Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Andrew Keen at TechCrunch talks to Clay Christensen about Escaping the Innovator's Dilemma. Clay describes companies with one business model as something similar to organisms in biology that do not adapt or mutate over time to stay competitive. Thus, most companies like this fail in time. He thinks companies need multiple business units running different business models to survive. Old business units get shut down when they are no longer competitive. He cites IBM as the only company to survive the minicomputer and PC eras. IBM succeeded by forming new business units in different locations for their minicomputer and PC products. The mainframe business unit ran with ~60% gross margins, where as the minicomputer and PC business units ran with ~45% and ~25% gross margins respectively.

Michael Fertik describes how Your Future Employer Is Watching You Online. You Should Be, Too. on his blog on the HBR website. It pretty amazing that your digital identity cab have so much influence over your job and your future job searches. I can see that people will carefully create, market, and manage their virtual identities in the future. I wonder how people will freely exchange ideas, be themselves, and be inappropriate, outspoken, or passionate at times in the future without killing their livelihood. Will an AI understand the finer points of working at a startup that failed and hold it against you, for example.

Clayton Christensen gave yet another great talk on Innovation: Growth — How to Create New Growth Business at the PARC Form on March 28, 2012. He talked about business, innovation, disruption, healthcare, and education. He describes how crappy products start a process that dominate and out competes the market leaders over time as the new player products go up market. He thinks this will happen in healthcare and in education in time.

the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity for 1996 to 2011 is now available. Entrepreneurs did not start as many business in 2011 as compared to 2010 but the rate at 0.32% is near the highest level in the last 16 years. The report shows business creation rate by gender, race, nativity, age, education level, industry, state, and region.
The list below shows the groups that start business the most in 2011:

• Men
• Latinos
• Immigrants
• 44 to 50 year olds neck & neck with 55 to 64 year olds
• Individuals with less than a high school education by a wide margin
• Individuals in construction
• Individuals in AZ, TX, & CA
• Individuals in the West

Guy Kawasaki former chief evangelist at talks on the Twelve Lessons He Learned From Steve Jobs at the IBM SmartCamp Global Finals in February. Some of the lessons that grab me include:

• Experts are clueless
• Jump to the next curve
• Ship it even if it's crappy

Eric Jackson in Forbes magazine reports the Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail To Keep Their Best Talent. It's a very good list indeed. The top three for me include:

• Lack of vision/passion
• Open-mindedness (to new ideas)
• freedom to do the work and make mistakes

Nir Eyal proposes to abolish the reference check. Instead, he sends email to a candidates reference asking them to write back only if the candidate is outstanding. It's a brilliant method. I've done some reference check that were total failures so this method looks to be more effective to me. None, not one of his reference, told me that working with that guy was like working with your hair on fire. Later, when I asked, they said, I thought you knew that. It's pretty much common knowledge.

The Harvard Business Review has posted the Top 10 Masters of Innovation on its website. Steve Blank and Clayton Christensen are my two favorite educators on the list. I don't know most of the other but hope to have time to investigate them further.

The ACS Careers website posted a good article on When Connecting Isn’t A Connection: 21 Ways to Build Relationships. It's always a pleasure when you run across some information that you know someone would be interested in and can send it to them. It's a bit difficult since it requires getting to know someone fairly well.

Just saw this alternate approach to college education that looks intriguing in that students learn business by doing for two years. Enstitute is funded so there is no cost, but there is little or no pay or healthcare either. The deadline fir applying is March 31, 2012. There are 15 openings.