This is the next article in a continuing monthly series chronicling the growth path of NanoScale Corporation, a growing nanotechnology company based in Manhattan, KS that is commercializing various advanced materials and compounds for improving indoor air quality, removing pollutants, and containing and neutralizing hazardous chemicals.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
Crawford & Co. labels itself as “the world’s largest independent provider of claims management solutions to the risk management and insurance industry.” In other words, it handles insurance claims on behalf of insurers and, with operations in more than 70 countries, it certainly does not lack for scale.
Now a big part of handling insurance claims involves repair, restoration and remediation services. In the U.S. market, Crawford has this base covered with Contractor Connection – a network of about 4,000 general contractors who must continue to meet certain quality benchmarks to remain part of the Crawford network.
Throughout the year, Crawford hosts a number of CAT (for catastrophe) conferences and Contractor Connection events. These kinds of industry events are crucial for NanoScale Corporation to showcase its products before what is often a sizeable captive audience of disaster restoration general contractors and insurance professionals who are in a position to provide a significant boost to its business.
With the convention and tradeshow circuit heating up for a busy spring season, NanoScale Vice President and General Manager Kyle Knappenberger is developing battle plans to measure the effectiveness of the company’s prospecting efforts against cold hard revenues. However, he appreciates the less tangible, but equally important goals of general awareness building and networking with other vendors and product manufacturers.
“These events are places to meet new distributors and new potential partners,” he said. “It’s a meeting of the minds between different manufacturers that can also result in cross-promotion and lead sharing.”
In fact, it was such a “meeting of the minds” which connected NanoScale with a manufacturer that was bringing to market a new air purification unit. The two companies ended up working together to create a new NanoScale OdorKlenz cartridge to fit the unit.
Read More
By Caroline Kealey
Some words are hard to love, and I have to concede that “data” is one of them. It doesn’t have any magic that makes the heart of a strategic communicator beat faster. But really, it’s so important that we should all learn to love it a little. Why? Because it’s indispensible to evaluating communications success – and to demonstrating your own contribution as a strategic communicator.
Let’s face it — as a communicator you barely have the time, let alone the budget, to measure your communications activities. Yet, your senior management team is constantly asking for data on return on investment and the evidence that communications has demonstrated a meaningful result.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly 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 The Telegraph, On Startups, eMarketer, Guardian, Inc., and Startup North.
The difference between a failed business and a successful one, in five key numbers
As author Alexis Dormandy explains, KPIs are supposed to measure the most important things in a business. They are useful for getting a whole business focused on delivering the really important things. However, KPIs have now become horrendously misused to include just about any number anyone in senior management cares about, someone in finance can measure, or someone in the middle just finds interesting. This post cuts through the noise and shares five vital KPIs that every business should understand, measure, and manage.
Read More
By Terry Lavineway
The Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program was one of the long-anticipated and highly debated areas expected to be addressed in the 2012 Federal budget. Politically, the government needed to show they were listening to their taxpayers over the last number of years given the amount of consultations, the amount of press and discussion about the SR&ED program and certainly “Innovation Canada: A Call to Action,” also known as the Jenkins Report.
The biggest change introduced relates to the tax credit rate available to SR&ED claimants that are not Canadian Controlled Private Corporations (CCPCs). The tax credit rate for non-CCPCs will decrease from 20 percent to 15 percent. This is a significant reduction. The government’s view is that the reduction of the corporate income tax rate since 2007 along with the corporate tax restructuring of non-CCPCs has resulted in growing pools of unused tax credits; these corporations are not generating enough taxable income in Canada to make use of all the SR&ED investment tax credits that they are generating. Therefore, the government reasons that they can reduce the rate from 20 percent to 15 percent without much impact. While this may be true in many cases, there are definitely large taxpayers in Canada that will be significantly impacted by this reduction. Only time will tell how this change will impact the amount of R&D performed in Canada by multinational corporations or even medium-sized corporations that do not qualify for the CCPC enhanced rate.
The other changes proposed are categorized as:
Read More
By Francis Moran
FounderFuel is a Montreal-based startup accelerator for which I have been a mentor through its first two cohorts. I recently caught up with John Stokes, a partner with Real Ventures, the seed-stage venture firm behind FounderFuel. Following is an edited and condensed version of our conversation. I started by asking John how FounderFuel was going in general, now that it was well into its second cohort of teams.
“Most of the people involved here, certainly myself and (Real Venture general partner) Alan (MacIntosh), have been pretty involved in other accelerator programs to one extent or another. But when you are running on your own and you really get down to brass tacks, there’s always more to it than you see. We took a long time to decide when we were ready to do it, and I think that decision, that preparation was worth while.
Read More
-
Ontario 2012 Budget: perspectives on business incentives
March 28, 2012 by Terry Lavineway
The Ontario 2012 budget was released March 27, 2012. The general theme of the budget is getting efficiency out of the prior investments and government spending and cultivating the growth presumably inspired by previous stimulus budgets. This focus on […]
Read more... -
SoLoMo: How governments are engaging their constituents
March 27, 2012 by John Craig
My firm, Purple Forge, has developed a very meaningful relationship as a supplier of mobile applications to governments at the municipal and federal level over the past two years. Given the integration of social and location-based information into our applications […]
Read more... -
-
Government incentive programs set for major shakeup
March 26, 2012 by Francis Moran
The eyes of the Canadian commercialization ecosystem will be focused sharply on Toronto and Ottawa this week as the Ontario and federal governments bring down new budgets that are expected to considerably reshape broad programs of industrial, research and […]
Read more... -
Great articles roundup: In the media spotlight, strategic thinking, patents, value propositions and marketing technology
March 23, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a round-up of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are The Globe and Mail, Phil Marks, Fast Company, Startup North and GigaOm […]
Read more... -
-
What an IP co-ordinator should know, confidentially speaking
March 22, 2012 by David French
While recently on a trip to the United States I was invited by an inventor with new technology (relating to Cold Fusion), to sign a Confidentiality Document, also known as a Nondisclosure Agreement – NDA. I reviewed the document and I was reminded of the […]
Read more... -
My day at FounderFuel
March 21, 2012 by Francis Moran
When I first learned of FounderFuel, the Montreal-based accelerator program developed by the folks at Real Ventures, I asked if I could be part of their mentor program. I was pretty up front about […]
Read more... -
-
Outsourced community management: Agency to B2B social media communications strategy
March 20, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
Outsourcing community management is a cost-effective way for companies to run successful social media programs regardless if they do not have the internal social media resources to support such activities on their own […]
Read more... -
Great articles roundup: The domain name industry, writing lessons, advisory boards and more
March 16, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we are going to provide our readers with a round-up of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are CIRA, Globe and Mail […]
Read more... -
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
Twitter
Tweets by @FrancisMoranRecent Comments
The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]