Posts tagged innovation
Canadian entrepreneurs don’t fear risk – investors do
Oct 27th
By Christine Wong
Christine Wong, Staff Writer, ITBusiness.ca
Penny for your thoughts?
Canada’s high tech startups would love to raise some pretty pennies for theirs. The fledgling firms are brimming with bright ideas, but can’t raise enough cash to turn them into reality.
Venture capitalists haven’t been as generouswith homegrown IT firms lately. The result: a Canadian tech sector cash crunch.
Read the rest of this entry »
Championship: Back to school
Sep 13th
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
A couple of moons ago, we talked about how “entrepreneur” is often a four-letter word on the university campus. Too many schools fail to appreciate how Web 2.0 has democratized innovation for the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and make the mistake of assuming it’s only engineers or physics students who can come up with the next billion-dollar idea.
These outdated perspectives are further aggravated by student and faculty cultures that take a dim view of capitalism, scorn profit as a motive, and emphasize formal theory over practical, hands-on projects.
However, there is no shortage of innovation that still comes out of the campus lab from faculty and students. The challenge is finding a path to market and providing these inventive minds with the resources they need for successful technology transfer. As Michael Atkin puts it, “Sometimes these things that are sitting there are great scientific advances, but they’ve got warts on them … they still need proof of concept.” Read the rest of this entry »
Championship: Making the most of the juicy leftovers
Aug 30th
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
Recently, tech heavyweights from around the world lined up to bid for Nortel Network’s portfolio of more than 6,000 telecommunications and web-related patents. When the dust settled, the portfolio had been sold for five times the opening bid and at least twice as much as analysts had expected.
Feisal Mosleh, vice-president for acquisitions at Intellectual Ventures, put the Nortel sale in context for MarketWatch.
“Since the market took off in the last eight years or so, intellectual property went from being an unused asset in the corner to a prime financial asset that can be traded,” he said, adding that, “there is no shortage of capital for the right invention. It’s one of the most differentiating aspects of business today.” Read the rest of this entry »
Championship: Opening up the ivory tower
Aug 23rd
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
In the context of getting technology to market, “champion” can mean a lot of different things.
Early in this series we defined it as individuals within established enterprises who see the value in supporting a new venture or investing resources in an innovation to help realize its commercial potential. This is often driven by the need to solve a pain point that the patron organization has been unable to address with its internal resources. Read the rest of this entry »
OMG! There’s an entrepreneur on campus
Jul 11th
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
Recently we have explored where and how government can facilitate the process of commercialization to help technology entrepreneurs get their products to market. Throughout this series, we have talked about the entrepreneurial right stuff and the value of those soft skills collectively referred to as emotional intelligence.
But where does good old-fashioned formal education fit into all of this? What role does, and should, a person’s alma mater play in the formation of the next generation of entrepreneurs? Read the rest of this entry »
How Canadian tech start-ups can learn from Israel’s entrepreneurial spirit
Jun 20th
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
“If Canadians were as good at innovating as we are at explaining why we’re bad at it, Canada wouldn’t rank 14th among industrialized nations in the Conference Board of Canada’s report card on innovation. And because innovation is the key to improving productivity, we wouldn’t be earning $7,000 less a person each year than Americans.”
That blunt comment came courtesy of none other than Conference Board president and CEO Anne Golden in an editorial published last August in the Globe and Mail titled “Canada’s innovation malaise: The cure’s in our culture.”
The Conference Board earlier in the year had released a report card on how well Canada had fared in innovation versus 16 of its peers through the economic downturn. For its purposes, the Conference Board defined innovation as “the ability to turn knowledge into new and improved goods and services.” In other words, it is the ability to move from the “R” to the “D” side of the R&D equation and create wealth from having built that better mousetrap. Read the rest of this entry »
Hug an entrepreneur
Apr 19th
By Andrew Penny
A lot has been said about creating an Innovative Culture. Research labs, government departments and agencies are all trying to figure out just how to make us innovate. The thought being that innovation equals wealth creation. However, to create this wealth someone has to do something with the innovation, someone who is prepared to take the risk that things may not work out quite as planned.
That someone is typically referred to as an entrepreneur (or the clever B-school term ‘Intrapreneur’ for those inside a company). If you put three or four intelligent people together for an hour or so, they are very likely to come up with some innovative, and potentially lucrative, ideas. However, the chances of anyone doing anything with the ideas are pretty slim. Even in corporations that pride themselves on innovation, the innovations that are not congruent with the corporate strategy get set aside. Innovation without entrepreneurship is usually just an intellectual exercise. Read the rest of this entry »
Onus on tech firms to build responsible privacy controls: a guest blog from MaRS
Feb 22nd
In my last blog entry, I wrote about Privacy by Design: The Gold Standard – my annual event that focuses on the implementation of new technologies and business practices that can deliver tangible results with regard to ensuring the future of privacy. This year, the theme was “We did it…so can you” and I was delighted to see so many practical examples of products, services and solutions that are designed with a view to making privacy the default mode of operation.
Toronto-based innovation incubator MaRS was on hand to showcase leading edge technology, with privacy solutions embedded, from a number of its Ontario-based companies. I have invited Earl Miller of MaRS as a guest blogger for this entry – to share his thoughts on why young tech companies should treaty privacy as a key business issue: Read the rest of this entry »
