This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Andrew Penny, an Ottawa-based business development and market strategist for B2B companies, and president of Kingsford Consulting Ltd. We welcome your comments.
By Andrew Penny
I work with dozens of business owners and executives every year. Many of them have been successfully running their businesses for the last 10 to 20 years – steady as she goes. What many of them don’t realize, however, is that a massive shift is taking place in business, driven by the relentless aging of the incumbent “decision making” class.
In fact there are 71 percent more people aged 45 to 65 than in 1990. In the next few years, these people will be leaving the workforce and the next generation will be in charge. The point is that it is not a gradual migration; it will be a rapid and exciting changeover.
About 11,000 people are retiring from the North American workforce every day – many of them are the decision makers you have been selling to for the last 20 years. As they retire, who is taking their place? I guarantee that this new person will be younger and think very differently.
What makes them different?
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, David French, a senior Canadian patent attorney with 35 years of experience, now provides the fifth of his commentaries on the importance to a company of protecting its Intellectual Property.
By David French
I began this series by talking about the importance of having an IP Co-ordinator on the team and how this role fits into an organization. Then I addressed what it means to obtain meaningful patents. We identified the three principles that apply if the objective is to obtain meaningful patents:
1. Right invention
2. Right market circumstances
3. Right patenting opportunity
In my last post I addressed the concept of “right market circumstances.” This time I will address the concept of the “right patenting opportunity.”
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By Alexandra Reid
This is part two of my three-part series on tactical methods companies can use to carry out rebranding across multiple social media accounts. Last week, I discussed common pitfalls companies face during the process of changing their names on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and how to overcome them. Today, I’ll focus on the steps required to change your company’s image across these social media channels, as well as YouTube and blogs.
It should be noted that rebranding is far more than just a change in visual identity and must be regarded as part of an overall strategy. If a brand has lost its relevance, changing its image will not fix its problems. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it won’t hide the fact that it’s still a pig. If this is the case, the company must reevaluate its answers to those core marketing questions about relevance, uniqueness, value, positioning and why people should care.
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This is the 27th article in a continuing series that examines the state of the ecosystem necessary to successfully bring technology to market. Based on dozens of interviews with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business leaders, academics, tech-transfer experts and policy makers, this series looks at what is working and what can be improved in the go-to-market ecosystem in the United States, Canada and Britain. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
The Canadian university system costs about $25 billion a year. The total income for all Canadian universities from licensing their intellectual property is around $50 million. Subtract the cost of managing that IP and you’re left with a net income of only $15 million. Getting technology to market is clearly not a big income stream for the typical Canadian university.
Those numbers come from The Way Ahead, Meeting Canada’s Productivity Challenge, by Tom Brzustowski, a professor at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management. While the book is a few years old, the overall trend illustrated by those numbers hasn’t changed. However, Brzustowski also quotes one of our past contributors, Doyletech’s Denzil Doyle, who puts these numbers in their proper context. According to Doyle, the IP income to universities represents only 2.5 percent of the new sales generated by products based on it. Do that math and you arrive at $2 billion — $2 billion in annual sales for the Canadian economy. That isn’t an insignificant sum.
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies, to share his thoughts on how startups can achieve market validation to drive revenues. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
The importance to emerging Canadian companies of being focused on winning deals outside of Canada.
As the co-founders of Purple Forge, Brian Hurley and I placed a significant amount of emphasis on exporting to the U.S. and around the world to get our business started. For those of you who don’t know Purple Forge, we develop and sell mobile applications as a service for politicians, event organizers, governments and interactive marketing firms. We are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada with offices in the U.S. and resellers around the world.
In 2009, we had a very simple idea — developing mobile applications for community engagement. The idea was to allow organizations to reach out to their key constituents to broadcast their news, events, social networking feeds and other information. These constituents would then share this information using their own Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then the organizations would ask these people to perform activities to the benefit of those organizations.
Cool, right? We thought so – and we wanted to prove it. So where to start? Well there was always the Government of Canada, which was in our own backyard. We knew the sales cycles are 18 months or more, and it was very conservative about adopting new technologies that hadn’t been proven elsewhere. We needed to find a customer who was willing to take a risk. Better yet, was willing to take a risk and would pay us to do it. That way, we could prove the value of the idea.
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