Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
Innovation and trade are keys to growth and competitiveness for small and medium enterprises around the world. Yet many entrepreneurs are unfamiliar with the opportunities for innovation across borders and the good practices that mitigate the challenges of successful international business development.
Note: Bendis to Speak at Event - Ed.
A straightforward guide to leveraging your company's intellectual capital by creating a knowledge management culture
The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management offers managers the tools they need to create an organizational culture that improves knowledge sharing, reuse, learning, collaboration, and innovation to ensure mesurable growth. Written by internationally recognized knowledge management pioneers, it addresses all those topics in knowledge management that a manager needs to ensure organizational success.
Taking an intellectual journey into knowledge management, beginning with an understanding of the concept of intellectual capital and how to establish an appropriate culture, this book looks at the human aspects of managing knowledge workers, promoting interactions for knowledge creation and sharing.
Large and small corporations, both in high-tech and traditional industries, now owe most of their value to investments in knowledge. These investments, creating value from the intangible assets of intellectual capital, have a better return on investment (ROI) than physical assets. The Complete Guide to Knowledge Management reveals how your company can achieve a measurable growth in its value by using knowledge management (KM) to create an organizational culture that cultivates knowledge sharing, reuse, learning, collaboration, and innovation.
Many foreign-born techies in the U.S. and abroad are pinning their entrepreneurial hopes on the passage of a bill, sponsored by Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), to create a startup visa. Tech-industry notables such as Paul Graham, Eric Ries, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, and David McClure have lobbied for this. I, too, lent this my support. In fact, I have been advocating such a visa since 2007—when my team’s research revealed that 52% of Silicon Valley’s startups from 1995 to 2005 were founded by immigrants. We also learned that a million skilled workers and their families were stuck in “immigration limbo” and that many were beginning to return home—causing America’s first brain drain.
Most VCs consider it a very bad idea to invest in companies doing contract research and development for the government. Government R&D is a specialized business model that’s made even more complicated by the nuances of government accounting and contracting practices. Companies that start out with government contracts have a tough time generating new business and winning proposals. And even if they do win new business, they may find that the government claims the rights to all of the intellectual property they developed while under contract.
Fair or unfair, German Web entrepreneurs get a bad rap for being copy cats. If Stefan Gulas is any representation, the same can’t be said for German entrepreneurs making…what I guess you would call futuristic motorized bicycles?
Gulas has spent the last six years building something called the eROCKIT that defies a vehicle category. Unlike a motorcycle, it’s active– you have to pedal to make it go. But unlike a motorized bicycle it goes incredibly fast. So fast it can out accelerate a car. And it’s completely electric, borrowing some technology and looks from your home exercise bike.
The good news is that venture investing grew in 2010 for the first time since 2007, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Assn. (NVCA). Venture capitalists invested nearly $21.8 billion in 3,277 deals last year, up from $18.3 billion in 2009.
The bad news: although more venture money is going out, less investor money is coming in, points out Michael Greeley, founder and general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners, a Boston-based venture-capital firm. Venture-capital funds raised only $12.3 billion in 2010, down from $16.3 billion in 2009, according to the NVCA and Thomson Reuters. That was the fourth consecutive annual decline and a far cry from 2006, when VC funds raised about $31.9 billion. All told, there were 157 VC funds in 2010, says the NVCA and Thomson Reuters, compared with 237 funds in 2007.
As if we needed another sign that Valentine’s Day is getting awfully expensive, the coupon Web sites have now gotten into the game.
LivingSocial offered deeply discounted candy to New York City residents on Tuesday. Two days later, Groupon offered $40 worth of flowers from FTD for $20.
These group buying sites may be trying to strike decent bargains for users. But now that so many people subscribe to their e-mails, gift givers have to be playing a weird psychic game with themselves. Will he know I used a Groupon? Will she think less of me for doing so? Cut-rate romance feels somehow wrong, so plenty of people simply pay up. It’s a special day, after all.
HAPPY VALENTINES DAY TO ALL IN THE BENDIS EXTENDED FAMILY.......RICH BENDIS
(ThyBlackMan.com) We are all quite aware of President Obama’s call for greater U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship as demonstrated in his recent State Of The Union Address. And it was certainly not lost on the hip hop generation that President Obama’s “we do big things”, when referring to American ingenuity, was a direct sample from the everyday language used by urban millennials.
But while the President’s use of that term may be familiar, the steps to actually becoming one of these business innovators that Obama would so much like to see, may not be quite so accessible. In fact, I get the feeling that much of Black GenY demographic is still shaking their heads in terms of figuring out just how the President expects today’s young people of color to take the entrepreneurial bull by the horns, particularly when it comes to an area where there is so much potential opportunity: the digital industry.
The Austin Technology Incubator, a University of Texas effort to spawn clean tech companies, is spreading its mission.
Strategies hatched at the incubator to match burgeoning companies with venture capital money will be replicated in San Antonio and El Paso, ATI Director Isaac Barchas said.
"We want to work together to start new clean energy companies in other parts of the state," he said.
Calling on a pot of federal money, the State Energy Conservation Office will put $500,000 toward organizing the two new incubators.
