By Alexandra Reid
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Forbes, Financial Post, iNova Capital, Inc., TechCrunch, MediaPost and Canadian Business.
Steve Blank’s most audacious guerilla marketing stunts
Author John Greathouse speaks with Steve Blank — professor, thought leader, author and leader within the Lean Startup Movement — to share his wily and creative feats as a creative marketing entrepreneur.
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By Leo Valiquette
As Francis will blog about later this week, Victoria Lennox and the team at Startup Canada were back in Ottawa last week and my brief showing at one of the events left me with plenty of food for thought.
Startup Canada wrapped up two busy days in Ottawa with a “Wine Down” event at The Hub on Bank Street on Friday evening. For those of you who don’t know it, The Hub is a co-working, meeting and learning space focused around social entrepreneurship.
I am a Gen Xer, not a boomer, and yet, to be in that room, I certainly did feel my age in a way that I haven’t before. There was plenty of idealism, ambition and energy. There’s plenty of idealism, ambition and energy to be found all over Ottawa wherever young entrepreneurs tend to congregate, be it The Hub, TheCodeFactory, or any of the various open labs, watering holes and caffeine bars that lie in the orbits of Carleton, Ottawa U and Algonquin.
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By Denzil Doyle
Prime Minister Harper is to be congratulated for his efforts to diversify Canada’s international trade so that we are less dependent on the U.S.
The cornerstone of his initiative is the signing of free trade agreements with as many countries as possible around the world. His advisors have obviously alerted him about what would happen to Canada if the U.S. ever becomes energy self-sufficient and does not need our oil, whether it be clean or dirty. They have also likely reminded him that Obama is a protectionist who has goofy ideas of how economies really work. (He obviously studied at the McGuinty School of Economics and majored in windmills and solar panels.)
Harper’s efforts, and the environment in which he is operating, can be looked upon as those of a mother bird who leaves the nest every morning in search of food for the baby birds. However, when he returns he finds that the baby birds have been defecating in the nest all day and that he really doesn’t have anything nice to show to the other big birds with whom he has been cavorting. The baby birds are fighting over things like how many extra worms they should get because they have pipelines running through their corner of the nest, or some of them want to throw their worms overboard and replace them with windmills and solar panels.
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By Denzil Doyle
Productivity is a topic that attracts a great deal of attention at both the federal and provincial levels of government in Canada. Most observers paint a grim picture of Canadian productivity across all sectors.
A recent entrant to the debate is Donald Drummond who authored an article in the June 26 issue of the National Post which carried the ominous heading, No more excuses for business. Mr. Drummond is described as “one of Canada’s foremost authorities on economics and an avid contributor to and commentator on Canadian fiscal and public policy.” He is obviously someone we should listen to on a topic of such importance.
I scanned his article carefully to see if it elevated the debate beyond the quagmire in which it has been trapped in recent years. Unfortunately, it did not. Like the others, it leaves one with the impression that Canadians must run a little faster on the treadmill and apply more technology in our manufacturing sector if we are going to close the alleged productivity gap that exists between us and our major trading partners, the U.S. in particular.
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By Alexandra Reid
As usual, we covered a lot of ground last month on our blog. We talked about social media, customer service, content marketing, trademarks for small businesses, neuromarketing, the trials of RIM, government funding for startups and what they have to get right to go global. In case you missed any of our posts, here’s a handy roundup:
July 9: Trademarks for small businesses in little towns
July 23: What technology firms must get right to internationalize quickly
July 25: Have the feds finally found the right way to back winners?
July 30: The pitch from a neuromarketing perspective
And on a related note…
In addition to our series, our associates and guest bloggers were also busy writing on a great range of topics. Here are our other posts from July, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:
July 26: Hard-cabled for success
July 31: A nice little story about the value of storytelling in content marketing
July 16: The best time to start a business
July 17: 5 qualities of a great ghostwriter
July 24: Throttled by those five ubiquitous rings
July 10: 7 reasons why people hate your B2B business blog
July 11: Your audience will judge you by your cover
July 3: The top 10 truths of social media
July 18: Where is Ottawa’s International Startup Festival?
July 12: Managing perceptions and product at RIM like Apple did
July 19: Why I like customer advisory boards
July 5: The price of everything, the value of nothing and customer service
Image: Cynthia Frenette
By Alexandra Reid 
