2010-YEARLY

To the innovationDAILY (iD) loyal readers:

I would like to thank you for your support and readership for the last year of innovationDAILY and innovationWEEKLY.

We now have had 18 months of publishing our daily innovation blog/newsletter and appreciate all the positive feedback we continue to receive on the quality of the content and the publication. We have tried to make it a PRACTITIONER'S PUBLICATION, which we hope provides valuable information and insight for you to apply in your day to day work. While we know 25 articles per day is like "drinking from a fire hose" the most frequent comment we hear is that while you may not have the time or interest in all the content every day there is at least 1 or 2 articles that you find valuable and worth reading every day.

Today's edition is dedicated to highlighting some of the most popular articles in 2010.

Innovation America's tagline is "The Daily Pulse of Global Innovation". See the impact that Global trends and Innovation are having around the world by watching this short, thought provoking video. I liked it so much that I made it the lead article for the first Monday of 2010! IT IS A MUST WATCH !
Enjoy and Thanks to Tom Mathews for sending it to me.
--Rich Bendis

As national organizations that support the start-up and growth of innovative small businesses, we want to express the importance of ensuring that the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 does not damage angel investing and particularly the entrepreneurial businesses they support. We join the Angel Capital Association in asking that two small sections in the bill be removed or modified:

• Section 412 and 413, Adjusting the Accredited Investor Standard for Inflation. As currently written, this section could result in the elimination of as many as two-thirds of all accredited investors who invest directly in start-up and early-stage small businesses.
• Section 926, Authority of State Regulators Over Regulation D Offerings. This section could make it more difficult to raise angel capital from investors in different states, make it unclear what entities regulate angel investments, and introduce potential lengthy waiting periods for businesses to receive their capital, possibly resulting in the death of those businesses.
• We appreciate the importance of regulation to protect investors from fraud, but we urge the Senate to consider several factors in improving these sections of the legislation:
• Entrepreneurial companies are important to job creation and innovation in the United States. We note particularly the study by the US Census Bureau that companies five years old or less created all of the net new jobs over a 25 year period.
• Angel investors are an important source of capital for many of these innovative start-ups. For instance, one of the signatories to this letter, the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), has tracked the source of initial funding for university spin-out companies for the past five years. They have consistently found that accredited individual investors are the source of initial funding for a third of all university start-up companies. All of the signing organizations are therefore deeply concerned about any changes that would diminish the size of the pool of accredited investors.
• Establishing standards that would significantly cut back on the pool of angel capital is especially difficult during the recession, when small businesses are having trouble finding capital, especially in the $100,000 to $2 million range that is sometimes referred to as the “Valley of Death.”
• Startup and seed investments are precisely the types of financing that need uniformity and simplicity the most. It is important to ensure that entrepreneurs raising capital have the same regulations regardless of their state and that they are not subjected to excessive legal costs, delays, complexity, and uncertainty that would follow from Section 926 as currently written.
• Consider “beefing up” accredited investor protections for private offerings by clarifying who is disqualified from involvement in these financings and developing more accessible information on individuals and entities with prior records of fraud and deceit in any type of investment activity, so that federal and state securities regulators can more easily review Regulation D filings to ensure that new investment offerings do not include those people and entities.

Thanks for your consideration of these issues and your support of innovative small businesses. We want to ensure that the entrepreneurial startups that create important innovations and high quality jobs not only continue to have this important type of capital so they can grow, but that they are not subjected to regulations that make new and existing companies die for lack of capital or waiting to clear 120 day hurdles and large legal costs to get regulatory approval for the legitimate capital they raised.

