Business Insider has an interview with Ben Milne (left), founder of Dwolla, an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit card fees and solves security and efficiency problems in the current online banking system. Dwolla, with about a dozen employees, is on track to handle $350 million in payments per month and is being adopted by banks and business across the country.
Check out Entrepreneur Magazine‘s fascinating profile of Angelo Sotira, co-founder and CEO of DeviantART, a popular social network (over 14 million members) for visual artists of all kinds. Sotira and his colleagues created an innovative architecture to support online creative communities years before Facebook and MySpace, with features that those more famous social networks later appropriated. The article covers Sotira’s career, DeviantART’s history, its plans for the future, and also features a short video about Sotira and DeviantART.
Colombia may be associated with violence and drugs in popular culture, but it has recently been strengthening its entrepreneurial base, says the Kauffman Foundation’s Policy Forum Blog. The Colombian government has been removing barriers to starting businesses, educational institutions have been adding more entrepreneurship courses and programs, more business incubators are cropping up, and there is an increased focus on entrepreneurship in the media. Certainly there are still problems with drugs and violence, creating a chaotic environment that discourages many potential entrepreneurs. Nonetheless, some entrepreneurs have found creative ways to respond, such as a company that produces bullet-proof underwear.
Norm Augustine believes that America is falling behind other countries like China and India in technological innovation. This is because our culture portrays engineers and scientists as nerds rather than venerating them, because our educational system deemphasizes science and math, and because we don’t invest enough in long-term basic research. “Despite what many Americans believe,” he writes, “our nation does not possess an innate knack for greatness. Greatness must be worked for and won by each new generation.”
Ken Phillips, in an article for Independent Contractors Australia, analyzes the failure of Australian government programs to nurture more entrepreneurship and innovation. The problem, he says, is that society is structured in a way that discourages self-employment. This decreases the amount of innovation in society because the experience of self-employment engenders a psychology of innovation. The self-employed person must constantly come up with new, creative ways to please clients. Phillips contrast self-employment to standard employment, which fosters a psychology of obedience to superiors and thus a lack of creative thinking.
It’s easy to understand the importance of innovators and entrepreneurs to the economy, but it’s much harder to figure out the best ways to encourage more entrepreneurship. In an article for TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa explores Start-Up Chile, a program that he calls “Chile’s Grand Innovation Experiment.” Most initiatives to create the next Silicon Valley have failed, Wadhwa argues, because they use a top-down approach that fatally leaves out the most important ingredient — the entrepreneurs themselves. Start-up Chile is therefore unique because, rather than building office parks and partnering with VC’s and universities, it focuses on attracting innovators and entrepreneurs from all over the world to Chile, where they will start their own businesses.
Popular Science has a great, in-depth feature on the best innovations of 2010. The feature lists 100 innovations from various categories, including auto tech, computing, gadgets, green tech, and home entertainment, as well as the grand awards for the most innovative from each category. There are also interesting profiles of several innovators.
Kauffman Labs for Enterprise Creation recently launched its first Women in Science and Engineering Business Idea Competition. “We know that more women than ever are leading U.S. businesses and hold a nearly three-to-one majority in undergraduate and graduate education, but too few pursue the path of high-growth entrepreneurship,” said Lesa Mitchell, vice president, Kauffman Foundation. “The Women in Science and Engineering Business Idea Competition is designed to illuminate world-changing concepts that have significant commercialization potential, and to escalate their visibility so that more female scientists and engineers are encouraged to pursue their entrepreneurial ideas.”
Also, be sure to read our fascinating Kaizeninterviews with two highly-educated female entrepreneurs, Reena Kapoor and Judy Estrin. Both women share their thoughts on the effect of culture on innovation and entrepreneurship.
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.
Business Insider has an interview with Ben Milne (left), founder of Dwolla, an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit card fees and solves security and efficiency problems in the current online banking system. Dwolla, with about a dozen employees, is on track to handle $350 million in payments per month and is being adopted by banks and business across the country.
