Innovation Alone Won’t Ensure Success. To Thrive, Shift Focus from Your Product to Building the Business It Needs. It’s About Finding Customers, Securing Investments, And Navigating Financial Challenges.
Beyond Invention: The Art of Business Creation Read More »
Horizontal progress is about creating a better mousetrap while vertical progress is about making a better way to trap a mouse.
You Need to Understand Horizontal vs. Vertical Progress Read More »
The Gartner Hype Cycle Is a Graphical Depiction of The Expectations of The Market’s Perceived Value of a New Technology or Innovation Over Time and Is Closely Linked to The Five Categories of Adopters.
How to Apply the Gartner Hype Cycle to Small Business Read More »
The Word “Startup” Has Become Ubiquitous in The American Vocabulary. However, There Is Really No Common Understanding of The Definition. This Is Because There Are Actually Two Types of Startups
What Is A Startup? Why You Need to Know the Different Types Read More »
Entrepreneurship has changed in recent years and why you may no longer need to write the classic version of a business plan.
Why Being Told You Need a Business Plan May Be Bad Advice Read More »
JP Morgan Was an International Financier and A Titan of Industry Whose History Contains Many Valuable Lessons for Small Business Owners.
7 Valuable Business Lessons from the International Financier JP Morgan Read More »
Andrew Carnegie Was a Steel Baron and A Titan of Industry Whose History Contains Many Valuable Lessons for Small Business Owners.
11 Valuable Business Lessons from the Steel Baron Andrew Carnegie Read More »
To Prosper in Business, You Need A Foundation of Solid Kenntnis Knowledge Through Firsthand Real-World Business Experiences Before You Dive in And Start Your Business.
What Is the Value of Real-World Business Experience as an Entrepreneur? Read More »
Leadership and management are both essential elements of business success. Leadership is closely aligned with the role of a CEO and Management to the role of the President. Even though there is a difference between leadership and management most people use them interchangeably which is incorrect.
What is the Difference Between Leadership and Management in Small Business? Read More »
Isaac Singer didn’t invent the sewing machine. He just perfected it. However, as a businessman, he was quite an extraordinary individual. His ability to spot opportunities and develop unique solutions was unmatched by any of his rivals.
How To Grow Rich By Thinking Like Singer – A Business Lesson From Isaac Singer Read More »
One thing contributes to more business failure. If the reason you want to start a business is you want the flexibility to work when or where you want, to become rich, or because you just want to be your own boss, you have a higher likelihood of failure. You are more likely to fail because your reasons for starting a business are self-centered and not externally focused.
The 1 Simple Thing That Contributes to Most Business Failure Read More »
There Are Five Categories of Adopters. Each of The Five Adopter Categories of Users Requires A Different Marketing Approach to Win Them Over.
The 5 Categories of Adopters – Why You Need to Know About Them Read More »
You need to shape the future rather than predict it. Why a manager entrepreneur approach is very different from a founder entrepreneurs
Exploit the Future by Shaping It – Don’t Try to Predict It Read More »
The reasoning style of the manager entrepreneur, with their predominantly causal reasoning, approaches a business startup very different from the founder-entrepreneur, who approaches a startup business primarily with effectual reasoning.
How Your Reasoning Skills Can Affect Your Business Success Read More »
Previously, we looked at how the startup landscape has changed and that you might not need a formal business plan to successfully launch your business. In this post, we will look into why we keep getting the same old business advice. What has emerged, as the funding and risk gap has widened, is a greater
Why The Business Advice You Are Getting Is One Sided Read More »
Innovations and manufacturing businesses have different planning requirements than the more common support and local service businesses.
Why The Business Planning Advice You Have Received Is Probably Stale Read More »
One of the best things for me about hunting season is not the thrill of the hunt or even trying to outwit a wild and cunning animal. Nope, it’s far less glamorous – It’s the quiet time I have alone with my thoughts. I recall a story that I read as a boy about Fred
What Is the Value of Quiet Time? Read More »
A while back, I was meeting with a client who was seeking venture capital investments to bring his product to market. I arranged to have Patrick Bultema, the Director of Innovation at Colorado College, to join us at one of our meetings. The reason why I invited Patrick to our meeting was that he had
How to Leverage Personal Development Read More »
The inverse to why sellers sell a business is why buyers buy. Often a seller may only sell one business in a lifetime. However, buyers often buy several companies during their lifetime as they assemble pieces to help another business grow. Many buyers purchase a business to avoid the risk associated with start-ups and are
Why Buyers Buy a Business Read More »
Rather than attract and retain key talent in-house, have you ever thought about building or using a platform like innocentive? Innocentive connects seekers of solutions with solvers. By using this type of platform, you can pay talented individuals based on the number of transactions you need instead of retaining them for a reoccurring salary. They
Buy and Sell Innovation Read More »
Samuel Colt was a great inventor and marketer. He never gave up on his idea even in the face of adversity. Business can learn a lot from him
Business Lessons From Samuel Colt, American Inventor Read More »
Ignore the status quo and don’t build a better mousetrap. Stop focusing on what your competitors do. Instead, challenge orthodoxies. To do so, start with any of the nine business model building blocks and build outwards. While we typically start with customer segments to build a customer-driven business model, there are four common starting points.
