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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By Linda Forrest
On this blog, we’ve written quite a bit about the PR value of reference customers and how to groom them. What we haven’t yet explored is how your PR team works with the balance of your team to cultivate that reference and ultimately exploit it to the highest degree within your PR program. This post aims to do just that.
How does your PR team know which customers to approach to be a reference?
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Associate Peter Hanschke is an Ottawa-based product management specialist. His post is part of our continuing series about the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market. We welcome your comments.
By Peter Hanschke
I’ve seen this situation far too often.
The engineering team and product management decide on what the next revision of the product needs to be or, in a new product introduction case, what the new product will be. The development team goes through its process to define how to build the features or product and starts a large development cycle.
There is always a great deal of interaction between engineering and product management, but, sadly, marketing is left out. I’m not sure why; maybe they feel that marketing won’t “get it.” Instead, the development process winds through the last test phase without any input from the marketing team. When all the critical bugs are fixed the product is released. It is at this point that marketing gets the product information thrown over the wall with the unrealistic expectation that it will create an immediate miracle. And then everyone wonders why the press release, the collateral, the web site, and so forth are so late in coming.
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By Alexandra Reid
Google Plus is all the rave, but will it eventually experience the same outcome as Wave? Bloggers and social media enthusiasts are clearly excited about the new platform, dissecting, praising and criticizing its features and debating whether it will ever seek to compete with Facebook or if it will flounder like Google’s other attempts to penetrate the social media marketplace.
It is estimated that Google Plus will grow to 20 million users by the end of the weekend and that the current user base has already surpassed the 10 million mark. It has also grown at an astonishing rate, with a 350-percent increase in users in just six days.
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This is the 24th 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
A couple of moons ago, we talked about how “entrepreneur” is often a four-letter word on the university campus. Too many schools fail to appreciate how Web 2.0 has democratized innovation for the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and make the mistake of assuming it’s only engineers or physics students who can come up with the next billion-dollar idea.
These outdated perspectives are further aggravated by student and faculty cultures that take a dim view of capitalism, scorn profit as a motive, and emphasize formal theory over practical, hands-on projects.
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