Mark Legenstein had spent many years installing carpets. He also spent as many years stuck on his knees while handling each project. Mark had enough. According to Fox WPMT, he created a special pair of skates that straps to your knees. For carpet installers, it means scooting across the floor with ease.
Knee Blades makes the job easier for anyone that works on all fours.
Creatives and inventors don’t need a record label, a movie studio or a wealthy uncle any longer - now, community websites let fans be benefactors. But how do these platforms stack up? We spoke with each of the main crowdfunding sites. Here’s what they did - and didn’t - tell us…
Dave McClure, founder of seed and incubator fund 500 Startups, which provides betwen $10,000 to $250,000 in seed capital, is a pretty well-known angel investor. Dave has invested in more than 100 startups, such as Mint (acquired by Intuit), Crowdflower, Sendgrid, Simply Hired, SlideShare and Twilio, to name a few.
As you can imagine, Dave's spent enough time with entrepreneurs to know what kind of advice they need.
Here's his three pieces of advice:
Be revenue focused- transation, and not we’ll-figure-it-out-later model.
Be user focused (solving problems that exist)
Be metrics focused and focus on improving conversion metrics.
We had a chance to talk to angel investor Dave McClure earlier this week, prior to the announcement of 500 Startups' new accelerator program.
We met in the company's 12th-floor offices high over downtown Mountain View, with a view of San Francisco 20 miles to the north. It seems like an amazing location for an individual entrepreneur or small team to spend a few months getting a product ready for a big investor to take a look. It's certainly a lot more comfortable than Susan Wojcicki's garage.
Whether you are an old hat at getting up in front of an audience, or stone cold terrified of speaking into a mic, one thing is certain: We all have at least one thing that sends chills of fear down our collective spinal cords.
Regardless of where your fear resides, the most important step to overcoming said fear is to NAME IT and get it out into the sunlight.
Let’s be serious - EVERYBODY is wondering if there is another shoe to drop in the Great Internet Gold Rush of 2011. $6 billion for Groupon? Nah, too low. Something between $8-$10 billion for Twitter? Sure, why not? Eight-figure pre-money valuations for numerous West Coast consumer web start-ups? Hey, it’s just supply and demand, and besides which, they DID go through YCombinator. $50 billion+ for Facebook? How about $70 billion in a handful of trades on SecondMarket. Even $315 million for HuffPo. Is AOL nuts? What’s up?
There is a strong desire to characterize the market in a homogenous way, e.g., “We’re in a bubble” (Fred Wilson) or “Valuations are reasonable” (Chris Dixon). Bottom line, this doesn’t begin to explain the variations observed in nature. There is a world of difference between Quora and Facebook, YCombinator start-ups and Groupon, every “social shopping” start-up and Twitter. One needs to look beyond the headlines and ask “What is REALLY going on here?”
Check out the picture on the right.
You are looking at the interior of a 2010 Lexus SC 430.
You are also looking at the last production car to come with a cassette tape deck.
Starting with the 2011 model year "no manufacturer selling cars in the United States offers a tape player either as standard equipment or as an option on a new vehicle," reports to the New York Times.
Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak just resigned after weeks of dramatic protests in Cairo and across Egypt.
As the biggest country in the Arab world, Egypt is seen as a trend leader for the broader Middle East.
So the question on everyone's mind is: who's next?
The Egyptian revolution is a challenge to state led authoritarian capitalism, but it is also a response to rising food costs and soaring unemployment. There is also the social media factor, which has allowed protesters to circumvent traditional state run media sources and organize more efficiently.
My friend Eric Patrick Marr, a passionate social entrepreneur, has been working to promote entrepreneurship in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky. At his invitation, I went this week to the state's two largest cities, Lexington and Louisville, to talk with local entrepreneurs and community leaders about what it takes to spur more innovation and entrepreneurship in a region.
It's a goal that nearly every locale seems to have these days, but here there's a particular sense of urgency given the recent election of new mayors in both towns. Lexington Mayor Jim Gray and Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer are both first-time office holders coming to public service directly from successful private sector business careers. Both new mayors ran and won on economic development platforms. Like me, they believe it's vital to think about the challenge of fostering entrepreneurship and innovation at the level of the city — and that their cities have the potential to lead the way by becoming innovation hotspots.
Most US universities maintain three core businesses that earn most of their revenue: selling diplomas, competing for federal and industry research sponsorships, and trying to crack open the checkbooks of wealthy alumni. Since the 1980s, universities have ventured into a new line of business: patenting inventions from university research labs and brokering these patents by licensing rights to businesses and startups. In the terminology of Henry Chesbrough, in the open innovation ecosystem, universities have branched beyond their traditional role of innovation explorers (they generate knowledge) to become innovation merchants (they license their knowledge to other organizations).
I spoke with Jay Verkler, the CEO of FamilySearch International, in the Oak Room of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. We spoke about the future of technology in the practice of genealogy, an activity with a distinctly old-school reputation.
Verkler is not your average genealogist (whatever that is). His background is not spending sleepless nights knee-deep in 18th century census records. He's a graduate of MIT and spent most of his career in Silicon Valley, at companies including Oracle, Sales.com and push technology company inCommon, which he founded.
