Venture capital supply in Britain should shrink to prove itself says Atlas Ventures partner

THE supply of venture capital in Britain should shrink so that fund managers become more picky about which companies to back and more investors start to see positive returns, one prominent player in the industry has said.

Fred Destin, a partner with Atlas Ventures, which announced last week that it was relocating its investment team to the US, said that there were "too many average funds in Europe".

This meant that institutional investors like pension and insurance funds had rightly rationalised the number that they were prepared to back.

Stanford Technology Ventures Program's Executive Director Tina Seelig shares rich insights in creative thinking and the entrepreneurial mindset. Her talk, based on her 2009 book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20, cites numerous classroom successes of applied problem-solving and the lessons of failure.

Original Article: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2266

Over the past year, I have been scouring the Internet for resources to help me grow my businesses. It is quite refreshing to discover and learn from others and hear stories from fresh perspectives, rather theory out of a book. Of course there are many ways to build a businesses and while many are figuring it out, the way we communicate is evolving right in front of our eyes. With the ammunition of a blog and a Flip cam, we are seeing many young entrepreneurs becoming prominent voices and in some cases niche leaders while building profitable businesses. In months and years not decades.

The team at Unstrapp’d has learned a great deal from our peers and we wanted to award and recognize our industry leaders. We have put together a list of blogs that have a message that can help a young entrepreneur grow their business and are written from the perspectives of young entrepreneurs. When you take a look at some of these blogs, you may find yourself scratching your head on how they make it look so easy and a few may just downright piss you off! However, after taking an open look into these bloggers experiences, you will find that much of their road is just like yours and their level of success is fully obtainable.

For some reason, I like wordsmithing and trying to make phrases smaller (while still retaining some meaning). Not long ago, when I was up much too late, I tried to come up with some of my best startup advice and see if I could reduce it down to exactly three words.3

One thing led to another, and I became obsessed with it. So obsessed, in fact, that I had put together 47 before I was able to make myself stop. While it’s likely not the most brilliant startup advice you’ve ever read – it has a decent chance of being the shortest.

Startup Triplets: Startup Advice In Exactly Three Words

The Ottawa-based Canadian Advanced Tech  nology Alliance (CATA Alliance) is using social networks to launch a discussion about the country’s innovation gap and amass feedback from the general public as to how to address it.

Taking a broad holistic approach to Canada’s state of innovation will ensure the discussion reaches beyond CATA and the IT community, said John Reid, president and CEO of the CATA Alliance. That will ensure, said Reid, that the issue is “embraced as a vision and a leadership theme that would be debated and discussed across the nation.”

In addition to reaching out to elected officials and businesses, CATA Alliance is taking advantage of the popularity and viral nature of social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook upon which to maintain the discussion.

Engaging the broad public will also mean that a multitude of facets regarding innovation will get covered in the dialogue, said Reid.

Most people don’t realize this, but Northern California actually has two giant technology centers: Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Silicon Valley is the world’s entrepreneurship capital, and Sacramento is California’s State capital. They are less than 100 miles away from each other. But technologically, they’re light-years apart. While Silicon Valley’s workers conceive the next revolution in technology, Sacramento’s workers toil away at maintaining computer systems that were built in the tech equivalent of the Mesozoic era. Both depend on each other: Sacramento workers maintain the State’s infrastructure and public services, and the Valley’s workers generate the revenue to pay Sacramento salaries. The irony is that while the valley entrepreneurs desperately look for problems to solve, Sacramento has problems aplenty and no saviors in sight.

Witness the problems that the state experienced last November when it couldn’t issue checks to unemployed workers whose benefits had run out before Congress authorized a payment extension. Workers had to wait for up to two months to receive their checks, because the Employment Development Department couldn’t make timely changes to its computer systems. Like most of the State’s systems, these were built in the ’70s and ’80s in now antiquated computer languages like COBOL, Adabas Natural, Assembler, and PL/1. They run under operating systems like CICS and IMS.

