focus on one or two that matter most.

The education process is long for this kind of product, so third was full collaboration with media and opinion leaders on social media to achieve maximum and long term exposure.

For those thinking about starting a business as a non-specialist, whether in Agritech or any other field, Tamir left us with the following tips:

Finally, the most important piece of advice all three entrepreneurs shared was to listen to your customers. They’re the real experts, and if you gain their trust by showing you really want to build a product that works for them, you’ll get the key insights you need to build a successful business.

Why companies must be critical of workplace surveillance practices

With so many more people working from home during the pandemic, employers have stepped up the extent to which they are monitoring them online . Not so many years ago, employees were having to adjust to having their work emails monitored; but that seems almost quaint compared to the digital surveillance we are seeing today.

Employers can use specialist software to track workers’ keystrokes, mouse movements, and the websites they visit. They can take screenshots of employees to check whether they are at their screens and looking attentive, or even use webcam monitoring software that measures things like eye movements, facial expressions, and body language. All this can be checked against a worker’s output to draw conclusions about their productivity.

Besides specialist software, managers can view statistics from their corporate private network to see who logged in and for what duration, and again cross-reference this to workers’ productivity data. In some organizations, staff who do not open work applications early in the morning could potentially be viewed as late for work or not productive enough.

Home-working has also raised the prospect of more informal staff monitoring. For example, if a worker would normally log in to meetings by turning on their video, but one day they are in a car or a new location, the employer might think they are not committed or focused enough.

This all raises questions about how such surveillance is affecting people’s work practices, privacy, and general wellbeing. Given that home-working looks set to extend beyond lockdown for many people , this is clearly a moment for some serious reflection.

The productivity dimension

Managers justify this kind of surveillance by claiming that it is good for productivity . Some workers even seem to agree with this – provided the monitoring is done by a peer and not a manager.

Many have signed up to an online service called Focusmate , for example, which matches anonymous strangers on “work dates” where they briefly say what they will be doing during the appointment and then they can rate one another’s approach to work at the end. The service aims to make workers more productive and to feel less lonely at work.

That said, home-working during the first UK lockdown in spring 2020 did not have a major effect on productivity. Workplace surveillance may even have held it back, given that it appears to have increased at the same time. Certainly, there is evidence that such techniques can make people feel vulnerable, afraid, and less creative. It can also reduce their job satisfaction and lower their morale .

Also bear in mind that this surveillance is taking place in someone’s home, which may make them feel particularly vulnerable. Some people have struggled with their mental health while working at home, and many have had to fit in other responsibilities such as caring for children and home-schooling.

Next steps

In view of all this, companies need to adopt an “ ethics of care ” approach to their workers, meaning they make a commitment to take care of them. They need to investigate their surveillance practices and analyze how exactly line managers use them to check up on workers.

While carrying out such an investigation, companies should recognize that some employees might be finding workplace surveillance more difficult than others. This will depend on to what extent they think it invades their privacy, and how they weigh the risks and benefits of sharing their data.

This is likely to be affected by things like their cultural background, gender, and the context in question. Those already struggling with home-working, perhaps because they have to care for children at the same time, are particularly likely to feel that this surveillance is making their lives even harder. Workers can therefore try and evade surveillance techniques – for example, by keeping an automatic mouse-moving application open to make sure they appear online all the time.

Companies should be ensuring from these investigations that employees are aware of what data is collected about them and how it’s used. They should hold open discussions with workers and unions on how these monitoring practices affect workers, and allow workers to have their say without threatening disciplinary action. If workers feel that their employers care about them as individuals, they will hopefully feel empowered and trusting towards them, and less likely to find workarounds or to react negatively.

Equally, it is important for regulators like the UK Information Commissioner to reflect on how surveillance in the workplace is changing. The UK code in this area broadly requires that any monitoring be fair to workers and that any adverse impacts – for example, on workers’ privacy, damage to trust, or demeaning workers – be mitigated. The rules may now need to be updated to reflect some of the latest forms of surveillance, and there is a role for researchers in looking into this as well.

Researchers have tended to look at workplace surveillance from the perspective of productivity where workers are viewed as resources, but we need to start thinking in terms of data justice . This has been described as “fairness in the way people are made visible, represented and treated as a result of their production of digital data”.

In a world where computers and smartphones are all around us, we need to negotiate our private spaces and our control over the data we produce online. Just like this has implications in our private lives for our relationship with Facebook or Google, the increases in workplace surveillance make it just as important at work.

