Tag: business
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When (and When Not) to Consider Venture Capital
On discussing why he and his co-founders are seeking venture capital funding for their programming question and answer site (StackOverflow), Joel Spolsky provides a number of scenarios for when a company should give consideration to VC funding: There’s a land grab going on. There is a provable concept that’s repeatable. The business could benefit from…
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Icon-Based Business Plans
Depending on who you listen to, a business plan is either a waste of your time or an essential document. A good compromise could be Peter Hilton’s idea to create a concise, icon-based business plan visualisation: Inspired by the simplicity and success of the Creative Commons icons, which condense pages of information that no one ever…
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Fostering Innovative Thinking
By interviewing and surveying 3,500 visionary entrepreneurs over a six-year period, a pair of professors believe they have identified the five habits and skills common to ‘creative executives’ that distinguish them from the rest: Associating: the skill of connecting seemingly unrelated questions, problems and ideas. Questioning, especially “questions that challenge the status quo and open…
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Systems for Innovation and Microsoft
Microsoft is a hugely innovative company, but the culture that has developed there has stunted or even thwarted its innovations, suggests former Microsoft Vice President Dick Brass. The ingredients of this culture are numerous, but it has flourished largely because of the company’s structure preventing the development of “a true system for innovation”. Not everything…
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What People Pay For
As a natural follow-up to his Monetizing Your Web App article [previously], Dan Zambonini looks at user needs and what people are willing to pay for: Time: Convenience, Efficiency, Immediacy Scarcity Comfort Esteem: Id, Desirability, Self-Image, Ego Belonging: Relationships, Sex, Affection Survival: Health, Safety, Wellbeing Financial Security: Wealth, Success, Career Entertainment: Emotion, Experiences Intellectual Stimulation:…
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Environmental Assumptions
Big business is environmentally destructive: a widespread and almost unquestioned assumption. A false assumption, according to Jared Diamond, noting that profits often arise from green initiatives and environmental concern is of inherent importance to many large corporations. The story is told through the lens of Wal-Mart’s transport and packaging initiatives, Coca-Cola’s concern “with problems of…
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Marketing and Spreading Online
Bud Caddell, strategist at Undercurrent, talks with the author of Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken, on Bud’s experience of marketing online and how it really should be done–by the small and large companies. This on making something ‘spreadable’: Trying to design a program that reaches mass first, isn’t going to spread at all. It’s not remarkable, there’s…
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On Hiring Talent (Not Just Programmers)
You could hire through open source like GitHub (“we hire ‘The Girl or Guy Who Wrote X,’ where X is an awesome project we all use or admire”) or use a check-list to recognise competency (passion, self-teaching, a love of learning, intelligence, hidden experience and knowledge of a variety of technologies) and no doubt find…
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Apple, Disney and Pixar: It’s the Products
Written in early 2006 shortly after Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in a $7.4 billion all-stock deal, BusinessWeek looks at the relationship between the Disney and Apple CEOs and where their relationship may lead. Prescient in that it accurately predicted the Apple TV and the iPhone, the article also briefly looks at Jobs and his product-first…
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The Societal Value of Various Jobs
The New Economics Foundation has released a report comparing various jobs in terms of the societal value they destroy or generate (pdf). The report was produced to start “a fundamental rethink of how the value of work is recognised and rewarded”—specifically by creating a relationship between jobs that create a benefit for society and the…