By Francis Moran
There’s an old Bedouin metaphor I love that says you should never let a camel get his nose inside your tent. The metaphor alludes to the reality that many small, seemingly harmless situations ought to be prevented whilst it is still easy to do so for fear they become very large and unwieldy situations. For wherever the camel’s nose goes, the camel is sure to follow and, once completely inside your tent, is an awful lot harder to dislodge.
For small technology companies whose product supplants larger and more established competitors, however, a camel’s nose strategy can be highly effective. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
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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, provides a further commentary on the importance to a company of protecting its intellectual property.
By David French
In previous posts, we have addressed procedural issues relating to patents. In this post, we wrestle with the fundamental premise: Is it worth what we’re spending in obtaining patents?
“How can we find out whether we’re getting value for all the money that we’re spending on patents within the company?” That was the question that had been posed in my conversation with the chief financial officer of a local business. And it is a question that I’ve heard before. It is a tough question to answer.
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By Francis Moran
One of my favourite personal-development aphorisms is the phrase, “Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” On Wednesday, at an event organised by TEC Canada, a peer-to-peer mentoring program for business leaders of which I’ve been a member for more than five years, noted author and thinker Dr. Chris Luebkeman took it one step further.
“Change is constant. The future is fiction. Participation is what shapes our world,” he told 175 CEOs and other business people gathered for the event. “If you’re not participating in writing the story of tomorrow, you’re going to live in a story that someone else wrote.”
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This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
Obtaining a lighthouse customer is a critical first step in starting a business. It establishes your credibility as a seller, and creates a repeatable case study that captures the needs of your target market. The follow-on step is differentiating your business relative to the competition. Having something that others cannot easily duplicate or manufacture is critical to establishing a secure beachhead in your chosen market.
Sales may now be the least of your concerns. What may now undo you is your own marketing prowess. Your reputation is now dependant on how you execute on your next contract, and there are a number of key factors that hopefully you have prepared for.
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This is the latest contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
My recent posts have looked at what we can learn about our business behaviour from a neuroscientific point of view. We’ve looked at how our brains have evolved and how this affects the way we behave and act. Neuroscience teaches us that the cerebral brain – the part of our brain that thinks and that differentiates humans from all other species – is a relatively recent evolutionary development, and that we are largely influenced by the living vestiges of more primitive brains within us. The decision-making part of our brain is reptilian, which allows for some useful predictive modeling.
My work, however, is not just about brain science. I believe that modern business has much to learn from all of the evolutionary sciences. Despite the drive to incorporate more and more new technology into our daily lives, we are creatures of our evolutionary past in in other ways.
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