Inside Out Business Model Read More »
When considering your unique value proposition, I find it helpful to consider a list of common value propositions to help guide me and my client’s thinking. To that end, here are eleven common value propositions that businesses might offer to their selected customer segment. Review the following value proposition types and determine which one is
Choosing a Value Proposition Type Read More »
Disruptive innovation is not about the next new product as much as it is about transforming an existing market from being expensive and complex to affordable and accessible. A disruptive innovation is more about targeting a high profit/low margin business and creating a high volume/low margin alternative. For example, it is very expensive to take
What Is Disruptive Innovation? Read More »
Some would say that Google has a monopoly on the search engine market with over 2/3 of all search traffic. Microsoft’s Bing is a distant number two with less than 1/5 of the search engine market. Is Google a monopoly that needs to be busted up like AT&T or Standard Oil for the good of
Monopoly Is a Matter of Perspective Read More »
More and more products can be produced and assembled by robotic assembly lines. Even services, such as those offered by CPAs and stock brokers, can now be performed by software tools or applications such as TurboTax or e-Trade. Recently, I read an article that said that with the threat of a monumental rise in the
The Robot/Application Arbitrage Read More »
The federal government killed the Industrial Revolution by squelching successful entrepreneurs such as JP Morgan, JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and spinning a story for its own political gain
How to Stop the American Industrial Revolution Read More »
Climate change has been blamed on our overuse of fossil fuels and pegged as the leading cause of the inevitable doom of our species. However, climate change in the form of ice ages and droughts has occurred many times during the period of mankind. Climate change has even led to some of our most important
Climate Change Spurs Innovation Read More »
The other day I was asked if a person’s idea would make a good business. Unfortunately, I had to tell them that it would not be a good idea for them to pursue. While the idea might have been a novel and been a successful venture in the right hands, they didn’t have access to
Your Best Chance to Succeed in Small Business Read More »
Sometimes managers get too comfortable with their jobs and build internal walls to control knowledge in the hopes of making them indispensable to the company. The result is the company begins to stagnate. To combat this thinking and spur innovation, Jorma Ollila, CEO of Nokia, implemented a job swap program. Nokia adopted an everyone-out-of-your-comfort-zone management
Never Get Too Comfortable Read More »
William Boeing never said “it can’t be done” Instead he believed that decisions should be based strictly on fact and not opinions
Business Lessons From William Boeing -Facts and Science Rule Read More »
Many entrepreneurs are lured by the possibility of extreme riches of being a primary employer. However secondary employers are less risky and much easier to fund and to start.
Don’t Be a Gold Digger – Why You Need To Be Main St. Instead Read More »
Many local ecosystems have initiatives and programs to foster innovation in their own community as a way to grow new technology or manufacturing companies. They do this in the hopes it will bring in new money as the primary employer grows to maturity. However, sometimes it is not the product that generates the revenue, but
New Product vs. New Economic Model Read More »
Sometimes the best ideas come from just looking at another industry and applying their lessons to your business. For example, when Henry Ford visited a meat packing plant, he saw how a side of beef was placed on a trolley and as it traveled down a track, a line of butchers each performing a single
A Source of Innovation Read More »
When agrarian society faded in favor of the more profitable industrial era, no matter how hard you worked as a farmer or how hard the farming industry tried to preserve itself the tide of change could not be turned. By the same logic, no matter how hard we try to reestablish a middle class based
The Middle Class Sputnik Moment Read More »
What if you could give your customer his order before he was done giving it to you? Well, that idea is what built the drug store Walgreens. When a nearby customer would call in a non-prescription order using the newly developed telephone, Charles Walgreen would repeat the caller’s name, address and order so his assistant
Constant Innovation Read More »
How to employ a three-page website to test the market’s readiness and verify that a product or service will sell before you make an investment.
Testing the Market with a 3-Page Website Read More »
I think we would all agree that making a profit is the incentive to take risk through investments. Moreover, it takes investments to stimulate innovation. But innovation creates productivity gains, which in turn eat into profit. For example, a tractor that costs as much as the labor cost for 150 workers, but which can do
Who Really Benefits Most From Business Investments? Read More »
In the news, you often see that the US accuses China of being a currency manipulator by artificially keeping their currency low. If their currency were allowed to rise, goods produced in China would get more expensive in the US and we would buy less of them. Higher prices would mean that Americans would have
How to Leverage China’s Currency Manipulation to Your Advantage Read More »
3 types of Investment risk. Greater risk = great rewards. Range = Inventory, least risk/reward, thru production equipment, to innovation most risk/reward.
Understanding the Investment Risk Continuum Read More »
