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.
As entrepreneurs at the beginning of our business trajectory, we still often find ourselves all caught up in the fallacy of sunken costs. “But we’ve already worked so hard on that,” or “We’ve already spent so much money on that,” we say to ourselves as a reason to stay the course. But a sunken investment – whether of time, money, or emotional energy – is never a good reason to continue down a path that is no longer right for your company.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Fundraising becomes a top-of-mind issue for most entrepreneurs in the summer, particularly as they start to plot their strategy for the fall and ensure adequate funding runway for the rest of the year.
As I’ve written about before, failure to protect intellectual property (IP) from day one can be a huge disaster for a startup. This is especially true when a company begins fundraising and starts pitching their ideas left and right in an effort to raise funds.
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He may sound crazy, but there’s a method to his madness. Itay Adam is already well-funded and staffed to create ‘the next big thing.’ All that remains is to come up with an idea.
On a memorable episode of the hit 1990s sitcom “Seinfeld,” NBC executives meet Jerry after his nightclub act and ask him to come up with an idea for a TV series. His friend George decides he can be a sitcom writer and comes up with the idea of it being “a show about nothing,” and it worked! Run with it.
Image: http://www.forbes.com
Marketing classrooms have long discussed the four P’s of marketing: product, promotion, position, and price.
I realized it was high time that entrepreneurship got the same love in the form of P’s, through a simple, formulaic way of discussing what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
Image: http://smashingboxes.com
How would angel groups fare if evaluated on the criteria we use to evaluate VC funds? We applied our Investor Mosaic algorithms to answer this and other questions about elite angel investment groups. For reference, Investor Mosaic takes into account factors such as past performance, network strength (who they know), selection aptitude and brand among other factors, and quantifies them to score and quantitatively rank investors. Specifically, we looked at 370 angel groups that have made at least one investment over the past two years.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dvids/2884877420
In their passion and excitement about a new product or service, entrepreneurs tend to continually narrow the scope of potential competitors, and often claim to have no direct competitors. This raises a big red flag with potential investors, who conclude that no competitors means no market, or you haven’t looked, and the new startup is likely not investable.
Foreign immigration is a hot topic these days, but the movement of people from one state to another can have an even bigger influence on the United States’ economy, politics and culture. Americans have already seen this with the Western expansion, the movement of Southern blacks to Northern cities and the migration from the Rust Belt.
The patterns of migration continue to change. California, shown above, has long been the destination of American dreamers from other states. It no longer plays that role; residents are leaving for greener pastures out East.
Image: http://www.nytimes.com
In the past century, the greatest global cities were generally the largest and centers of the world’s great empires: London, Paris, New York and Tokyo. Today size is not so important: Of the world’s 10 most populous cities, only Tokyo, New York and Beijing are in the top 10 of our ranking of the world’s most important cities. Instead, what matters today is influence.
“Wharton alumni status is gold,” enthused Gregg Spiridellis WG’99, co-founder of digital entertainment studio JibJab. The irreverent humor of JibJab’s celebrated political satire, their Year in Review shorts (featured on The Tonight Show), and “Starring You” ecards all came about because of Gregg’s Wharton experience. Gregg knew by his second year that he wanted to build a tech company, and shortly after graduation, he did so, co-founding JibJab with his brother Evan.
Image: Gregg (WG’99) and Evan Spiridellis on The Tonight Show. - http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu
American businesses are ageing, as is the country; and this is bad for the economy, say Ian Hathaway and Robert Litan, of the Brookings Institution.They report that the share of older firms, aged 16 years or more, has increased from 23 percent in 1992 to 34 percent in 2011.
It can bend, it can twist, it can suck, it can cup. The tongue is an essential, often playful part of human anatomy. Many of us grew up believing the assertion that the tongue is the strongest muscle in the body. But is it really? The short answer is no. But the explanation is not as straightforward as you’d think. We asked a few tongue experts (yes they do exist) why the myth has been so easy to swallow.
Image: Johan Larsson via Flickr
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Although most might not freely admit it, all entrepreneurs—even the most seasoned ones—make mistakes throughout their careers. It’s something that every founder and business leader has to deal with at one point or another. If you’re thinking about diving into the world of entrepreneurship by starting your own business, you have to be prepared to make mistakes.
Image: http://smallbiztrends.com
Do you see the fish or the aquarium? There is a big difference between the thought patterns of specific and holistic thinkers that can undo a multicultural team’s effectiveness.
I was teaching a course to a class of Executive MBA students at INSEAD and I had just given them a small-group assignment. One of the groups was made up of two British students, one German, one American and one Chinese. They had twenty minutes to discuss a case study and then to prepare the answers to four very specific questions.
Open innovation is a strategic game for big companies and one of the most important moves to consider for their innovation leaders is the allocation of focus and resources in the context of open innovation.
Here we need to consider that big companies like GE, Cisco or Microsoft tend to have 8-12 different value pools (think suppliers, startups, customers or universities) to consider for their open innovation efforts.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
In today’s global economy, it’s almost a given that most companies hope that a product will be sold both domestically and internationally. The Internet has made it deceptively easy to reach a global audience, especially when tools such as Google Translate allow for a rough website translation with the click of a button.
Can you take a vacation without a laptop or tablet? If you answered no to this question then you might be facing one or two of the following scenarios:
You believe that your role is to make all the important decisions and solve the all significant problems. And you don’t have the right team in place to keep the business on course in your absence.
For 20 years Hong Kong has been ranked as the #1 place in the world to do business by the Heritage Foundation. Last year the United States came in at #12, dropping out of the top 10.
A year ago I moved myself and my family to Hong Kong to open an office in Asia for my firm. Since then I’ve had the opportunity to experience firsthand the process of doing business in this city of 7 million inhabitants.
Economists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln published the results of their annual State Entrepreneurship Index last week. Though co-author Eric Thompson admitted the index reinforces a long-standing bias toward the east and west coasts, he said Prairie states like Iowa and Nebraska ranked well.
“I have to confess that it does reinforce this stereotype, this predilection that some people have toward opportunity on the coasts,” he said. “But the index is also saying there’s plenty of opportunity and things going on here, too.”
Image: http://siliconprairienews.com
Digital health has a pretty erratic grade point average, or so says Dana Mead, a parter at venture firm Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers. He outlined and graded what he called the five most important elements of the digital health ecosystem at Qualcomm Life‘s Connect2014 conference this week in San Diego, and this is how he slices it:
