Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Evan Carmichael has posted a list of the top 100 startup experts to follow on twitter.

Bill Gross founder and CEO of Idealab gives some sage advice on how to give great feedback to employees. He says never you but as part of you feedback.

• Wrong: Your performance is outstanding, but..
• Right: Your performance is great and would be outstanding if you did...

Using but promote confrontation and negates any goodwill where as and avoids this issue.

Forbes has posted this handy The Non-Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting in Startups.

Nathan Gold gives a great lecture on How to Captivate Any Audience in Less Than 30 Seconds as part of the Startup America Partnership learning series. Nathan describes how to use stories, similes, analogies, metaphors, and examples to captivate an audience. He also provides some tools on how to overcome people's preoccupation. He points out that most of your messages comes from your facial expression and voice.

Steve Blank is offering the Lean Launch Pad course online on Sept 14, 2012. You can enroll at the Udacity website.

Google has improved the patent search by adding a prior art search as described in their blog. This is a welcome addition and should help with improving patent search efficiency.

Brink Lindsey a senior scholar at the Kauffman Foundation has written a new e-book HUMAN CAPITALISM: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter – and More Unequal. In his research, he found that we are becoming more unequal. College graduated are more skilled and make 70% more that non-college graduates. The trend is increasing plus the demand for the highly skilled workers is increasing but the supply is not. He attributes the reason to culture. If you are part of the skilled class than you are nurtured from the beginning to get educated to become highly skilled. If not you are not then you have fewer opportunities and incentives to become educated. Lindsey is optimistic that schools and institutions can compensate for the cultural gaps and educate more people to become skilled.

The HBR has posted the 10 reasons why winners keep winning aside from skill. The reasons include:

• Positive mood and energy energies others
• Positive pull keeps other engaged and working longer
• Sharing tips and mistakes without making other defensive enhances learning
• Deep focus
• Culture of respect minimizes infighting and second guessing
• Good press and good vibes
• Success open doors and helps create new links to other successful people
• Establishes a long term stable environment

Sujan Patel, the founder of Single Grain, has posted a list of the 100 books entrepreneurs should read. This list looks very interesting. I have read Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder which I highly recommend, and have read up to chapter 4 of The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank but recommend it too. The list is broken into the following categories.

• Biographies
• Business classics
• New business classics
• Business strategy
• Startup 101
• Marketing and branding
• Personal development
• Leadership and management
• Time management and productivity
• 21st century business
• Inspiration and motivation
• Networking
• General economics

Forbes posted a list of the most entrepreneurial universities in the USA. The top three include:

• Stanford
• MIT
• Harvard