Sincerely,

Dan Berglund State Science & Technology Institute

Marianne Hudson Angel Capital Association

Jim Jaffe National Association of Seed and Venture Funds

David Monkman National Business Incubation Association

Matthew Nemerson Technology Councils of North America

Rohit Shukla Larta Institute

Ashley Stevens, D. Phil (Oxon), CLP Association of University Technology Managers

Kerwin Tesdell Community Development Venture Capital Alliance

Eileen Walker Association of University Research Parks

By Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute

Ask any entrepreneur what it costs to make a hiring mistake and you'll likely be met with a groan and a 'double eye roll'.  Everyone knows the costs:

• The recruiting fees
• The job postings
• The time you spend interviewing
• Your turnover rate causing increased UC contribution costs
• The lawyer's fees for the employment contract, figuring out how to break the contract, and sometimes additional fees--plus the tax on your time and patience--required to defend yourself against wrongful termination!

Think of these these costs as 'direct damage':  a real strain on any entrepreneur's budget, but not an unexpected cost of doing business.  Bad hires happen.  But wait.....have you considered the 'collateral damage'?

No hiring decision happens in a vacuum.  You need your team to be whole. You have a missing part.  You seek to fill it in a way that capitalizes on the assets of your existing team members - and makes up for their deficits.  That's why prudent employers engage search specialists, scour resumes, do 360-degree interviews, personality tests, reference checks, and even credit checks (where allowed by law).  But somehow, bad hires still happen, and when they happen to you, you're naturally disappointed.  Or worse.  Because if you've pegged your hopes and plans on the wrong person, it's the collateral damage that costs so much more than the hiring failure.

In our annual TIME 100 issue we name the people who most affect our world

"I've seen thousands of information technology innovations," said Richard Caruso, "and as an Ernst and Young 'Entrepreneur of the Year,' an annual competition judge, creative finance entrepreneur, and developer of Mentorsphere, I review countless executive summaries and business plans. Through this process I've encountered probably every variation in business plan templates, formats, technologies, and technical service providers. Unismart Capital Software's Funding Roadmap Business Plan and Due Diligence Reporting System is a standardized, focused plan development approach and I see it as having the potential to become the next basis for business planning, due diligence, and collaboration.

I look forward to working with Ruth Hedges and the entire PELT100 Pilot Project UnleashPA with the Innovation America team, as we incorporate all of the revolutionary technology provided by www.Mentorsphere.com, www.Fundingroadmap.com, and the Adreamz Institute.”

The Funding Roadmap is setting a new industry standard with their reinvention of the business plan. Ruth Hedges, Unismart Capital Software CEO says, “We realized the limitations of the business planning model, looked at the accelerating social networking environment, and the lights went on!”  Now the Funding Roadmap is being promoted by the Intuit Small Business Community, the SBDCNet and Start-up Weekend, whose founders Marc Nager and Clint Nelson are enthusiastic: “Here is an awesome way to collaborate with your peers while aligning your strategy, setting goals and finalizing your vision.” Users are now located in countries around the world.

Simon Sinek’s TED Talk from TedxPuget Sound (Sept 2009) has been posted and is just awesome. He starts out with the question “Why is Apple so innovative,“ Why is it that Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement,” and “Why is it that the Wright Brothers were able to figure out controlled power manned flight?”

A consortium of automotive officials, the Office of Breakthrough Innovation of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research are set to make it easier for automotive manufacturers and suppliers to tap into the leading entrepreneurs in vehicle microelectronics.

The inaugural AutoVenture Forum, set for September 22, 2010 in Novi, MI will directly match selected entrepreneurial ventures with business units within large automotive companies through a showcase of business pitch sessions. “It’s an effort aimed to build a profitable automotive sector by facilitating a more agile innovation process,” says Chris Przirembel, Clemson University vice president for Research and Economic Development and chair of the ASME Innovation Committee. “To fully succeed, corporate automotive innovation groups need to draw upon the worldwide entrepreneurial community to tap creative business models and innovative technologies,” he says.

LYON, France, March 30, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Founded by EMLYON School Business and KPMG S.A., the World Entrepreneurship Forum is the first global Think-tank dedicated to entrepreneurs, creators of wealth and social justice. It benefits from the high patronage of Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic and gathers annually more than 100 international personalities, entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, political leaders and experts selected from 40 countries.