This article by Evronia Azer , Assistant Professor at the Centre for Business in Society, Coventry University is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

‘Business benevolence’ is the key to surviving an economic crisis

The COVID-19 crisis is reshaping the world around us in profound and unpredictable ways, not least of which has been the widespread disruption of global supply chains. The fragility of some supply chains is so stark that some economists are signaling the end of globalism as we know it , causing business and government leaders to fundamentally rethink how much they rely on partners in other parts of the world.

But what’s really at stake? And how can businesses prepare for the next pandemic — or for that matter, any international crisis?

What’s at stake varies, since every company’s exposure to international trade is unique. Until this year, it seemed inevitable that international trade and interdependence would only increase in the coming years — and it still may — but regardless of how the COVID crisis resolves, we can reasonably argue that global supply chains will see dramatic changes.

But supply chains cannot be remade overnight. Most American companies with overseas partners cannot immediately shift their entire supply chain to the United States even if they wanted to.

At Cisco, we managed to revisit and revise our supply chain strategies during and after various crises: the tech bubble popping; SARS and Swine Flu; the 2008 financial crisis; devastating Asian tsunamis; and more.

What we learned is that companies can create better failsafes, optimize supply chain processes, and foster an environment of collaborative fulfillment and mutual benefit rather than cutthroat competition.

It starts and ends with business benevolence . Supply chain partnerships should be about fostering a relationship rooted in trust and mutually-assured success. Simply put: partners should not be willing to screw each other if things inadvertently go sideways.

The last thing any organization wants in the midst of a crisis, large or small, is some kind of winner-take-all mutually destructive standoff. And there are ways to avoid this:

Build an ecosystem where all partners support and trust each other

While it’s obvious to avoid single points of failure — for example, single-sourcing a mission-critical component from only one supplier — partners across the ecosystem should feel that they can rely upon and supplement each other in time of crisis.

Partners should not feel pushed beyond their limits but rather supported, even if that means that other partners may sustain marginal costs as well.

Distributing costs (e.g. lines of credit or other kinds of IOUs) across ecosystem partners requires trust and transparency, but it also helps to ensure the long-term survival of all partners.

Put another way: if you have five boats attached by rope and one begins to slowly sink, it behooves every other boat to take a bucket of water to ensure they don’t all sink. In some cases, you may only delay the inevitable, but during a crisis, buying time is critical.

Create real incentives for transparency, fairness, and equity

Transparency involves getting all the important stakeholders in the same room in order to align. Alignment, early and often, which is to say before a crisis, is critical. If you only give half the info, you only get half the insight.

It’s important to have a broad collaborative approach, whether it’s transparency about second-sourcing or openly sharing ERP data across all the supply chain, in order to plan for that which you can’t see or manage on your own.

Part of this is how you structure your relationships going in: transparency, fairness, and equity language should be built into your contracts in order to secure multilateral buy-in — as opposed to just a squishy platitude or afterthought.

Incidentally, this may help you ferret out less scrupulous partners, with whom you may not be able to build a lasting benevolent relationship. It’s also about how embedded you are as a partner; at Cisco, we worked hand-in-hand with our partners to train and educate their employees and vice-versa so that we were deeply committed to each others’ success and knew how our businesses operated.

Memorize this number: 613

Have a plan for your supply chain six months, one year, and three years after a crisis: everything from rates and payment deferment schedules to logistics to raw materials suppliers.

Again, these plans must start from a benevolent paradigm in which mutually-assured operation is viewed as the single most important outcome.

When the crisis is over, you’ll want partners who remember you as being in their corner, which pays in lasting dividends: nurturing these relationships will go far in securing favorable deals in the future, particularly if partners weigh your proven loyalty to your unproven or disloyal competition.

Don’t be like Amazon

My team’s culture was to prioritize: employees, customers, and suppliers, — and ordered by who was in the greatest need. In that order.

We never lost sight of who to take care of because the number one factor as predictor of future business was our ability to ensure our customers’ and partners’ success. We never let customers or partners fail, if we could help it.

Compare that with Amazon, which uses its tremendous scale and profit margin to exploit its own employees, to say nothing of its partners and customers — many of whom are locked into long-term contracts that are favorable for AWS. AWS, for its part, is doing little to help its partners or customers during the COVID crisis, instead forcing them into impossible choices about how they can ensure business continuity in an unprecedented economic downturn.

We all hope that the COVID-19 crisis will be over soon and that things will get “back to normal” — but the reality is that it would be a huge missed opportunity if things went back to exactly the way they were. We have been confronted with a monumental challenge, but not an impossible one.

This wake-up call for businesses and governments around the world should prompt thoughtful questions about not only how to recover from the current crisis, but how best to prepare for the next one. If businesses approach their partner and customer relationships from a position of mutual trust and support, we will all be better equipped to weather future storms.