Teaching Kids Financial Fitness

One of the gaping holes in the education system is the life skill of personal finance.  Here is a great way to teach kids about money!  Centsables

Starting a Startup Business

Where I live, February is the worst weather month of the year.  We spend a lot of time inside and travel as little as possible.  February is a good month to read and think.  

Today is "Startup Monday," so let's read and think about it! 

• How to Start a Startup by Paul Graham
• Startup Tools collected by Steve Blank
• Interview with Emmet Gowin by John Caponigro
• Jessica Livingston: What Stops Female Founders?
• Dennis Crowley: Top Five pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs
• Max Levchin: Greatest of Max Levchin's Lessons Learned as a Young Entrepreneur
  
  (Entrepreneurial Design)
  

Will Manufacturing Make a Comeback?

One of the fundamental premises of "What's New America" is that innovation and entrepreneurship are drivers of economic recovery and expansion.  As America continues its recovery from the Great Recession, more and more economists are theorizing that the rising cost of doing business in China and election year politics are bringing manufacturing home from overseas. 

Along these lines, MIT researchers are conducting a two-year Institute-wide research project called Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) focusing on renewing American manufacturing. The central thesis of this study is the United States still produces a great deal of promising basic research and technological innovation that needs to be translated into economic growth and new jobs.

• Production in The Innovation Economy (MIT)

Oil Pipeline and Keystone

As the debate about the Keystone pipeline continues, I found this a cool set of information.

Get Over the Hump: Leadership To Come Out of Recession

In The USA, we often refer to Wednesday as "Hump Day," the mid point of the week which once this day is over, it's only two more days till the weekend!  

The economic recovery we are in cannot seem to get over the hump.  Maybe where you work cannot seem to get over the hump and breakthrough.  Today is devoted to getting over the hump. 

• The Bad Workplace Hump: Toxic Versus Cooperative Behaviors At Work (International Journal of Leadership Studies )
• Innovating in Recessionary Times (Monitor Innovation)
• The Bad Economy Hump (Milken Institute)

Measuring Innovation, Davos, New in High Tech--It's Tech Tuesday!

Today is Tech Tuesday where we begin our day with a focus on the technology sector.  

The competitiveness of companies today is highly dependent on the ability to be innovative, i.e. constantly exceeding customer expectations, and challenging competitors. 

• Measuring For Innovation: A Guide For Teams (Innovation Management). 
• Insight from Davos: How Global Thought Leaders Talk About Innovation.  (Forbes)
• What's New in High Tech? Where are venture capitalists placing their bets on innovation and entrepreneurship?  **Note: Audio takes 27 seconds to begin in the video below...
  
  
  
  
  
  

Weekend: Personal Focus--8 Nations of Innovation

Rick Warren is a spiritual leader, author, and philanthropist.  This is a great TED talk on how to innovate your own life. 

The Role Of Innovation in Competitiveness

We now live in an innovation economy in America.  As Dean DiBiase says, When old solutions are applied to new challenges, the results are never good. 

While America cannot rely on its old place in the world, innovation keeps us moving ahead of the rest of the world!  Innovation is a word that many today believe is hard to define.  It seems it is akin to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart who said he couldn't define pornography but would "know it when I see it."

Here is one definition of innovation to help you know it when you see it:

1. 1  The introduction of a good (product), which is new to consumers, or one of higher quality than was available in the past;
2. 2  Methods of production, which are new to a particular branch of industry. These are not necessarily based on new scientific discoveries and may have, for example, already been used in other industrial sectors;
3. 3  The opening of new markets;
4. 4  The use of new sources of supply;
5. 5  New forms of competition, that leads to the restructuring of an industry.
   

Michael Porter of Harvard, one of my favorites on competition and innovation, defined innovation well:

0. to include both improvements in technology and better methods or ways of doing things. It can be manifested in product changes, process changes, new approaches to marketing, new forms of distribution, and new concepts of scope . . . [innovation] results as much from organizational learning as from formal R&D.
   

What I am reading about innovation today:

• Edison's Approach to Goals (Innovation Excellence)
• What Does Innovation Really Mean (Bloomberg Business Week)
• The Role Of Innovation
• Watched Michael Porter's great talk given in Saudi Arabia, "Innovation and Competitiveness."

Tech Tuesday: Shale Gas

Not all technology innovation is in computers and smart devices. 

In live in western New York State.  The Marcellus and Utica shale deposits are big news in our area. As an investor, one of the most interesting companies I am looking at is AbTech, a company whose polymer technologies developed for oil spills are being adopted by the fracking industry.  Once their smart sponges absorb wastes they permanently bond and cannot be squeezed out.  The fracking water problem is able to use this technology to clean and re-use water on site at wells.  

I think  one of the arguments against shale gas innovation just got silenced.

View AbTech Corporate Video

From MIT Technology Review

• View info-graphics of natural gas resources, production and consumption.
• See how a drilling rig is moved.
• View an animation of how horizontal drilling works. 

Monday Startup

Mondays are the day we get our brain back in gear for another week of racing with rats to find new cheese.  Yes, I did read "Who Moved My Cheese!" 

• This week Apple  said they are going to change the textbook industry.  I don't know about you, but with two kids and a spouse in college, every time I pay over $100 for a textbook I say to myself, "This is such a racket.  There has to be a better way."  Is the Apple initiative a better way?  Since Apple likes to control the user experience--something I detest about Apple--I can see how Apple is trying to build a dependency on their devices in the textbook market.  (FastCo.Exist)
• Last week, here in the Rochester, NY area where I live and work, Kodak finally went bankrupt.  A friend wrote me and asked why this happened.  Here is how I responded:
• Kodak was the king of film and then invented digital. As other industries and companies began to envision how they could use digital technology in personal computers, photography, and mobile devices, Kodak hesitated on putting themselves of out the old film based business. We call this cannibalization--put yourself out of business so someone else doesn't. That opened the door for competitors like Canon and Sony to leverage digital technology in cameras and mobile devices. Kodak then fell behind the curve and never caught up. There were also a bunch of financial decisions they made that Wall Street analysts punished them for. Stock options for employees dropped in value. Good managers then started leaving and the death spiral began.  Let this be a lesson about hesitation in company strategic planning and innovation!

• Last for today, CROWD FUNDING has long been used by charities and non-profits to raise money for projects.  In these days of banks being encouraged by Federal Reserve policy to not lend money to small businesses, crowd funding has faced the hurdle of Securities and Exchange Commission laws making this source of capital difficult for small business.  That seems to be changing (Entrepreneurship). 
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• 13 Crowd Funding Websites to Fund Your Business
• 13 Crowd Funding Sites for Social-Cause Entrepreneurs
• How to Find Venture Capital Investors For Your Company