Creation of the first "World Entrepreneurship Centres"

Argentina and Singapore are the first countries where regional chapters of the World Entrepreneurship Forum will be created. These chapters, directed locally by members of the think tank, will gather throughout the year local entrepreneurs and decision-makers who will debate global issues with their vision and experience of the local reality. These centres will be places of identification and observation of the best practices, and they will feed the debates carried out on a global level.

Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute

Sound familiar?

• Your startup seemed to have essential Angel funding ‘in the bag,’ but for some reason the money never arrives.
• A strategic alliance took months to establish, and can nearly double your revenue projection, but suddenly your new partner gets bought by a competitor and the deal is off.
• The new marketing materials are ready just in time for product launch at a major show, but a storm in the Midwest delays the shipment, leaving you empty-handed.

Bad things do happen to good entrepreneurs—all too frequently.  Some manage to recover and others don’t. Is there a way to distinguish the teams that will step up from the teams that give up?

Even in these tough times, surprising and extraordinary efforts are under way in businesses across the globe. From politics to technology, energy, and transportation; from marketing to retail, health care, and design, each company on the following pages illustrates the power and potential of innovative ideas and creative execution.

How IBM, Hallmark, and Apple get innovation right—but not for the reasons you might think

As the economic environment stabilizes, there's a temptation to return to business as usual. And although much about the future of the economy is uncertain, I can say with some confidence that a return to the recent status quo would be a colossal mistake.

GE (GE) Chairman Jeffrey Immelt said it best in a speech he gave to the Business for Social Responsibility conference in November 2008. "This economic crisis doesn't represent a cycle. It represents a reset. It's an emotional, social, economic reset. People who understand that will prosper. Those who don't will be left behind." Immelt's remarks constitute nothing less than a challenge to his peers: Reinvent your business, or go home. Organizations that wait for solutions to fall from the sky fully formed will be the next to fall. Even a casual observer can see that the challenges facing GE are an object lesson for the rest of us.

How do you navigate an enterprise through uncertain times? By getting back to fundamentals. That goes for innovation, too, which doesn't mean novelty for novelty's sake. Innovation is about growth, and growth takes empathy, creativity, and executionEmpathy, on an organizational scale, is a shared intuition for what people outside the company really need and value. Creativity is the ability to come up with new ideas for products, services, and businesses that are different and distinct. And execution is the art of getting things done. These aren't feel-good ideas for easy times. They're the secret to surviving a storm.

ST. PAUL, Minnesota– In a packed State Building Office hearing room Tuesday, witness after witness rose to speak in support of H.F. 2750, a bill that would grant $32 million in tax credits over three years to angel investors who fund risky, high tech start-up companies. Entrepreneurs, investors, university officials, industry groups warned lawmakers that the lack of early stage capital meant innovative start-ups in Minnesota would either die or move to another state.

Rep. Ann Lenczewski of Bloomington, the powerful Democratic chair of the House Tax Committee and a vocal opponent of the bill, listened politely. Then she called her one and only witness: Joel Michael, a House Research staff coordinator who helped authored a report, at Lenczewski’s request, on Minnesota vs Wisconsin venture capital.

Michael, whose gray hair, spectacles, and low droning voice proved fitting for a numbers cruncher, began his report by saying it was not a report, even though the report begins with “This report…” Ooookay. He then offered the following caveats: he was not a venture capital expert and there was little data to draw on.

This article examines the impact of the emerging model of open innovation on state public policy, particularly the practice of technology-based economic development in weak research and development (R&D) states. Open innovation describes the nascent practice of firms using knowledge created outside their boundaries and also marketing ideas they would not commercialize themselves. Firms engaging in open innovation thrive on knowledge spillovers, and weak R&D regions could benefit from this model through the creation of Marshallian externalities. It is therefore interesting to ask whether weak R&D states take advantage of this model. This case study analysis shows that states involved in the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research partially support the emerging open innovation paradigm. All states have science and technology strategies and actively support and invest in their higher education infrastructure. They show variation in their support for university–industry partnerships, entrepreneurship, capital access, commercialization, and technology transfer. None of the states, however, uses the open innovation framework explicitly.

