Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Gigaom has posted the Online education startups: a field guide. Millions of people world wide are looking for and need higher education. The startup universities include:

• UniversityNow
• Codecademy
• Coursera
• 2tor
• Minerva Project
• Udacity
• Udemy

The opportunity for online universities looks very promising and a source of disruptive innovation. The established universities are offering distance learning too and there are many sources of quality course available for free.

• MIT & Harvard edX
• 500 Free Online Courses from Top Universities
• nanoHUB

Update: The GetEducated.com website provides reviews and ratings of online universities.

Tina Seelig provides A crash course in creativity at this years TEDxStanford conference. Tina describes the innovation engine and how culture, attitude, imagination, habitat, knowledge, and resources are all related and interact. What we imagine translated into what we build, for example. If we can't imagine it, the we can't build it. Knowledge enables us to unlock more resources. Culture influences our attitudes about creativity.

Yahoo! just announced that Marissa Mayer will become their new CEO. Marissa was a very early employee and became Google's Vice President of Search Products & User Experience. She gave this lecture at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader seminar series about innovation and product development at Google in 2006. Google uses data from product trial runs and iterative improvement to create products. Hopefully we will see good things from her and a more vibrant Yahoo!.

Harvard Business Review produced this short video on how the Run a Disciplined Innovation Experiment. Professor Vijay Govindarajan outlines techniques to first identify unknowns about your business. This might include questions like: Does my product or solution truly address the customers needs, or how many units of my product will the customer buy and at what prices. The next step is to determine how critical these questions are to the success of the business. Rank the most important and most critical issues first and then think of ways to cheaply test the assumption. The key idea is to fail cheaply and quickly. Old assumptions are replaced and tested in an iterative approach on until sound tested assumptions remain.

The new Kauffman report What Does Fortune 500 Turnover Mean? describes the history of the turnover of fortune 500 companies over the past 50 years. The report describes a rich and complex ecosystem of companies that start, grow, live, and die by the thousands.

Tech Cocktail has posted a list of 105 Women VCs and Angel Investors on their website. It a more extensive list women in the investment industry than seen in most finance publications, blogs, and website.

The TEDxStanford 2012 conference is to be held May 19 from 11 AM-7 PM. The speaker list looks great and better yet it will be streamed live, but you must register

It appears that the quest for top talent is getting even more innovative as reported by Joe McKendrick at ZDNET. A new web site service, Path.to offers a kind of dating service between talent and companies. The idea is that resumes, grades, and work history are inadequate for describing a top talent, or that the present selection criteria are too rigid to identify a top performer. Finding a job you love that is a good fit or finding a key employee will become even more interesting in the future as if it isn't already.

The USPTO has posted a the new IP Awareness Assessment tool on their website to help educate inventors on the various aspects of intellectual property and patents.

In this video, John Cleese describes what it takes to be creative well sort of. It's a difficult thing to tell people how to be creative. Instead, he ask how many people does it take to screw in a light bulb. Cleese says that you need space and time to set up the conditions to be creative. Plus, you need the courage to play and be wrong until a decision must be make. It's easy to take the first solution to a problem, but research has shown that the more creative people study and explore the problem for a longer period of time before selecting a solution. Creative collaborations are also an important aspect of creativity. Collaborators must feel safe and free of judgment, however. It can be helpful to start the creative process using random connections. These random concepts are knows as intermediate impossibles, and can be used as stepping stones to a solution since they force non-logical thinking.