This is the next contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
In my first posting, I promised that this blog would investigate how human evolution has impacted the way we do business, why we are the way we are, and why we act and feel the way we do in our personal and business lives. When it comes to evolution, two areas of investigation are of interest: first, the evolution of the human brain as it relates to how we make decisions, and second, how and why we like to live and operate in tribes.
A few weeks ago a Globe and Mail column by Margaret Wente, The Amygdala Election, provided an eloquent discussion of both phenomena visibly on display in the current Canadian federal election.
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This is the 13th 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
In our various interviews for this series, one of the most elusive topics of discussion has been culture of risk. Elusive in that it strays into the realm of stereotype and generalization.
Can it be defined by borders, or is that a naive misconception? Is it somehow encoded in the DNA of one nation’s culture more than another, shaped and influenced by how much public policy favours free-market capitalism versus socialism, or all of the above?
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As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked serial entrepreneur Jason Flick to share some of his insights on getting tech to market with lean thinking. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By Jason Flick
You would have to be living under a rock not to have heard about the billions in venture capital flooding into the Valley. Venture firms raised over $60 billion in Q1 2011 alone. Some companies are ramping from zero to billions in revenue in years rather than decades. Students fresh out of school are being offered six-figure salaries, four-month signing bonuses and iPads to come on board. (VentureBeat summed it up well in this recent story.)
Of course, these stories seldom report that for every company like this, there are 99 others that flounder and end up as large financial craters.
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By Linda Forrest
Happy Playbook release day, everyone! Today is the fateful day when Canada’s own Research in Motion begins selling its long awaited Playbook tablet. You might have heard that this was coming, as the media has been very hungry for news on tablets set to compete with iPad; it’s a topic we’ve covered here as well. You might also have heard that RIM has had a series of PR, well, disasters leading up to this release: from on-camera CEO breakdowns, to a cavalcade of bad reviews that suggest the product is not yet ready for market. What should have been an exciting and positive time has instead become a challenging time poised to test the mettle of the company and affect its long-term reputation in a highly competitive marketplace.
The recent PR missteps have been documented extensively elsewhere so rather than repeat them here in-depth, let’s look at the Playbook story as a whole and see what lessons can be learned for other companies bringing technology to market.
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This is the 12th 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
It’s fitting that we follow up last week’s post on the strategic value of marketing in its purest sense as a process for enabling customer validation and iterative product development with a definition of this thing called lean startup.
Strategic marketing is a fundamental aspect of the lean startup methodology, a methodology first defined by Eric Ries almost three years ago. And lean startup itself as a process for bringing technology to market warrants careful consideration by any entrepreneur in the socially enabled age of Web 2.0.
It’s fitting because just this month, Ries updated his definition of lean startup based on how the concept has evolved since it was first coined.
Ries defines lean “in the sense of low burn. Of course, many startups are capital efficient and generally frugal. But by taking advantage of open source, agile software, and iterative development, lean startups can operate with much less waste.”
He also defines lean startup as an application of lean thinking, which at its most basic is about maximizing the value you provide to your customers while minimizing waste in your organization. If it ain’t focused on delivering value to the customer, get rid of it.
Ries further defines a lean startup as one that is powered by these drivers:
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