In its third year, the Kansas Pipeline Entrepreneurial Fellowship Program continued its mission to provide some of the state’s most promising startups with the right foundation for further growth.

Executives from eight Kansas businesses were chosen from hundreds of applications and put through a series of quarterly three-day education sessions on subjects ranging from ways to organize their finances to how to improve how they communicate their business to customers and potential investors.

I HAD THE PRIVILEDGE TO BE A NATIONAL JUDGE FOR THE KANSAS PIPELINE iNNOVATOR OF THE YEAR PROGRAM. I PERSONALLY SERVE AS A JUDGE FOR SEVERAL BUSINESS PLAN OR ENTREPRENEUR PROGRAMS AND BELIEVE THAT THE PIPELINE, YEAR LONG IMMERSION PROGRAM, IS ONE OF THE BEST ENTREPRENEURIAL FELLOWSHIP PROGRAMS IN AMERICA.THIS PROGRAM COULD BENEFIT MANY STATES REGIONS AND COUNTRIES. JONI COBB, ITS PRESIDENT AND CEO, IS WILLING TO DISCUSS SUCH EXPANSION IDEAS WITH THOSE THAT DESIRE TO CREATE A MORE ROBUST ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEM. CHECKOUT HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE RECENT INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR PROGRAM WITH THE FOLLOWING BRIEF VIDEO.

RICH BENDIS

BEIJING, May 13 -- China is an Asian country with many neighboring countries. There are 14 countries border China, plus countries that face China across the sea, China has more than 20 surrounding countries.

In recent years, China's rapid economic development has become the major force of the world's economic growth, and China's surrounding countries directly benefited a lot from China. China's continuously expanding foreign trade undoubtedly stimulated the economic development of the surrounding countries.

From 1978 to 2008, the total export-import volume of China's foreign cargo trade had increased from 20.6 billion U.S. dollars to 2561.6 billion U.S. dollars, with an average yearly growth of 18%, and a total increase of 124 times. The share of the total export-import volume in the world had increased from 0.8% to 8.9%, and the economic aggregate increased with a yearly average of 9.8%. In 2009, the most economic depressing year after the World War II, China's economic growth rate was still over 8%, with a total contribution of more than 20% to the world economy.

I spent four days in Aspen last November at the Aspen Design Summit where I worked with Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, and Henry King, the Global Account Manager at Doblin amongst a few others on a project with Mayo Clinic:

“The Mayo Clinic Rural Healthcare Project considered what a massive, local rural healthcare intervention might look like. The Project envisioned working across Mayo Clinic’s Center for Innovation (CFI) platforms to research, prototype and build a healthcare delivery concept to improve healthcare services in rural communities.”

“After examining the concept of community network building and well-being, the design mandate became the creation of a community health association called “Austin.us.” The goal is to create a network that changed the focus of the community from the consumption of healthcare to the collective production of well-being. The association’s network would allow community well-being to be driven through individual connections and change the currency of healthcare from dollars to commitment.”

If you live in Luling, Texas, (population 5080) you don’t need another list of the top trends for big city dwellers. You want to know what’s happening in the small towns. It’s different. You’re more worried about the Citizens State Bank, than Citibank. With those differences in mind, here are the top ten trends for rural small businesses and small town entrepreneurs in 2010.

1. Census 2010 – Population counts are critical for government programs, grants, and more for a decade. Smart small towns and counties will be actively finding ways to get everyone counted. Watch for town meetings to answer questions, and a whole bunch of canvassing. Your small town business will be indirectly affected by the results for ten long years.

Special to Innovation America by Dr. Janice Presser, CEO, The Gabriel Institute

Notice that I am making a statement, not asking a question.  There is no question about it.  Interviews suck.  And it doesn't matter if you are the interviewer, the interviewee, or someone else who's been sucked into the process.

There are three simple reasons.

