Manuel Tânger: "Thinking like a start-up is the most important thing for a company's success"

"We should all think like start-ups, in times of exponential growth. Things are changing fast, faster than we are used to or that our intuition can foresee, and start-ups have one characteristic: they know they don't know, they don't succeed beforehand. They experiment a lot, and experience is really the key to the future these days. You should try new techniques, see if they work, without being fixed to any models that have succeeded in the past," explains SingularityU's Disruption, Innovation and Entrepreneurship expert.

He also stresses that broadening horizons can be a good strategy to profit and prosper in the market. When you have a business, you must answer two questions: why this industry? Why do I stay in it?

"Consider tangible industries, close to your comfort zone, close to the technology area you operate in. See if your solution can help. You need to find gaps in behaviour, understanding, information and usability. All are opportunities for new products and services. There are a number of things that are fine, but could be much better. So, here, there is a gap. Go after it! There has never been more opportunity to build new things, it's easier to connect people, with technology and environment, to create new solutions, and cheaper too. So experiment, try and learn!".

Did you know our speaker? Manuel Tangier is a specialist in Disruption, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Singularity University Portugal. He has a Masters in Physics from Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa, where he concluded with a final thesis supervised by the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics, Gerard t'Hooft, at Utrecht University.

He has lived in many different countries during his life: Brazil, China, India, Holland, Italy, Canada, Belgium and, of course, Portugal. In 2009, Manuel co-founded Beta-i, an organisation that actively promotes entrepreneurship and innovation worldwide.

He has helped several global companies, such as Airbus, Nestlé, Nokia, Cisco, Novartis, EDP, Ageas, Deloitte, and many others, to define and design innovation strategies.