The think tank for global entrepreneurs
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category.
Case In Point: Steve Case and America Online
Steven Case created America Online from scratch into the world’s largest online service by making the power of the Internet available to the average consumer. He describes his source of pain. “In 1982, I bought my first computer and wanted to hook it up and be part of this online world, and I went to great lengths to make it happen. Continue reading ‘Creating Your Market Entry Strategy’ »
Case In Point: IBM
Around 1890, during the height of the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. Census Bureau was in an information crisis. As a result, the Bureau sponsored a contest to find a more efficient means of tabulating census data. The winner was Herman Hollerith. His Punch Card Tabulating Machine used an electric current to sense holes in punched cards and keep a running total of data. Capitalizing on his success, Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. It was the world’s first electric tabulating and accounting machine company. Continue reading ‘Discussions of the High-Tech Revolution: Part A’ »
Discussions About Your Web Strategy
Today, “staying in business means staying in touch.” With increasingly sophisticated and easy-to-use analytical tools, early stage ventures have an array of options for obtaining customer information that can support data-driven business decisions. Continue reading ‘How do we create our Web strategy?’ »
Discussions About Using the Internet To Grow Your Business
We now have to accept that the value of a venture is no longer multiples of the top line revenue, but the combined value of the venture’s customers. In fact, we found that the best customer care of the industry becomes the standard by which all others are measured. Besides recurring revenues, there are other ways a networked organization can increase a venture’s bottom line. Continue reading ‘How can we use the Internet to grow our business?’ »
Discussions About Joseph A. Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter, an Austrian-American economist, was one of the first to study entrepreneurs and the impact of entrepreneurial capitalism on society. As he wrote in The Theory of Economic Development, he believed that innovation and creativeness distinguished entrepreneurs from other businesspeople. Continue reading ‘Who was Joseph A. Schumpeter?’ »
Discussions About Intellectual Property
From the fifteenth century, when the first patent systems emerged in Venice, to 1790 when Thomas Jefferson served as the first patent examiner in the United States, intellectual property and the value in encouraging technological progress has been well-understood by governments through granting inventors sole rights to their creations for limited periods. Continue reading ‘What is intellectual property?’ »
Going Into the Eye of the Perfect Storm
The United States experienced an extraordinary surge in wealth in the 1990s that increased American’s net worth by 75 percent. John T. Wall, president of NASDAQ International, described the NASDAQ Bubble as a “total breakaway with no rationale.” Continue reading ‘What happened in the Perfect Storm?’ »
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a new report on parents and their use and regulation of the internet in the home. Parents are engaged with their children’s media consumption, but have less positive views of the internet today than they did in 2004. Continue reading ‘Parent and Teen Internet Use’ »
Discussions About Creating and Managing the Networked Enterprise
In a Journal of Marketing article entitled “Marketing in the Network Economy,” Ravi Achrol and Philip Kotler introduced the concepts of a networked organization. They define a networked enterprise as an interdependent coalition of task- or skill-specialized business entities (independent ventures or autonomous organizational units) that operates without hierarchical control but is embedded by dense lateral connections. Continue reading ‘What is a networked enterprise?’ »
Fostering innovation in a mature company can often seem like a swim upstream—the needs of the existing business often overwhelm attempts to create something new. Harvard Business School professor Lynda M. Applegate shows how one of the forces that threatens established companies can also be a source of salvation: disruptive change. Plus: Innovation worksheets.
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When Apple dropped the price of its iPhone by a third after only two months on the market, even its most loyal buyers complained bitterly, forcing chief executive Steve Jobs to apologize and offer a partial rebate. This is an excellent discussion about new market entry strategies, pricing strategy, and technology adoption.
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With more than $300 million in sales in its first week on the market, “Halo 3 is truly a cultural phenomenon,” says Microsoft chairman Bill Gates. This is an incredible story about new product launches, as this is one of the most successful new product sales in history. This is an incredible story about “corporate entrepreneurship” because the gaming division in Microsoft was started as a new business inside of Microsoft.
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This handbook was created by the Lemelson-MIT Program to address the independent inventor’s and aspiring entrepreneur’s most frequently asked questions regarding United States patents. This handbook will provide some helpful information on the patenting and commercialization processes and discusses how to maintain the intellectual property rights.
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