First, interviews are very much like blind dates.  Both sides get a lot of hype upfront, and most of it is inaccurate or misleading.  Think back to the last time you bought-in to: "…and he's so good to his mother" or "…but she has a wonderful personality."  Is that any different from "…he's an undervalued property" or "…you'll really grow with this company"?  The bottom line is that interviews are a form of assessment, and no matter how structured or 'fair' you think you are being, they are neither standardized nor objective.  Even if you are using 'behavioral interviewing' techniques, the information you retain about each candidate will still have been filtered through your personal frame of reference and unconscious biases.  And just like the date who seemed like a perfect 'fit' - until their quirks, or their temper, or some other 'undocumented features' began to show up - there are people who have become experts at getting hired by NOT being themselves during the interview process.  (Did you know there are dating coaches and interview coaches that drill people in how to 'get lucky'?)

Second, for various reasons, the scales tend to tilt in favor of people who are least likely to be great team players.  Poorly defined job scope?  Insufficient resources?  Unrealistic performance expectations?  A great team player will raise relevant issues for discussion.  A bad team player will tell you just what you want to hear.  To make matters worse, all parties to the interview process have the same desired outcome, which no one will openly admit: they just want to get it over with!

    •    For HR or a staff recruiter, the harder the hiring manager is to deal with, the stronger this desire becomes. 
    •    For an external recruiter, the desire to close and move on is variable: retained search, "No problem";  contingency, "Excellent choice! When will my check be mailed?"
    •    The interviewer(s) will push for rapid progress to the 'right' decision, despite the fact that the same process has proven faulty in the past.
    •    And lastly, the candidates (depending on their employment status, how shaky they think their present situation is, and any number of other factors) want a job, a great job, the perfect job, or at least one that they can survive until they land somewhere else.  All this pressure favors candidates who are easy to 'fall in love with' instead of the people who are the most capable of adding value to the team.

Third, the very best person for the job rarely gets picked.  Why?  Let's go back to dating for a moment. Did you know that the surest way to hook up with the wrong person is to look for someone who matches your personal 'want list'? (This is a fact based on research, not folklore.) Think about it: can a list of experiences, skills, and physical attributes predict the quality of interpersonal behavior? Certainly not!  In order to get a positive I.D. on a 'good team-player', you need to know something about how the person will behave when working with others to overcome obstacles and achieve common goals. Unfortunately, that's not what we get from interviewing.  

First there are the interminable screenings to match candidates to a 'job req', i.e., the 'want list'. And since screening is rarely done by the person doing the hiring, persons with slightly different - yet truly unique and excellent - qualifications usually get kicked to the curb. The longer and more complex the interview process, and the more people involved, the more likely the process will produce a lowest-common-denominator selection. (Example: we know of a senior level executive who worked for well over a year to convince a competitor's top salesman to 'jump ship', only to lose this guaranteed star player in an off-target and humiliating (for the candidate) intra-departmental 'stress interview'.  Bottom line: interview survivors may be the ones who best tolerate non-productivity, who thrive on petty corporate politics, and/or who blow the biggest smokescreen.

As the saying goes, "If you keep on doing what you've always done, you'll keep on getting what you've always got." If you want productive teams, you need to be able to identify the best team players. Now there's a way to do that BEFORE you make big investments in a questionable interview process and risk a long-term commitment to the wrong person.   

Some aspects of interviewing may always suck, but the outcomes will be a lot better if you limit it to the candidates who really know how to 'team'.

Dr. Janice Presser is CEO of The Gabriel Institute, which has created Role-Based Assessment: the completely new way to predict how someone will work on a team. She offers readers of Innovation America a 'no cost solution' for a hiring problem.  Contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
 

RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Every firm has the capacity to innovate, so what’s often lacking has to do with strategy and vision. To be an “innovative” company means being willing to be different – to upset the structure of competition in an industry. So, one of the first things a non-innovative company must do is to decide to be different – to become a leader and a pioneer rather than a follower. To become proactive rather than reactive. As we like to say, the firm must leave the “safety of sameness”.

Next, once the decision has been made at the executive levels to embrace innovation, someone must communicate or define clear innovation goals or strategies. This can be as simple as defining a major problem to solve or opportunity to address. Innovators need clear targets, and those targets need to align to important corporate strategies.

