Entrepreneurship & Innovation

The Startup America Partnership web site has posted an article on how to find top talent for your startup. Companies that register with Startup America Partnership get a discount at the service providers listed.

It turns out that independent professionals represent a $250B business sector. In this CNN Money article, The future of work: Fiercely independent and agile, independent professionals are sought after by companies for their specialized expertise and are much happier in general as compared to corporate employees. Independent professionals, however, face challenges such as the growing complex processes corporations use to higher independent experts, safety mechanisms, and taxation.

The theFunded.com provides a community for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders to help grow their business. As part of this effort, the community has created a rankings for VC firms to help other entrepreneurs find the resources they need. Having a helpful and knowledgeable VC is so critical to your success, because it's about much more than money. Getting a bad VC relegates you to a life like the one in Mad Max on your way to making a big crater when you crash and burn.

A recent study looked at high school students and their interest in engineering as reported in the article How to turn a teen into an engineer (study) at DevBeat. High school students don't really know what engineering is or what engineers do. According to the article, high school students become very interested in the subject once the become aware of the cool things engineers design. In the study, boys are 60% more likely to consider engineering careers after learning about it, but only 35% of the girls are like to to consider engineering careers. It appears that girl perceive that engineering as non artistic or creative because it involve spreadsheets somehow. Girls are more interested in engineering projects that are have more of social impact like clean water projects in Africa.

They say that the innovation rate grows exponentially. Innovation drives our economy and the more innovation the prosperous a society seems to be. The whole world seem to have recognized the fact and are copying this model. The Atlantic web site has posted an article on the The 8 Best Innovation Ideas From Around the World. There are some really great ideas being used around the world.

Steven Blank posts and article at Entrepreneur Corner on How to be a better venture capitalist: Run a startup. Steve suggest that to be a good VC, the VC needs to have run a startup. Today, you can build a mobile, cloud, or web company for $500,000. The startup can have 10,000 customers and deliver product in less than a year (inconceivable and amazing). Running a startup gives a VC an insight into the realties of how hard startup life can be.

The WSJ reports that companies can't find employees because they aren't paying enough or willing to train employees like they did in the past. Many jobs are unique today that finding the perfect candidate is impossible. I believe that the best way to go is by training and mentoring. This is especially true for many technical fields.

I've thought that the way business optimizes profitability over everything else is short sided, destructive, kills jobs, not in the interest of national security, wasteful, and unsustainable for a while now (externals are important and should be counted). To my amazement, Clayton Christensen is saying what I've been thinking but couldn't put into words in this article at Forbes.com Clayton Christensen: How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy. The two metrics Internal Rate of Return (IRR) and Rate of return On Net Assets (RONA) seems to be the culprit. Professor Christensen gave a really wonderful lecture at the Gardner Symposium ITXPO 2011 on innovation, disruption, and how American business theory is destroying the economy. The lecture is well worth watching.

Do you feel Lucky? Do you? Well maybe it's best not to. I've sometimes felt that it's better to be lucky than to be good at your business. Well, according to Matt Harvey's blog at the Stanford Technology Venture Program, being lucky is accepting unknown risk and having a positive outcome. Successful entrepreneurs need to identify risks and work to eliminated unknowns so that they can operate and adapt without the need for being lucky.

James Altucher at TechCrunch describes How Entrepreneurs Can Create Their Own Luck. Being in the right place at the right time seems to be important as is persistence, great story telling, strong relationships, and passion.