Tag Archives: Venture Fest

Jolt Your Sluggish Company Back to Its Entrepreneurial Past: Three types of Intrapreneurial programs you can start today

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Large companies have long realized that they don’t innovate – their employees innovate.    At most companies though, the usual bureaucracy gets in the way of allowing employees to emancipate their entrepreneurial drive.   A few companies have swayed their Pessimistic Patty managers to simply get out of the way, and that in itself is a huge improvement.  But the boldest companies

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Innovation Competitions. Innovation as Sport

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My name is Ricardo dos Santos and I’m an Innovation Competition-holic.   Let me get started with what I mean by Innovation Competitions (you can also check out this presentation I uploaded on slideshare). My Definition of Innovation Competitions In this context, I  use the term Innovation Competitions interchangeably with Inducement Prize Contests – these are distinctly different from recognition prizes in

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Yes you CAN sell ice to Eskimos – Part II: Our Primal Needs

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In Part I of this blog, I introduced the age-old secret of entrepreneurship – understanding the essence of what you’re really selling, i.e. defining the intrinsic quality of your product or service that compels your customers to want it.   This is also referred to as the ‘value proposition’ or ‘deep meaning’ of any particular offering, elucidating the reason ‘why’ someone

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Just say ‘Maybe’

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What the diagnostics business can teach us about innovation investment decisions.   There are easy businesses and there are hard businesses.  Then there are REALLY HARD businesses. If you ask me (and I’m living it now in my current startup, Biological Dynamics), the hardest business of all is medical diagnostics, especially for initial disease screening (is the patient healthy or

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