Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
Earlybird Venture Capital has announced that it has closed its fourth fund, valued at €150 million ($200 million).
The Berlin and Munich-based firm is known for investing in early venture rounds and counts the likes of Carpooling.com, 6Wunderkinder, EyeEm and SocialBakers amongst its portfolio.
Most readers will recall the extensive coverage of the steps the Stephen Harper government took in launching the reform of Canada’s immigration system. There have also been a plethora of news stories about the critical need to finance the repair and modernization of deteriorating local infrastructure in Canada.. While these stories may seem unconnected, using innovative strategies to achieve the former may actually help solve the latter.
Examples of crumbling municipal infrastructure are becoming almost daily occurrences throughout Canada. From falling pieces off the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, to broken water mains and collapsing roads in Ottawa, to the collapse of the Ville Marie Tunnel in Montreal, to blunt warnings from the Premier of Alberta, the need for infrastructure renewal is a situation that can no longer be put off.
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Everyone can innovate. Innovation generally refers to renewing, changing or creating more effective processes, products or ways of doing things. For businesses, this could mean implementing new ideas, creating dynamic products or improving your existing services. Innovation can be a catalyst for the growth and success of your business, and help you adapt and grow in the marketplace.
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In the ranks of technology incubator programs, there is AngelPad here in San Francisco and Y Combinator about 40 miles south in Mountain View. And then there is the Pentagon.
In the last year, former Department of Defense and intelligence agency operatives have headed to Silicon Valley to create technology startups specializing in tools aimed at thwarting online threats. Frequent reports of cyberattacks have expanded the demand for security tools, in both the public and private sectors, and venture capital money has followed. In 2012, more than $1 billion in venture financing poured into security startups, more than double the amount in 2010, according to the National Venture Capital Association.
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So you’ve joined a startup accelerator and survived the first months of the program. Suddenly, that big Demo Day presentation is looming large.
If you’re like me, public speaking is an unnatural experience. Add to that the fact that, during a Demo Day presentation, you need to summarize your entire startup in 2-5 minutes, and the stress quickly builds up.
I am an entrepreneur – a moderately shocking fact for a kid from Cleveland. What’s more shocking? I’m a very proud graduate of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. Yes, I willingly left the work force for two years in order to pay to attend business school.
The crowdfunding industry is experiencing growing pains as entrepreneurs and operators of Web-based financing portals complain about a few hostile state securities agencies and the regulators grapple with an industry whose rules have yet to be written by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
While some states, like Georgia, Kansas and North Carolina, have welcomed the advent of Internet-based crowdfunding as a potential boost to their economies, with their own intrastate rules, others have taken a more skeptical and cautious approach.
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Anyone working on economic development of developing countries is bound to realize, sooner or later, that entrepreneurship does not get the recognition and support it deserves for its role in economic growth and poverty alleviation. In fact, it can also be argued that role of entrepreneurship in less advanced economies, like Nepal, is among the least studied subjects in the implied discourse. Yet, developing countries are teeming with entrepreneurs who are investing their time, energy, and skills in solving the problems that besiege their societies. Over 400 million individuals in developing countries are owners or managers of new firms. India and China alone are home to an estimated 200 million plus entrepreneurs. But despite the ubiquity of entrepreneurs in these societies, the problems and hurdles they face in starting, expanding, and sustaining their ventures are numerous and much different from the hurdles that are addressed in the majority of the literature on entrepreneurship available today.
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Deleting yourself from the Internet is hard work. First, you have to decide where exactly you want to disappear — from social media sites to retailer databases — and then you have to figure out how you're going to do all that.
So attention, web users. This is something you'll want to bookmark.
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With the venture industry increasingly dominated by a handful of multibillion-dollar powerhouses like NEA and Sequoia Capital, smaller boutique firms have arisen to focus on particular startup sectors or stages. Outfits like True Ventures and Baseline Capital have become popular with investors and entrepreneurs alike. In this week’s edition of Elevator Pitch, we meet the co-founder of a firm with a particularly specialized investment strategy.
