Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Tom Peters a management consultant and author of The Big Little Things provides leadership advice in this short video. The key elements to great leadership includes strategic listening and asking "what do you think?".

Nate C. Hindman the small business editor at the Huffington Post reports on the SXSW 2012: 8 Crucial Takeaways. The three takeaways I found most interesting include:

• Heavy use of the back button means it hard to find info on your site so fix it
• Know your angel investor using sites like AngelList
• Building relationships makes things happen

Daniel Gulati is a tech entrepreneur and describes the pros and cons of being a generalist or specializing in your career in his blog on HBR Keeping Your Options Open Could Be Hurting Your Career. It appears that being a subject matter expert in one industry provides a foundation for a longer and more prosperous career. The problem is how to determine when and where to specialize.

The HBR reports that women run businesses in Afghanistan support not just their families but also their community. Running a business is hard enough, and can't imagine how much more difficult it is in a war zone.

Clayton Christensen describes disruptive innovation in this short video interview. The first half covers the basics. Disruptive innovations occurs when a new usually cheep products allows many more people to participate in a technology instead on a select few (think mainframe computers of old). The second part was really good. Data is historical so being a data driven organization or manager means you can't see the future. The key is to develop a theory or model of your business, and use the model to see the future. Don't let the cheap competition eat away at your lowest product would be one model of seeing the future, for example. Ford & GM lost low cost market Toyota. Toyota is losing its low cost market to Kia, for instance. Intel protected its high-end processors with the low cost Celeron and now perhaps the Atom which illustrates an example of using the model to manage the competition.

Co-founder TV is a web site with links to entrepreneurial videos found on the web. It's a wonderful idea and I hope to have time to view some of the videos that have been curated. The website might be a good companion to e-corner.

Eli Pariser gave an interesting TED talk entitled Beware of online "filter bubbles". Apparently, most website personalizes our web search without us even knowing that it's happening. This results in algorithmic filters that can isolated us from information that is important for us to know. Eli thinks that these filters should be transparent and should allow us to control what information gets through.

The iBrdge Network hosts a huge database of university research and innovation for license and technology transfer. I noticed a government lab research posting too. The site appears to be mostly free except for a $1500 fee for non-US universities. It looks like a convenient way to find technology to fill in the gaps in a corporate IP portfolio.

The Entrepreneurial Thought Lecture series posted an archive of the lecture given by Ted Zoller a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation on Building an Entrepreneurial Career. It was an interesting talk and Ted Zoller described mappings of entrepreneurs and venture capitalist networks in different regions of the country. Silicon Valley as you can imaging produced a network so dense it looked like a massive hair ball. Boston has another strong network, but it pales in comparison to Silicon valley. The Kauffman foundation will be sponsoring a conference to get entrepreneurs and VCs together to study their networking and help propagate these connections around the country (and probably around the world). The goal is to help foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

Phil McKinney the now ex-CTO of HP describes 6 ways to measure innovation. The six metrics include

• % of Revenue Spent on R&D
• R&D Impact = Gross Margin / R&D Spend
• % of Revenue From Products Launched In The Last XX Years
• Patent quality
• % of Time Executives Spend on Innovation
• R&D Spend – Follow The Money

Instituting these metrics would seem to be very useful in making a company much better at build the next new thing.