Entrepreneurship and salesmanship have one thing in common. They both need to convince someone that a new product or service is needed. The entrepreneur does it by bringing his ideas to reality and the salesman sells it.

What does it take to be a successful entrepreneur? While the world has advanced rapidly from what it was a mere hundred years ago, there is yet room for improvements and the entrepreneur is as much demand as he ever was. It's rare to find the man or woman that is willing to take a chance, sometimes to risk life and stake everything they have to bring a unique idea to life.

The agriculture and agri-food sectors are closer to developing new business opportunities with a $7-million investment in the Atlantic Centre for Agricultural Innovation.

The province is contributing $500,000 for the first two phases and $4.5 million for the third phase of the project in Bible Hill's AgriTECH Park. The government of Canada, through the Atlantic Canada Opportunity Agency, is contributing $2 million toward the first two phases of the new 20,000-square-foot facility.

The funding was announced today, Jan. 24, by Agriculture Minister John MacDonell and National Defence Minister Peter MacKay, on behalf of ACOA Minister Keith Ashfield.

The British TV show Dragons' Den and its U.S. counterpart Shark Tank can be viewed as a less-than-real representation of the entrepreneurial experience.

On the shows, early-stage entrepreneurs have five minutes to pitch their idea to a panel of five angel investors. Each panel-member then asks questions about the details of the business plan before individually deciding whether or not they will provide funding, in exchange for a percentage of the individual's company.

This might sound like "fundraising lite." But, in an article for BusinessWeek, Professor Scott Shane of Case Western Reserve University argues otherwise.

Taipei, Jan. 25 (CNA) The government has decided to launch an "innovation voucher" program to encourage small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to develop new technologies and products in collaboration with research organizations, an official said Monday.

"If all goes smoothly, the program might be put into practice after the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday at the earliest, " said Lai Shan-kuei, director of the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) Administration under the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA).

The program is patterned upon similar incentive projects adopted in the Netherlands, Singapore and the United States in an effort to help SMEs adapt and upgrade to survive in the ever-more competitive global market, Lai said.

Now I [Diane Helbig] am not a Republican nor a Democrat, and I do not live in Massachusetts. However, it seems that no matter who we are or where we live, those of us in the United States were watching the Senate special election on January 19, 2010. I know I was watching and learning.

For me, there are some stark sales lessons that can be learned from the experience.

1. Don’t take your current clients for granted

This is really Sales 101. Your current clients are your best revenue source. If you aren’t visiting with them your competition is. It is critically important for a salesperson (a.k.a. candidate) to ensure they are visiting with their current clients.

Remember, your current clients want to know that you value their business. They don’t want to feel that you have moved on to greener pastures now that you have captured their business. Martha Coakley thought she was secure with her current clients (a.k.a. Democrats) so she didn’t get in front of them enough.

The needs of the poor are greater than the money available to help them, but that's not enough to discourage Bill Gates in his work as co-chair of the world's largest charitable foundation.

In his second annual letter, issued Monday, Gates says investment in science and technology can leverage those dollars and make more of a difference than charity and government aid alone.

In his 19-page letter, Gates says the foundation currently is backing 30 areas of innovation including online learning, teacher improvement, malaria vaccine development, HIV prevention, and genetically modified seeds.

When Unilever wanted ideas for a new TV advertising campaign to sell its Peperami snack food, it decided to try something unusual. It dropped its ad agency of 15 years and turned instead to a little known internet site called IdeaBounty.com, an online marketplace trading in creative ideas. Companies or individuals post topics and then sit back and wait for surfers to send in their best shots. After the closing date, the client selects the best idea and pays the winner.

The challenge generated over 1000 replies and in November last year, Unilever paid out $15,000 for the two ideas it liked best. The new Peperami adverts are due to appear on British TV later this year.

The Finance for Business North East Fund was unveiled by Rosie Winterton MP, Minister for Regional Economic Development and Co-ordination, to scores of businesses at an event at Ramside Hall Hotel, Durham.

