Organizations that are making massive waves today have an innovative leader at the helm who smashes old boundaries and builds new bridges. Behind EarlyBirds, there is an accomplished leader who has combined thirst for learning with a determination to improve business functionality throughout his career.
Meet Kris Poria, the Co-founder and CEO of EarlyBirds, an open innovation ecosystem that connects organizations – Innovators, Early Adopters, and Subject Matter Experts – to accelerate capacity, speed, and culture to innovate and solve business and technical challenges.
Kris is always focused on innovation. He aims to solve clients’ challenges in a manner that maintains trust-based relationships across the industry to support and foster successful outcomes. He simply gets the job done – no fuss, solid performer, consistent and reliable.
Let’s shed some light on his journey and how he is taking Earlybirds to great heights.
From Drawing board to Execution
Kris was born in a humble farming family in rural India and was exposed to English medium education only at the age of 16. Initially, he struggled to understand anything for the first three months, but he persisted with patience and approached this as an opportunity rather than a problem.
Kris started his first business in IT and Education in the 90’s before he got interested in software programming. Then after selling his business shares, he moved to metro cities in India to work with various software companies. He grabbed further opportunities to work in Europe and the USA before applying for skilled migration to Australia in 2002 to settle permanently with his family. After moving to Australia, he got an immediate opportunity to work in the IT sector, but then his entrepreneurial spirit kept knocking to start his business.
Kris started a business in Education Consulting, followed by helping LJHooker to expand its international presence. During this time, he identified an opportunity to market Australia further on a global scale and started “Invest in Australia” magazine along with pursuing MBA at Macquarie Graduate School of Management.
When print media started declining, Kris made a move to come back to the IT industry and started helping various IT organizations, including Intech, Fujitsu, Oracle, Unisys, and others, to find strategic business development opportunities where he had many successes. While working at Unisys, Kris identified a gap in the market to connect disruptive innovative companies with large organizations, and EarlyBirds idea was born.
Kris was joined by Jeff Penrose, his colleague at Oracle as a cofounder at EarlyBirds. After launching the platform in Sept 2019, EarlyBirds has become an Actionable Innovation Ecosystem with over 4M Innovators (startups, scaleups, and mature organizations), 100+ Subject Matter Experts in Australia, and over 600 organizations registered to use the platform.
In 2021, the number of tier one, public and private sector organizations became EarlyBirds customers to solve their wicked problems as well as scale their capacity and speed to innovate. EarlyBirds and Kris have been recognized global leaders by various media companies during 2021.
Standing Tall to its Mission
EarlyBirds was set up with a mission to engage society in actionable innovation.
For Early Adopter organizations – EarlyBirds helps them to become a self-learning organization through: continuous improvement across all business functions; resolving business and technical challenges quickly; and exploring disruptive business models, solutions, and innovations.
For Innovator Organizations – EarlyBirds helps them to engage with Early Adopter customers and partners to adopt their solutions and products, creating a revenue pipeline.
For Subject Matter Experts –EarlyBirds provides them with a flexible contract; it is a business framework, assisted programs, training, and platform to solve challenges and accelerate innovation for a wide range of customers.
Besides, EarlyBirds is a technology-based company that uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to provide insights into global actionable innovation capabilities. Technology also helps its customers to find appropriate innovators based on their business and technical challenges.
Innovation as a Service
EarlyBirds has built an Open Actionable Innovation Ecosystem where customers can focus on the challenges or opportunities that are important for them. The company identifies appropriate disruptive innovators, including startups, scaleups, or mature, that are already working on solving customers’ current challenges or opportunities in any part of the world.
In this Open Innovation Ecosystem, Subject Matter Experts helps both Innovators and Early Adopter organizations with EarlyBirds programs to either solve a specific challenge or ongoing innovation as a service.
Aspires to Build Agile Strategy
We asked Kris what change he would like to bring to his respective domain, to which he answered, “I would like to bring actionable innovation to build an agile strategy of the organization that can be evaluated and tested on a regular basis using open innovation ecosystem. Actionable innovation brings an outcome-based approach to building organization capability and capacity to innovate.”
Future Ahead
Kris is always looking forward to adding value to society and business. His vision is aligned with EarlyBirds to engage society in actionable innovation. EarlyBirds identifies over four million global innovators in various industries to solve specific business and technical challenges.
Words of Wisdom
In his advice to emerging leaders, Kris says, “Look for solving problems for your customers where you would feel it worth solving. Take risks, have your own views and vision as sometimes customers might not know what exactly they are looking for.”