At the recent South African Innovation Summit, Christine Strutt spoke about the importance of startups having an international mindset from day one, and why some of them succeed.

In her talk, Start-up to Grown-up: Local Innovations with a Global Mindset, Strutt used case studies of seven outstanding startups from the Western Cape, South Africa, which have all managed to scale internationally.

The need to highlight these specific companies’ stories stemmed from her desire to find the secret recipe that dictates which companies succeed and which ones burn out.

Take the success of the BraaiCube, for example. It’s a rather basic idea that managed to sell more than 10,000 units within its first few months and make a total revenue of R1-million in 2012. On the other hand, US tech giant HP released its TouchPad tablet in 2011 and sold less than 20,000 globally, with the product line shut down shortly afterward.

The examples Strutt used include Paperight, Entersekt, OculusID, TradeRoot, OWS (Organic Water Solutions), Nomanini, and SAT (Straight Access Tech). Most, if not all, of these share a couple of key characteristics which have been responsible for their impressive progress over the years. Read the full article

Source: Ventureburn