In his recent article “Start-Up City,” Edward Glaeser traces New York City’s long history of innovative entrepreneurs from the sea trade industry to sugar refining to the garment industry to finance. Glaeser then discusses the dependence of the economy on entrepreneurs, the current perils New York faces, and how we can encourage more entrepreneurship.
Read the article at City Journal.
Last week, Big Think started a ten day series on the future of capitalism. Through articles and videos, the series examines the impact on capitalism of technologies such as 3D printing, virtual products and currencies, data analysis, and the relationship between governments and markets. Also featured is an interview with John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods and co-founder of Conscious Capitalism with recent CEE guest speaker Michael Strong.
Kevin O’Connor, Kaizen interviewee and CEO of FindtheBest.com, has an article on the Huffington Post that outlines his method for finding the best solution to a problem.
Via the Policy Forum on Entrepreneurship, here is a good New York Times article on entrepreneurship in Argentina. With the government in debt, and with little access to credit, “slowly, Argentines are beginning to trust and invest in each other.” The article profiles the founders of a software startup as examples of how the response of individuals to the stormy economic climate of Argentina is changing.
Aviation Week recently published a feature on aerospace startup SpaceX. The company is known to actively recruit the best, most enterprising talent. “In fact, [SpaceX founder, CEO, and CTO Elon Musk] considers this entrepreneurial mind-set to be even more important than the smarts of his new employees, opposing the more traditional hiring practices of his competitors.” From the company website: “Established in 2002 by Elon Musk , the founder of PayPal and the Zip2 Corporation, SpaceX has already developed two brand new launch vehicles, established an impressive launch manifest, and been awarded COTS funding by NASA to demonstrate delivery and return of cargo to the International Space Station.”
Read the Aviation Week article here.
Stata Ventures, Kaizen interviewee Ray Stata’s venture capital vehicle, recently provided funding to technology startup Lyric Semiconductor. Lyric is developing probability chip technology. Traditional chips use binary “yes/no” switches, but probability chips “can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities, or levels of certainty.” Some of the commercial applications of this technology include: better error correction and faster operation for portable flash drives; better prediction of consumer behavior for websites like Amazon (and better product recommendations for customers); and faster, cheaper large scale data processing.
Read more about Lyric at the New York Times and VentureBeat.
Read our interview with Ray Stata.
Watch a video interview with co-founder and CEO of Lyric, Ben Vigoda, who explains probability chips:
Venture capitalist Kevin O’Connor, interviewed in the April 2009 issue [PDF] of Kaizen, is now co-founder and CEO of FindTheBest.com. FindTheBest, as described by Mr. O’Connor, “was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way.”
He explains further: “I could find endless amounts of information on any subject but when I had a complicated decision to make, I found myself wasting hours, or even days, compiling information I could compare. Or, I found sites offering their “top 10” recommendations, only to discover they were secretly getting “kickbacks” from the sites they were recommending.”
His solution, FindTheBest, is now in beta version. It allows the user to compare search results (similarly to travel websites like Expedia), and to narrow down the results by various criteria (much like browsing Amazon). Like Wikipedia, users can also contribute to the site, updating existing areas or creating new listings in which they have expertise.
Read Kevin O’Connor’s introduction to FindTheBest.
Read the full-length interview with Kevin O’Connor.
We know that the entrepreneur takes on the financial risk of her venture, but Dan Pallotta at Harvard Business Review reminds us that the entrepreneur takes psychological risks as well. By seeing the world differently than others and acting on her vision — by embracing the inner misfit — the entrepreneur must be willing to make herself vulnerable. This vulnerability, says Pallotta, “is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know.”
Read the rest of this excellent post at Harvard Business Review.
Iceland took first place in INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index (PDF) this year. Last year it won an award for best entrepreneurship movement. Iceland’s strengths, therefore, in entrepreneurship and innovation could help the country recover from its recent banking collapse. Read more at the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship.
The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) recently won a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for NFTE’s mathematics curriculum “Entrepreneurship: Owning Your Future”. From the announcement: “Written by NFTE Founder Steve Mariotti, the curriculum teaches fundamentals of mathematics as well as comprehensive guide to developing a business plan. It focuses on critical basic business skills including business communications, negotiating, business ethics, social responsibility, time management, and goal setting.” We interviewed Mr. Mariotti for the August 2009 issue of Kaizen (PDF). Read the full-length interview here.
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