Lateral Sparks Quiz: 5 Startup Dilemmas and Solutions

Lateral Sparks: Test Your Startup Instincts

Lateral Sparks is a weekly quiz that challenges your domain knowledge, business acumen, and lateral thinking. In this 208th edition, you face five real dilemmas entrepreneurs tackled on their startup journeys. Read each scenario, think through what you would do, then compare your answers with the founder-tested solutions below.

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The Five Dilemmas

1. Q1: Corporate commutes

   Large companies juggle multiple fleet vendors, making employee commute management fragmented and hard to scale. Moving toward electric vehicles for sustainability introduces additional operational and integration challenges. What’s an effective tech solution?

2. Q2: Drone power

   Battery-powered drones offer limited flight hours and frequent replacements, increasing cost and downtime for agritech operations. What’s a better power solution to reduce operating expense and extend lifecycle?

3. Q3: Candid conversations

   Employees in large organisations often fear speaking up due to potential retaliation, stifling honest feedback and preventing improvement. How can leadership create a safe, effective channel for candid conversations?

4. Q4: Agriculture and food

   Beyond digital apps, vast opportunities exist in agriculture—sustainable farming, fast soil diagnostics, and affordable plant-based foods tailored for local diets. Where should innovators focus and how can they gain traction?

5. Q5: Tech education

   Effective tech education needs hands-on experience, community support, and active engagement beyond passive exhibition visits. What model scales practical tech creativity, especially for girls and underserved learners?

Answers: What the Entrepreneurs Actually Did

Below are five real-world solutions created by founders who faced these exact problems. Consider how your own answer compares and which ideas you might adapt.

A1: Corporate commutes — centralized, tech-driven fleet orchestration

Solution approach: Build a B2B2C employee-transport platform that centralises vendor management, optimises routing and capacity in real time, and supports EV adoption.
Example outcome: The startup scaled to serve over 300 companies across 25 cities, operating more than 350,000 rides a day. By deploying Operations Command Centres and integrating EVs, the platform improved reliability, safety, and sustainability while simplifying vendor coordination for large employers.
Why it works: Centralised orchestration reduces fragmentation, enables predictive vehicle dispatch, and creates a smoother transition path to electric mobility with coordinated charging and fleet analytics.

A2: Drone power — switch to hydrogen fuel cells for longer life

Solution approach: Replace lithium batteries with lightweight hydrogen fuel cells that allow drones to carry heavier payloads and operate far longer between replacements.
Example outcome: Hydrogen-powered drones were developed in variants weighing roughly 10–16 kg. Hydrogen fuel cells offer lifecycles around 22,000 hours versus roughly 300 hours for lithium batteries, dramatically lowering replacement costs and operational downtime for agritech use.
Why it works: Longer lifecycle, higher payload capacity, and lower total cost of ownership make hydrogen a compelling choice where continuous field operations and heavy spray or seeding payloads are required.

A3: Candid conversations — anonymous, controlled feedback platforms

Solution approach: Create an anonymous feedback and communication tool that lets employees share insights and concerns safely, choose who to share with, and comment without revealing identity.
Example outcome: The platform enabled safe expression across large organisations by allowing selective anonymity, private sharing, and moderated anonymous comments—fostering transparency and trust without exposing contributors to risk.
Why it works: Structured anonymity and recipient controls reduce fear of retaliation, increase psychological safety, and surface issues leadership might otherwise miss.

A4: Agriculture and food — rapid diagnostics and localised nutritious products

Solution approach: Combine IoT and AI for portable, on-site soil health devices and develop affordable, culturally relevant plant-protein and millet-based food products.
Example outcome: Portable devices now deliver soil-health reports in minutes rather than weeks, enabling timely agronomic decisions. Startups also created affordable plant proteins adapted to local tastes and healthier millet-based staples like noodles and pasta, supported by early-stage funding and mentorship programs.
Why it works: Fast diagnostics empower precision agriculture; affordable, regionally tailored food products address nutrition gaps and consumer preference simultaneously.

A5: Tech education — open, peer-led community hubs

Solution approach: Run open, peer-led, community-based tech centres that prioritise hands-on projects, inclusivity, and mentorship—especially focused initiatives to engage girls and underrepresented groups.
Example outcome: Community hubs expanded across multiple centres, engaging over 16,900 learners across schools, colleges, and early-career programs. They ran women-focused hackathons and initiatives to amplify participation and practical learning.
Why it works: Peer-led, project-based learning scales motivation and skill acquisition. Community environments sustain curiosity and provide low-cost, high-impact pathways into tech careers.

Reflection: Would You Do Things Differently?

Each solution blends technology with human-centred design: operational platforms for logistics, alternative energy for robotics, anonymous systems for culture change, fast diagnostics for agriculture, and community-led education to build future talent. Think about constraints, costs, and local context—then adapt the core idea to suit your market.

Further Reading and Resources

Explore book summaries and creative takeaways on entrepreneurship, or dive into photo essays that celebrate creativity across arts and technology. For hands-on learners, seek local hackathons and community maker spaces to try these ideas in practice.

Edited by Kanishk Singh