Temple SmallBizU The Temple University Small Business Development Center provides exceptional training opportunities for start-up and existing business owners. Take advantage of the free or nominally priced educational programs. Classes are available in the following areas: Business PlanningBusiness OperationsHuman resourcesAccounting, FinanceTaxesMarketingSalesLegal Issues There are also excellent training opportunities in international trade, environmental, government procurement and technology commercialization. Our two featured series are our Entrepreneurial Success Workshop and Construction Management Certificate program.
It Took Less Than 10 Years for IT Not to Matter Way back in May 2003, Nick Carr published the article “IT Doesn’t Matter” in the Harvard Business Review. For those of you who don’t remember it, Carr’s piece was a doozy and then some. He argued that companies paying top dollar for the latest and greatest technological equipment were spending a lot to buy a very limited competitive edge, if any. The chief executive officers of the largest technology companies reacted to this proposition as you might expect. Ignoring all the nuances in Carr’s argument, they viewed it as a wholesale attack on technology. Carly Fiorina, then CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), called Carr “dead wrong.” In truth, it has taken just about 10 years for Carr’s view of the world to reach mass adoption. Most of the people I talk to these days are like Siobhan McFeeney, who heads up information systems management for the AAA in Northern California, Nevada, and Utah. Salesforce—the granddaddy of the software-as-a-service companies—went public in 2004.
Darden Speaker Series This series features speakers who have visited Darden as part of the Darden Distinguished Speaker Series (DDSS), the Darden Leandership Forum (DLF), and the 50th Anniversary Speaker Series. The speaker series brings top-level corporate, government, and industry leaders to Darden to discuss current business issues and trends, and their individual leadership philosophy. These guest speakers represent a variety of experiences, industries and geographical regions, but all share a similar commitment to the core values consistent with the Darden mission: to better society by developing leaders in the world of practical affairs. Subscribe to this series of podcasts: or auto-subscribe in iTunes: Monday, March 4, 2013DAPHNE KOLLER, CO-FOUNDER OF COURSERA The Darden Leadership Speaker Series presents Daphne Koller, Co-founder of Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with top universities to make the best education freely accessible to everyone. James P. John A. Martha N. Wendy L.
Thomas Kuhn: the man who changed the way the world looked at science | Science | The Observer Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you've ever heard or used the term "paradigm shift", which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress. A Google search for it returns more than 10 million hits, for example. And it currently turns up inside no fewer than 18,300 of the books marketed by Amazon. The real measure of Kuhn's importance, however, lies not in the infectiousness of one of his concepts but in the fact that he singlehandedly changed the way we think about mankind's most organised attempt to understand the world.
Knowledge At Wharton the other side of INNOVATION - Research The only effective way to study the management of innovation initiatives is to compile in-depth, multi-year case histories. Doing so is time-consuming and expensive. It requires in-depth interviewing, followed by the meticulous process of synthesizing hundreds of pages of interview transcripts and archived documents into meaningful narratives. The Other Side of Innovation is based on an extensive ten-year study that produced the most extensive library of case studies about executing innovation initiatives in the world. Several of the case studies are summarized in this book. Subject companies include: 3M Corporation Analog Devices, Inc. 3M Corporation Vijay Govindarajan; Julie Lang Length: 4 pages Publication date: 2002 Case No. 2-0002 3M's strategy was rooted in innovation. 3M's 30 Percent Rule, where 30 percent of revenues must come from products introduced in the last four years, clarifies and drives its innovation mentality. This is not your grandfather’s tractor!
New Consumer Bill of Rights The original work done by John F. Kennedy on the Consumer Bill of Rights was a towering achievement and it was never our intent to start from scratch. In fact, it was our intent to change the original as little as possible while still expanding and updating the rights. Our amendments are to three of the current five rights. 1) The right to safety: We made two additions to the language that we believe represents the expectation that today's consumer should have as part of an exchange with any enterprise. 2) The right to be informed: This section saw the biggest changes probably based on two factors: the power of transparency to empower consumers and the newfound access now possible through the creation of the Internet. Additions represented here in italics: These amendments were made to represent our new understanding that what is in our products can be as dangerous as what is in or on our foods. 3) The right to choose: This right saw two important amendments.
