Sharon Zivkovic split product development from business development for autistic founders

Dr Sharon Zivkovic began the Sydney panel on autistic entrepreneurship by placing the difficulty in the method. Business development, she said, usually means a business planning or business model canvas approach, and that approach rests on forecasting. In her words to the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in June 2024, it is “based on prediction. We like control.” A founder asked to predict is looking at something that does not yet exist, and she gave the autistic response to that request in a few words. It does not make sense, it is not real, the founder cannot touch it and cannot control it. In her telling, the mismatch starts the moment an autistic founder is handed the standard tools.

Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had asked her to explain the words in the session’s title, autistic cognition in particular. She described it as a recognition that autistic thinking differs from what is classed as neurotypical, and said the difference matters a great deal in business development. Her second point concerned the direction thinking travels. She said that “the research says that most autistic people are bottom-up thinkers”, who begin with the data sets they have built in their monotropic interest areas. Business development, as she described it, runs the other way. The frame is set first and the founder fills in the boxes. She did not name the research she was drawing on, and her summary of it is reported here as hers.