In the great rush to politicize the bankruptcy of Solyndra, potentially valuable lessons are being ignored. I’ve argued before (investing the wrong way, VCs and Green Tech, and More VCs in Green Tech) about the folly of public investing in Solyndra and similar new ventures, but now fear the scramble of politics will wash away valuable lessons in pursuing innovations in clean technology.
New report: The challenges and best practices of pursuing low-carbon innovation
Climate change—and efforts to mitigate it—are creating an increasingly uncertain future for businesses. The long-term effects of a warming climate are enormously difficult to predict. In the near term, however, new policies, technologies, and market preferences are already altering the competitive landscape of entire industries. That is creating opportunities for companies that effectively produce and manage low-carbon innovations in their markets—and threatening those that, by choice or circumstance, do not.
Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison
Last week, Bob Sutton asked me to add my two bits to the dog-pile surrounding the “Steve-Jobs-is-the-modern-Thomas-Edison” analogy. I initially balked. There were plenty of folks who’d already made this connection. Then I balked because Bob’s own brilliant post on Apple took the discussion in a much more productive direction. Over the weekend, however, I bit. Not because of how the analogy fit, but because of how it didn’t.
2011 UC Entrepreneurship Academy
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Problem-finding, by Tom Kelley of IDEO
Albert Szent-Gyorgi, who won the Nobel Prize in 1937 for discovering vitamin C, once said “Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought.”
When it comes to innovation, or its cousins invention and discovery, we tend to think of it as a process of discovering solutions. In fact, it is more often a process of discovering the right problems. Tom Kelley, of IDEO, talks so eloquently here about the value of finding the right problem in talking about how IDEO's designers were able to discover a new problem in what was essentially an old and mature market, kid's toothbrushes.
BMEA2011 Elevator Pitches
Elevator pitches are a great way to share some of the ideas that have been brewing here at the Biomedical Engineering Entrepreneurship Academy.
One of the first and easiest ways to prototype a potential venture is the well-crafted elevator pitch. With this in hand, anyone can get great feedback from potential customers, mentors, advisors, investors. Sure, you can communicate alot more detail with more time, but that leaves less time to listen and learn. Below are the BMEA2011 elevator pitches—all based on research being conducted in university labs around the country:
Biomedical Engineering Entrepreneurship Academy 2011
This morning our 2011 Biomedical Engineering Entrepreneurship Academy comes to close. 45 university research scientists from across the country, full professors to first year grad students, arrived on Monday morning with their research and the desire to see it become a reality. After an intensive week of work, they're pitching their proposed businesses for the first time and to a jury of potential investors.
An (innovation) revolution in our midst
The fields of innovation and entrepreneurship are undergoing a revolution of sorts. We are slowly and inexorably recognizing that our obsession with ideas—how to have them or how to buy them—fails to explain how breakthroughs actually happen. It's no longer easy to believe that a single idea drove Apple's iPod (which in a decade has become its biggest business) or Edison's lightbulb when we consider the dozens of other companies who were already selling those same ideas in the market when their proverbial and literal light bulbs went off. As with any scientific revolution (and conveniently self-referential), it's not a single idea that drives the revolution but rather a subtle accumulation of similarly new ideas from different sources. In this case, the revolutions is about the role of entrepreneurship, of action and experimentation, in making breakthroughs happen.
Problem finding—not just for amateurs
I've posted recently about the challenge of understanding the problem before rushing off to develop a solution (Finding new problems and What's the problem with LEDs?). A recent post by Sam Shrauger, Vice President of Global Product and Experience at PayPal, reminded me that losing sight of the real problem (or ever having it in the first place) is not just an amateur mistake: Why the Mobile Payment Debate Is Headed in the Wrong Direction. As Shrauger points out in talking about the future of mobile payments, even the best people in the best organizations lose sight of the real problems.
UCD Research: link btwn stock price & GHG emissions across industries, strongest for energy cos and utilities http://j.mp/h70nH3
UCD Research: link btwn stock price & GHG emissions across industries, strongest for energy cos and utilities j.mp/h70nH3
Andrew Hargadon 