Inside the trend of tech 'spinouts' solving real-world problems | Computer Weekly

"Silicon Valley has created the impression of the archetypal technology company as founded by smart, young guns in a garage who tinker around to find a product that can make them, and their investors, a fortune. When things fail to work out, it is often down to the fact their creation failed to address a real-world problem. The opposite of such a scenario is when a business finds itself with a problem and, failing to identify an offering in the marketplace, develops one itself."

"The best products have then been "spun out" of the original operator businesses to then sell their capabilities to others in the sector who are encountering the same issues. Joel Robinson, founder of Openr, says that before it was a tech company, the firm started as a solution to a problem faced by the Azzurri Group, a leading hospitality operator with Zizzi, Ask Italian and Coco di Mama among its brands."

""We were experiencing the pain," he says. "In 2017/18, [hospitality] was a simple business involving configuring tills in restaurants and 'off you go'. But post-pandemic, it was about order at the table, click and collect, website ordering and catering platforms. Managing identical data across these platforms was proving inefficient.""

"Having failed to find a market offering that could truly solve its unique needs of handling this data, Robinson decided to build one. "If we felt we needed something then we'd build it ourselves," he says. "We also spoke to peers to see if it was a sector-wide problem.""

Silicon Valley startup mythology contrasts with operator-led innovation that originates from solving internal operational problems. Hospitality and retail experienced rapid technological expansion post-pandemic, producing fragmented data flows, manual processes and inflexible systems across tills, table-ordering, click-and-collect, websites and catering platforms. Azzurri Group encountered inefficient identical-data management across multiple platforms and could not find a market solution. The operator developed its own platform to handle those needs and then spun the solution out as Openr to offer data-management capabilities to other hospitality operators. Peer conversations indicated the problem was sector-wide, validating broader demand.

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