Identity and startups: an introduction

Why is understanding identity important for startups?

What strategic relevance does identity have for technology startups? The answer, in a nutshell, is that understanding and catering for people's experience of identity—individuals' unique experience of who or what they, other people, things and information are—seems to be key to understanding how to create and monetise value in our increasingly fluid and personalisable society.

People are coming to expect to be able to customise and integrate more and more areas of their life in their own, individually unique way. To be competitive, startups must work out how to enable that customisation and integration in a way that is radically more effective than their competition. And more often than not, innovations in technology and its applications provide that opportunity.

The problem—a complex topic covered in an inconsistent and piecemeal way

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Just work out how your target users experience identity and build your service accordingly.

However, there's a catch: identity, even in its practical, applied (as opposed to abstractly philosophical) sense, turns out to be a hugely complex and multi-faceted subject, spanning psychology, economics, branding, business theory, law, politics, anthropology and many other fields. You simply cannot reduce identity to any one of these perspectives if you hope to understand it clearly, because identity is something that informs our whole life! Yet while there already exists a good deal of research on and discussion of each niche area of identity studies—much of it of great merit in its own terms—there has been little work done on developing cross-sector approaches to understanding identity.

Where is the poor entrepreneur to start?

The solution—an integrated conceptual framework for startups and identity

What seems to be needed is a clear, comprehensive and integrated conceptual framework within which startups can plan their identity strategy. Such a framework would enable startups to identify opportunities, threats and unknowns that identity represents for their business across commercial, technological, legal and social spheres—in a straightforward and consistent way.

In a forthcoming series of posts over the coming weeks and months, myself and a number of co-authors, each a thought leader in their specialist field, will develop just such an overarching conceptual framework for startups and identity.

We will begin by looking at the opportunities, threats and unknown factors around identity that digital networks—with a special focus on the web—raise for startups. Subsequent posts will go on to explore mobile, governmental, legal, branding, retail, banking, mainstream media and psychosocial aspects of the problem space. Links to each post will appear below as they are published.

I'm looking forward to learning a lot in the process of co-authoring these posts—I hope you will accompany me and my collaborators on the journey, and help us along the way with your comments and criticisms!