This is the ideal forum for any entrepreneur seeking information, help, ideas or feedback. Being an active member of the forum, I know first hand that they have one of the most helpful communities out there.

Thanks to a number of spectacular successes obtained by blue-chip companies in recent years, Reverse Innovation is becoming a popular trend. Examples include GE's portable ultra-sound equipment designed in China and sold worldwide, LG's low cost air conditioner designed in India and sold worldwide, Renault's Logan low-cost model designed for Eastern European markets and now selling on Western Europe, etc.

In an enlightening article, Vijay Govindarajan outlines a historical perspective from globalisation to reverse innovation, and highlights the key driver behind this evolution: the revenue gap between developed and emerging markets. But there are other drivers that may be less visible but no less powerful.

A new report from Harvard asks "Why are some metropolitan areas so much more entrepreneurial than others? Silicon Valley seems almost magically entrepreneurial with a new startup on every street corner, but in declining Rust Belt cities such startups are far and few between."

The report notes a close correlation with regional economic growth.

The new Policy Brief published by Harvard’s Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, which is sponsoring a series of talks on geography and entrepreneurship, economists Edward Glaeser and William Kerr report that high levels of entrepreneurship are closely correlated with regional economic growth, which means that local policy makers who are looking for ways to rev the economic engines of their cities often are interested in policies that can generate more entrepreneurship. Read more.

So much about the practice of economic development is information-driven and the Internet has facilitated the creation of several web-based tools that make data on regional competitiveness more accessible than ever. A newly launched web site makes such analytical tools available to economic developers and public officials in an effort to support better decision-making, particularly in rural regions. These web-based tools are part of the Rural Innovation Project, which is a collaborative effort between three Midwestern universities and a couple of private research firms.

With funding from the U.S. Economic Development Administration and the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs, the project has built three analytical tools that are designed to inform strategic thinking about what it means to be competitive in a knowledge-based “innovation economy”. The three tools are: 1) the Innovation Index, 2) Cluster Analysis, and 3) Regional Investment Analysis. The Innovation Index is comprised of four sub-indexes (human capital, economic dynamics, productivity and employment, and economic well-being) and allows a region to compare itself to other regions, a state, or the U.S. on key measures of innovation. The Cluster Analysis tool allows users to examine the characteristics of 15 pre-defined occupational clusters and 17 industry clusters that are knowledge-based in their orientation. The Regional Investment Analysis tool provides a framework for prioritizing public investments that support innovation-based economic development within five broad categories:

• Brainpower
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship Networks
• Quality, Connected Places
• Branding Experiences
• Civic Collaboration

#1 Babson College, Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship, Babson Park, MA
#2 University of Houston, Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship, Houston, TX
#3 University of Arizona, McGuire Entrepreneurship Program, Tucson, AZ
#4 Baylor University, Baylor Entrepreneurship Program, Waco, TX
#5 Temple University, Innovation & Entrepreneurship Institute, Philadelphia, PA
#6 Drexel University, Laurence A. Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship in Technology, Philadephia, PA
#7 University of Dayton, Entrepreneurial Leadership, Dayton, OH
#8 DePaul University, DePaul Entrepreneurship Program, Chicago, IL
#9 City University of New York - Baruch College, Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management, New York, NY
#10 University of Southern California, Lloyd Greif Ctr for Entrepreneurial Studies, Los Angeles, CA
#11 University of Oklahoma, Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Norman, OK
#12 Northeastern University, Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Boston, MA
#13 Syracuse University, Entrepreneurship and Emerging Enterprise, Syracuse, NY
#14 Washington University in St. Louis, Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, St. Louis, MO
#15 Miami University, Miami Institute for Entrepreneurship, Oxford, OH
#16 University of Wisconsin - Madison, Weinert Center for Entrepreneruship, Madison, WI
#17 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Chapel Hill, NC
#18 Brigham Young University (UT), Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, Provo, UT
#19 Xavier University (OH), Xavier Entrepreneurship Center, Cincinnati, OH
#20 Loyola Marymount University, Hilton Center for Entrepreneurship, Los Angeles, CA
#21 Ball State University, Entrepreneurship Center, Muncie, IN
#22 The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa, Management Program with Entrepreneurial Track, Tuscaloosa, AL
#23 University of Iowa, John Pappajohn Entrepreneurial Center, Iowa City, IA
#24 Washington State University, Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Pullman, WA
#25 University of North Dakota, Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurial Studies, Grand Forks, ND

Report from entrepreneur.com

He was breathless, but determined.