It seems from hanging out with entrepreneurs (to the extent I do), there are two entrepreneurial types:
The Serial Entrepreneur One entrepreneurial type loves the cool factor associated with being known as a serial entrepreneur. The badge of honor is starting a bunch of things, even if (and this is typically unspoken) many of them never come to fruition. A serial entrepreneur gains advantage in that each new project, effort, or company is positioned separately, which allows greater clarity in how they are marketed and discussed.
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In building successful businesses, I find that creating a new and innovative product or service is usually the easy part. The hard part is providing the leadership required to align and motivate all the constituents and players – from engineers, to investors, vendors, and ultimately customers. Great entrepreneurs are not just idea people and then managers, they are extraordinary leaders.
Most investors admit that they invest primarily in people, not ideas, and they inherently believe that they can sense this leadership ability needed to get the rapid growth and 10x return we all strive for. Yet beyond a list of noble attributes, like vision, courage, and integrity, it’s hard for them to define what separates an ordinary entrepreneur or manager from an extraordinary leader.
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The entrepreneurial sector in the Middle East has picked up the slack where corporations have become ephemeral at best, and has consequently emerged as one of today’s engines of growth for the regional economy, writes Bassam Aoun. The lackluster job market has been less than merciful to numerous aspects of contemporary life. From the detriment of careers to the foreclosure of homes and the subsequent rise in the cost of unemployment insurance programs, the effects are pervasive and considerably malignant to the average individual.
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As summer comes to a close, kids are gearing up for fall. But more importantly, they're getting ready for the first day of school.
For many students, this means fittings for new school uniforms or dusting off old ones that spent the summer in the closet. Soon kids everywhere will be back to wearing knee-length skirts and clip-on ties.
IMAGE: FLICKR, THE ADVOCACY PROJECT
The billionaire entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley have not all been recycling their earnings into Napa Valley vineyards. With publicity commensurate with their wealth and ambitions, such notable visionaries as Elon Musk (co-founder of PayPal, the online payments giant owned by eBay) have staked out claims at and beyond the frontier of available technology, from Tesla's all-electric cars to the proto spaceships of SpaceX.
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Paul Graham wrote a great post in which he defines a startup as a “company designed to grow fast” and encouraged founders to constantly measure their growth rates. For Y Combinator companies, he notes that a good growth rate is 5 to 7 percent per week, while an exceptional growth rate is 10 percent per week.
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Will Davis and Evan Baehr, co-founders of an Austin tech company called Outbox, saw how tight the venture capital business has gotten when they went looking for money a few months back. When they'd first raised funds two years ago, Silicon Valley investors had been eager to deal. Then Facebook's IPO flop popped that bubble.
But aspiring Zucks are in luck: Entrepreneurs have a growing number of alternatives, from new online platforms for meeting investors to nascent federal “crowdfunding” rules that aim to let moms and pops back startups.
As business start-ups spark life into the UK economy, London Business School’s John Mullins sounds a note of caution; pointing out that customers not venture capital backers are the real key to business success.
With 15,720 digital business start-ups launched at London’s Silicon Roundabout alone in the year to July and ‘tech clusters’ flourishing in cities all over the UK, entrepreneurial ideas and capital backers seem to be operating in textbook harmony.
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This is big. Luxury private car company Uber has US$361.2-million in its latest funding round and US$258-million of that is believed to have come from Google Ventures. At its core, Uber is an on-demand private driver. Users of the service can request a ride at any time using the service’s iPhone and Android apps or from its mobi site. With your credit card registered on the service, the car picks you up and the trip is tracked from the moment you get in ’til you get off.
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Last week, my colleagues and I met with some executives from a prospect company to introduce OpenView Labs, and describe what all of our respective teams within the Labs focus on with our portfolio companies.
The CEO of this company was intrigued, particularly as Tien Anh explained the types of projects that his Research and Analytics team typically executes with our portfolio. In short, the Research and Analytics team works with OpenView’s companies to help them better understand the markets that they should be targeting, the buyer personas within those markets, and what messaging will resonate best. They conduct primary and secondary research to attain such data, and some of their most valuable insights come from survey calls with customers, lost customers, and prospects.
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