Microsoft was working on e-books and tablet PCs a decade ago. So why did it never get around to releasing them? Why, with so many intelligent and talented employees, is it falling behind Apple in innovation? Dick Brass, who was a Microsoft vice president for seven years, explains how Microsoft’s lack of systems that support innovation lead to risk-avoidance and internal struggles that crush great ideas before they ever make it into the marketplace.
Entrepreneurship is all about rethinking the old way of doing things, so let’s start off the New Year by reading about ten breakthrough ideas for 2010 at Harvard Business Review. Some of the interesting issues explored by the authors are: What truly motivates employees? Can we create a better model for the pharmaceutical business? How can we speed up the process by which innovative research makes it to the marketplace? And, what lessons can we learn about productivity from hackers?
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has reported that patent filings are down for 2009. Is this a symptom of the economy, or of the fact that the time it takes to successfully file a patent is a serious barrier to innovative entrepreneurs?
The boy who harnessed the wind — a 14-year old who decides to design and build a windmill to bring electricity to his remote village in Malawi. A deeply human story of initiative, ingenuity, and independence.
“What makes visionary entrepreneurs such as Apple’s Steve Jobs, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Ebay’s Pierre Omidyar and Meg Whitman, and P&G’s A.G. Lafley tick?”
An article by Vivek Wadhwa at TechCrunch explains why “VCs follow innovation, they don’t lead.”
The National Venture Capital Association claims in their Venture Impact report that companies like Microsoft and Google “…would not exist today without the funding and guidance provided during their early stages by venture capitalists.”
But what about the entrepreneurs who, as Wadhwa puts it, “risk their life savings, max out their credit cards and put their families in the back seat?”
Dr. Stephen Hicks was invited to speak at three conferences over the past few months. In September, he was a special guest speaker at the Fiserv Connect Forum in Orlando, Florida, where he discussed “Innovation, Ethics, and ‘Creative Destruction.’” In July, he delivered two lectures on “Capitalism and Art in Contemporary America” at The Atlas Society’s summer seminar in Portland, Oregon. And in June he gave a talk on “The Role of Outside Donors in the College Curriculum,” at the International Association for Business and Society’s 2008 conference in Tampere, Finland.
Robert I. Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford’s Engineering School, illustrates two “weird ideas that work”. This presentation is based on his book Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation, of which a preview is available here.
Growthology’s Tim Kane wonders what Schumpeter would think about the changing face of innovation promotion: “If Schumpeter had lived to see the development of the IT revolution, the Internet, and google, what would he have thought? He probably would be incredibly encouraged to see the acceleration of innovation and the constant re-spawning of innovative small firms. This is the start-up culture, and my sense is that it is the one big idea Schumpeter missed.”
Microsoft was working on e-books and tablet PCs a decade ago. So why did it never get around to releasing them? Why, with so many intelligent and talented employees, is it falling behind Apple in innovation? Dick Brass, who was a Microsoft vice president for seven years, explains how Microsoft’s lack of systems that support innovation lead to risk-avoidance and internal struggles that crush great ideas before they ever make it into the marketplace.