Innovation from the Edge Some time ago, Mathew Ingram of Gigaom asked in a post why it is that the NY times and other newspapers don’t create new innovations, like daily deals . The question inspired an impressive variety of comments, from those who denounced newspapers as “old fashioned” and “change averse” to those who pointed out that a newspaper’s primary mission is journalistic. Whatever your sentiments about newspapers, clearly the problem isn’t exclusive to them. Why didn’t Yahoo invent the search engine? Corporations are not People Most people assume that large organizations simply don’t want to innovate because they like the status quo. I don’t want to say that doesn’t happen, but if that were so, it would be an easy problem to fix. An alternative explanation is both more likely and more interesting: people within organizations pursue worthy individual actions that result in poor global outcomes. It is a mistake to anthropomorphize organizations. The Innovation Ecosystem The Cybernetics of Action
COMMON Watch as Alex Bogusky, Rob Schuham and John Bielenberg present COMMON, and follow along with the deck below (Download PDF). We’re confident that benefiting people, communities, society, the environment and future generations is the new advantage in business. We’re launching the COMMON brand in support of this transition from competitive advantage to collaborative advantage. COMMON is one part community; one part business prototyper; and one part collaborative brand. A living network of creative people rapidly prototyping dozens or hundreds of progressive businesses designed to solve social problems. Mathematicians will lead the next consumer tech market disruption This is a guest post by Duncan Smith, head of product development at Cambridge Consultants When we think of how the best consumer technology is developed, the devices that make major breakthroughs in consumer experience, we tend to think of engineers or product designers -- whether it is the Jonathan Ive-designed iPod or James Dyson and his vacuum cleaners. What we won't think of is a mathematician. However, as we look to the near future of consumer technology, mathematicians are going to be behind the next generation of "must have" devices and services. As an engineer I grew up using mathematical modelling as a tool for good design. Of course user experience and technology are still important to innovation, but they are fast becoming "hygiene factors" -- necessary but not sufficient to thrill consumers. This is because the next big consumer technology breakthrough will require complex mathematical solutions rather than just inspired design and applied technology expertise.
Y Combinator C. M. Rubin: The Global Search for Education: In Search of Innovation "We reinvented the notion of a film festival and we were disruptive mainly out of necessity." -- Craig Hatkoff "Educate to Innovate," President Obama's campaign for excellence in science, technology, engineering & math, is a call to action that our education system embrace a specific type of orientation. Innovation requires educators to think about a 21st century education incorporating both critical and creative thinking beginning with the earliest years of a student's education. Disruptive innovation definition: A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. Following on from my interview with Dr. I had the pleasure of connecting with Clay Christensen (Kim B. "In the history of access to knowledge, we're at an inflection point that is rivaled only by innovations like the printing press." -- Clay Christensen C.
How Big Companies Are Becoming Entrepreneurial Editor’s note: Dan Schawbel is the managing partner of Millennial Branding, a Gen Y research and management consulting firm. He is also the author of Me 2.0 and was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 list in 2010. You probably believe that big companies are anti-entrepreneurial because you assume they are slow growth dinosaurs that resist change, but history teaches us otherwise. Today, companies are starting new entrepreneurship initiatives because they need fuel for innovation, desire top talent and need to sustain a competitive advantage. Intrapreneurship is on the rise In the past, we heard of intrapreneurs or individuals that behave like entrepreneurs in major companies. Corporate entrepreneurship contests Colleges aren’t the only ones starting their own entrepreneurship contests. Amazon Web Services has the “Start-Up Challenge,” which is a competition for start-ups that use its Web, e-commerce and cloud-computing technology to build their infrastructures and businesses.