This Navy veteran had worked an eight-hour shift until Saturday morning and then driven three hours from the Central Valley to participate in Catapult Innovation and Learning in San Jose. The program was half over, but as soon as he got the attention of 50 Most Important African-Americans in Technology selectees Mike Beasley, Arnold Brown and Ed Young, he began his elevator speech.

First, he pulled out copies of his resume which included a new bachelors degree in information technology from DeVry University, host for the workshop on building aad financing growth companies along with the Bay Area Chapter of BDPA.

While serving in the U.S. Navy, he had served aboard several ships as a LAN administrator a decade, but he had not been able to find work in the field as a civilian for the past four years.

In an earlier post, we posed the question, “Is College Necessary for Entrepreneurs?” While there are certainly good arguments for both sides, it’s a fact that a college degree does not guarantee success. And there are countless determined entrepreneurs who have proven that success can be achieved despite a lack of higher education.

We have compiled a list of 100 amazing “degreeless” entrepreneurs who have risen to the top. Some high-profile entrepreneurs you will recognize immediately, while others you may be discovering for the first time. Many of them didn’t complete elementary school, and still more are considered high school dropouts. Their backgrounds and industries run the gamut; however, they all have at least two things in common. Incredible success and no college degree.

As you know, most PowerPoint presentations are boring and ineffective. Here’s why. We create them not to convey crucial information, but rather to help us ease our uncomfortableness with public speaking. I’m convinced this is true. We use PPT like a magician uses a lovely assistant — to misdirect the attention of the audience.

As a result, most slide decks are:

• Simply speech outlines. We encourage the audience to follow along by reading the screen rather than looking and listening to us. What could be more deadly?
• Jammed with much too much information, presented poorly. Your audience must decide whether to digest the slide or listen to the speaker — impossible to do both.
• Choreographed to bullet point style. Bullet points have no rhythm, no tempo, no liveliness — and neither do presentations that rely on them.

As we described last week in State Job Creation Strategies Part I: Finding the Money and Investing in Human Capital and Physical Infrastructure, competing globally for jobs starts with policy makers instituting fundamental investments in education, human capital and physical infrastructure that make their state a productive environment for economic innovation.

The next step, as this Dispatch will describe, is helping the private sector leverage opportunities for job creation and technological innovation. Too often, some state leaders treat economic development as merely a bidding war between states to give away the most tax breaks or economic subsidies to big corporate bidders. Not only do most studies show such tax-giveaway approaches to be ineffective -- fundamentals like labor productivity and physical infrastructure are more critical in site selection for most global businesses -- but they end up devoting most state resources to a few large businesses while ignoring investments in start-ups and smaller homegrown firms that are the heart of long-term local prosperity.

When I first started attending panels and VC events, there was a lot of hype around the concept of an ”elevator pitch”. An elevator pitch is an overview of a new business idea that an entrepreneur can explain to an investor in the length of a chance elevator ride shared by the two parties. In approximately one minute, the entrepreneur needs to bait and hook a VC so that he can reel the investor in later.

At business plan competitions and pitch events, “pitch coaches” spent hours with entrepreneurs sharing with them the secrets of the arcane art of the elevator pitch. And once their disciples were fully indoctrinated, the newbies would get to show off their elevator pitching skills. Most entrepreneurs are trained to pack as much information as possible into that minute, driving most pitches to sound like they were being delivered by the spokesman for MicroMachines.

Constructing the perfect city means blending the best and boldest ideas from across the nation. Here are 12 we hope all future cities will embrace.