The eyes of the Canadian commercialization ecosystem will be focused sharply on Toronto and Ottawa this week as the Ontario and federal governments bring down new budgets that are expected to considerably reshape broad programs of industrial, research and business incentives in each jurisdiction..
At the federal level, where the budget arrives Thursday, the main concern will be around the future of the Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit, a widely used program that accounts for well more than half of Ottawa’s annual $7-billion support for research and development. More than 24,000 companies every year underwrite at least part of their operations through this refundable tax credit that gets paid out whether the company is profitable or not. The fear is that the federal government will follow the advice of the Expert Panel Review of the Federal Support to Research and Development, a task force that suggested SR&ED be scaled back and the savings redirected into more direct funding of research.
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By Francis Moran
When prospects approach us to talk about our helping them with their marketing, they almost always mean help with their marketing programs, the stuff they do to promote their company and product or service. And while we can certainly create greater value simply through the effective management of marketing programs, real marketing consists of much more than this. Real marketing consists in the first instance of identifying a high-value pain or need that your technology has the potential to address, and then building the right product to meet that need. Only after that can you start crafting a marketing program.
I have always referred to this approach to marketing as “capital-M marketing,” and so I was immediately drawn to a chapter in an e-book that’s been on my spike for a while but that I only just got around to reading. In their “The Secrets of Tuned In Leaders: How technology company CEOs create success (and why most fail),” authors Craig Stull, Phil Myers and David Meerman Scott use almost the same language in a section they title, “Marketing with a Big ‘M’.”
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By Francis Moran
With the possible exception of a client vying for a huge defence procurement project in the late 1980s, an undertaking for which money certainly seemed to be no object, I’m pretty sure nobody has ever told me they have more money than they wanted or was needed for a top-notch, multi-faceted, integrated and long-term marketing program. If I ever do find such a client, I expect they shall be in the unicorn-ranching business.
Given this near-universal reality, why do so many companies waste or spend poorly the already-inadequate sums they do manage to set aside for marketing?
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By Francis Moran
I changed internet service providers this month and, while I was at it and since it was the same company, also cancelled my cable television service. It’s not something I did on a whim. I have been dissatisfied with the quality of the internet service I was receiving, and have long despaired of my provider’s customer service.
But that’s not why I switched. I’ve never been tempted to move from one ISP to another because, short-term promotional offers aside, the two major alternatives in my neck of the woods offered pretty much the same quality of service for pretty much the same price. And neither is any great shakes when it comes to customer service.
However, I recently learned of a local, independent service provider that offered far faster service for a lower price. Like in many other households, watching television for our family these days is much more a matter of streaming content from both paid and free sources on the web, and twice now I have bumped into the what once seemed to be a rather generous bandwidth cap with my current provider. In addition to the much higher speeds and lower cost, the cap with my new provider is more than three times higher.
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By Francis Moran
Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that I am passionate about entrepreneurship and a huge fan and supporter of startups. So it’s not unusual to find me at almost any event where startup entrepreneurs gather.
On Monday, however, I found myself in a bit of a more atypical venue for such a gathering — the barrel cellar of Laughing Stock Vineyards on the Naramata Bench near Penticton in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. (I snapped the alongside picture from just outside the cellar.)
Gathered around a long table in the cellar was an eclectic collection of agriculture and agri-tourism entrepreneurs, brought together by Laughing Stock co-founder and former investment executive Cynthia Enns. Cynthia took advantage of the arrival in BC of Startup Canada’s national tour and invited a number of her neighbours and other local stakeholders to come together to discuss how they could help each other and better promote their region.
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