Back in 1999, minty-fresh from my Sloan MBA and stint at the Boston Consulting Group, I thought I knew all there was to know about ‘survival’ business jargon. This namely consisted of what I called the ‘big eight’ buzzwords: The first four related to top-line growth, namely: Strategy, Competitive Advantage, M&A (when you have no competitive advantage but you have
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Seed accelerators or incubators like the Y-Combinator and TechStars have become increasingly popular mechanisms to support startups, offering funding, mentoring and sometimes office-space for founders and their teams. There are hundreds of such programs in the United States and abroad and the number seems to be growing by the day. However, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, a recent
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University of Virginia Darden professor Saras Sarasvathy’s groundbreaking 2001 paper “What Makes Entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial” finally gained some widespread recognition when Vinod Khosla posted a copy on his website with some personal notes, one of which read: “First good paper I’ve seen”. Professor Sarasvathy developed the Effectuation theory of entrepreneurship after exhaustively interviewing 27 serial entrepreneurs. Her research findings greatly advanced
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In Part I of this blog, I covered five common inhibitors to corporate entrepreneurship, namely: Lack of time Lack of connections Lack of CE skills (& context to learn them) Lack of executive visibility & resources Flawed risk/reward ratio and or misconceptions In Part II I introduce a programmatic example on how to deal with the above challenges – An
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Companies realize that they don’t innovate – their employees innovate. Companies are thus earnestly preaching: ‘Innovation is everyone’s job”! While the employees themselves want to become more innovative and entrepreneurial, they face five major structural inhibitors in attempting to do so (that only the most gifted, networked and experienced corporate entrepreneurs can overcome – unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them
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Necrophone 