The new fund - formerly called JEREMIE - will underpin the growth of business start-ups, technology-based companies and growing smaller businesses, helping to create jobs and prosperity for the region through targeted loans and equity investments.

Over the next five years, it will support up to 850 small and medium-sized North East companies, with the aim of creating more than 5,000 jobs.

Rosie Winterton MP said: "I am delighted to formally launch the North East ‘super fund’.

The 111th Congress begins with our nation facing challenges on many fronts: a foundering economy; a climate in crisis; a growing need for energy we produce at home; and our scientific leadership slipping. The keys to solving these problems lie in science, technology, and the American spirit of innovation. In the 111th Congress, the Committee on Science and Technology plans to work on issues including energy technology development, climate and weather monitoring, math and science education programs, nanotechnology, the space program, aviation research, and technical standards for industries from energy to health care to telecommunications. The Committee also will work with the new Administration to implement other critical science and technology priorities.

Value innovation can help improve efficiency across the organisation and deliver better results.

In the second decade of the 21st century, it is imperative that governments increase the quality of life for their citizens, and companies drive sustainable, profitable growth to compete effectively in the global economy. They do this through innovation.

Innovation is critically important but is it clear what innovation is? It can be many things: Doing things differently, thinking out of the box, coming up with new ideas and products, taking risks, being creative. The ability of an organisation to innovate is not only a function of processes and tools but also the organisation’s culture and stakeholder behaviour. It is easy to see why innovation is misunderstood.

Massachusetts marked a sobering milestone last month: For the first time since World War II, the state ended a decade with fewer jobs than it had at the beginning.

The decade started with a technology bust and ended with a historic national recession. Job loss was spread over most of the state’s major employment sectors, as the decade’s quickening pace of globalization, competition, and technological change pressured the Massachusetts economy. Manufacturing took the biggest hit, shedding one job in three.

“The job creation engine for Massachusetts is broken,’’ said Michael Goodman, an economic analyst and professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “We have a high tech, innovation economy, but one that is not creating enough jobs.’’

Will your innovation stand up to this 2-minute test?

In the last couple of years I’ve been repeatedly reminded of an essential, yet all too often overlooked, step in the innovation approach. This is my plea for you to blend commercialism with your creativity!

As a brand communication and innovation consultant working globally in the Food & Beverage sector I am privileged to see many innovation approaches. Naturally, there are a huge number of routes to new ideas and many contributing success factors.

But when I’m asked to consult on failed launches, to ‘pick up the pieces’ of a failed new product, I find there is usually 1 question I can ask to get to the root of the problem – and asking that 1 question is the missing step in too many innovation processes:

As we described last week in State Job Creation Strategies Part I: Finding the Money and Investing in Human Capital and Physical Infrastructure, competing globally for jobs starts with policy makers instituting fundamental investments in education, human capital and physical infrastructure that make their state a productive environment for economic innovation.

The next step, as this Dispatch will describe, is helping the private sector leverage opportunities for job creation and technological innovation. Too often, some state leaders treat economic development as merely a bidding war between states to give away the most tax breaks or economic subsidies to big corporate bidders. Not only do most studies show such tax-giveaway approaches to be ineffective -- fundamentals like labor productivity and physical infrastructure are more critical in site selection for most global businesses -- but they end up devoting most state resources to a few large businesses while ignoring investments in start-ups and smaller homegrown firms that are the heart of long-term local prosperity.

“If we are together nothing is impossible. If we are divided all will fail.” While Winston Churchill’s famous words are typically attributed to political and social reform, they also carry great value in business. Partnerships provide great opportunities for entrepreneurs to create larger impact. It is way to share risk, exchange ideas, build capital and pool resources. For instance, if two like-minded entrepreneur’s contribute $500k, it could ladder up to a $1 million goal.

We can learn from all types of partnerships — from Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to lesser known partnerships, such as J.P Morgan, the Vanderbuilts and Edison. Partnerships of entrepreneurs and thinkers have shaped the way we communicate, and inspired innovation. By analyzing the greatest partnerships in history, we give you the top five reasons to form a partnership: