Work

business & working

The Art of the Start

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I usually peruse the business section in any bookstore and am quite selective in what I decide to buy. There are a lot of business books, but few that stand the test of time. I’ve just finished reading Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, and his book is the exception, for a number of reasons.

First of all, I use Furl to mark web pages of interest that don’t get on to my blog. My Furl page referring toKawasaki’s book has had more views than any of my other Furl pages. Kathleen Gilroy has also made positive comments about The Art of the Start, and Brendan Wilson has an overview of the book’s major principles. Therefore, I finally went out and bought the book.

This book is for anyone starting a business, or helping someone to start a business. It cuts to the chase, and unlike many other fad books, will stay on my desk as a reference for a long time. The examples are excellent, as are the templates on "how to do a pitch" and "how to write a business plan". What Kawasaki, a veteran of Apple, tells you not to do is as important as what he says you should do. This is the best $(CA)40.00 that I’ve spent for a long time.

Creative Commons (CA)

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Creative Commons now has licenses available which are designed specifically for Canadian copyright law. You can see mine on the bottom left of every page. When you select a license, Canada is one of the jurisdictions available on the drop-down menu. The Canadian license is available in French & English, and each deed has links to both official languages. The CC license also saves on legal fees :-)

Building Alternatives

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Robert Paterson said it a while back, and Brian Alger just mentioned it. I’m referring to this statement made by Rob:

I am beginning to think that this may be the great work — to build the alternatives rather than to try and reform the existing system.

I think that this is a wonderful mission statement — To build alternatives rather than to try and reform existing systems. I know that we have systemic problems in politics, academia, and health care, to name a few. Instead of trying to tweak these systems, it may be more fruitful to build alternatives that can serve as examples. This does not mean destroying the existing system (as some may argue that managerial capitalist systems can do this all on their own) but creating prototypes for experimentation and learning. It’s kind of like early American democracy that showed many other people how it could work.

Free Culture, again

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Mark Oehlert blogs again on Lessig’s book, Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. The book is a success, even with the free download available, as well as the audio chapters that have been completed by various volunteers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about business models and how the Internet has turned many on their heads. Making money on a book by giving away the digital version does not make intuitive sense; which is why I’m re-posting this as well. The rules have changed, but not everywhere. Today, we need to challenge our understanding of conventional business wisdom, especially when developing business plans.
 

Social Purchasing Portal

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A new business model, called the Social Purchasing Portal (SPP), has been developed in Vancouver. It’s a form of community economic development that leverages good business practices, not charity. The portal allows the participants in the supply chain to make socially responsible decisions in their supplier/purchaser agreements. Here’s an example of the portal in practice:

Pivotal, a major international software company with nearly 200 local employees, has basically only one entry job, a receptionist. They use their significant catering needs to leverage social value by ordering from Cook Studio Cafe. The increased business for Cook Studio results in business growth and the need to hire six employees from their youth-at-risk training programs.

According to the Vancouver portal, everyone wins in an SPP:

  • Participating “Purchasers” use their existing business expenditures to practice corporate social responsibility while still meeting their business purchasing criteria for value, price and quality.
  • Participating businesses and social enterprises who participate as “Suppliers” of goods and services have access to new and expanding markets, growing their businesses and requiring new employees.
  • The SPP initiated business growth creates employment demand, providing opportunities for hard-to-employ persons seeking employment.

I discovered this through Brian Alger’s post, and he includes a number of other links if you want to explore SPP’s further.

The Rural Nature of the Customer Revolution

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Robert Paterson has a good conversation going on about creative talent moving to the rural areas. I’m not sure how large of a movement this is, but it makes for an interesting hypothesis. Rob backs it up with some examples:

Oh Yes – University? My son is one of the leading artists in his field. 8 years of art school no degree. He is hired because of his talent and his portfolio. My business partner started programming when we he was 14 and had his own business since he was 16. No one cares about his credentials, they care about what he has done and what he can do – he is so much better than the product of a technical college. My daughter has cooked all over the world, owned her own restaurant – no one asks where she went to school. Once they have tried her food, they are hooked.



My point? In the real world of where the producer is on the line and not buried in a bureaucracy, what counts is can you really do it. Most universities and technical schools are credential machines that produce people that have few skills. Think of a BA in Business – which I teach by the way. What do you know as a graduate that you can apply in a small business? The true answer is all but zero.



Credentials are still very important in bureaucracies but they have no standing on their own in the creative world and in the world of reputation

Does this mean that the creative people will be able to live in rural bliss while the rest live live in urban sprawl with McJobs? Will the successor to the digital divide be the Creative Divide? Of course there will be implications for organisational design; when your creative team is separate (physically & mentally) from the developers/manufacturers. It sounds good on the rural/creative side, but I’m worried about the effects on everyone else.

In the meantime, it would be a nice change to get some solid economic activity in places like Atlantic Canada. For instance, in New Brunswick we’ve had two mill closures this month, with about 800 jobs lost. I’m not sure how many creative entrepreneurs have started up this month, but certainly less than 800. There may be turbulent times ahead.

Update: Dane Carlson on the Business Opportunities blog, is observing a similar phenomenon in the US – "I think that technology is quickly removing any economic benefits from operating your business in a major metropolitan area."

 

Innovation and Idea Protectionism

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Albert Ip talks about the reality of developing new products, and then dealing with lawyers and patent issues.

In these days of patent lock-up, it is NOT about publishing the achievement and improvement. My patent lawyer told me the other day, it is about limiting other people’s use of your idea. Hence this concept of patent portfolio and mutual licensing. He advised me to break my invention into several patents in order to start building a patent portfolio. When there is a way of doing thing which is lock up in other’s patent (by the way, I discover the method myself independently – but it does not matter, somebody has the exclusive right just before you), one can use one’s patent portfolio to negotiate for some mutual licensing. This makes sense, a lot of $en$e – but only to the lawyers! I ended up protecting my IP using "trade secret". BTW, if you ask nicely, I may tell you my trade secret after a drink.

Albert’s experience shows why the open source movement and intiatives like Creative Commons are essential for innovation and for our continuing economic growth. Innovation is NOT about limiting other people’s use of your idea. Our civilisation and technology is where it is today because scientists and others freely shared their findings in order to grow their disciplines. Albert is keeping his secrets, but on his terms. We should do like CC says – skip the intermediaries [lawyers].

Innovation Articles – Summary

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The LearnNB community has been provided with a number of PDF articles on innovation – mostly Canadian perspectives. These are in preparation for the quarterly meeting this Wednesday, September 22nd. The documents have been hidden away (password-protected) in the collaborative work space for LearnNB (I can set up an account if you want one). I have also posted the names of the articles on the public LearnNB blog. A quick search today has shown that most of these documents are freely available, and I’ve done a quick synthesis of a few.

What follows are some short summaries of the documents that caught my attention.

A series of three articles from Research Money by Alan Cornford, (significant subscription fee required) provide some interesting observations on innovation. Cornford states that increasing R&D spending will not increase innovation capacity, as only 3% of of public R&D spending results in measurable innovation; the only way to measure innovation is through the outputs – or local wealth generation; and there is plenty of VC money available, but not enough finance-worthy ventures. The key to driving innovation is having the right people. He also shows that private sector investment has 15 times the return on investment as that of the public sector. His main recommendation is not to weaken public R&D spending, but to strengthen it through private partnerships, especially with small and medium sized enterprises. Cornford is also in favour of enhanced R&D tax credits and the channelling of government investment into "community innovation idea outreach" to communties and SME’s
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Where local SME (small and medium enterprise) R&D receptor capacity is limited (as in most of Canada), the universities, polytechnics
and colleges can conduct applied R&D for local SME industry and therefore benefit from these increased R&D investments, while community SME innovative capacity grows.

Cornford also produced a report for ACOA in 2002, entitled – Innovation and Commercialization in Atlantic Canada , which I have not read yet.

A different perspective is presented by Douglas Barber, who in 2003 surveyed the 120 most innovative companies in Canada, (those who spent more than 3% on R&D) and determined that the main issues around innovation were inadequate tax

incentives, lack of qualified workers, uncoordinated government support and regulation concerning R&D. These companies included Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, BCE

Emergis Inc., Corel Corporation, GlaxoSmithKline Inc., Pratt & Whitney Canada Corp., and Sierra Wireless, Inc.. This paper focuses primarily on large companies, not SME’s.

Denzil Doyle in a 2004 report for ITAC (PDF) examined the selling of Canadian high-tech companies and purchases by foreign investors. This again focuses on larger companies, not the smaller companies that are predominant in Atlantic Canada. Doyle concludes that:

This paper has been written on the assumption that Canadian policy makers want to position Canada as a global player in the worldwide high-tech industry. In order to achieve

that goal it will not only have to create a favourable environment for foreign-owned branch plants but it will have to grow several world class companies with the majority of

corporate decision-making carried out in Canada. Examples of such companies are Nortel Networks, Cognos, ATI Technologies, OpenText, McDonald Detweiller Associates, and

Research In Motion.



While Canadians can be proud of their R&D skills and achievements in nearly every field of technology, more attention should be paid to ways and means of commercializing

more of the resultant technology in Canada. This will require the development of a financing industry that is capable of launching companies properly and of taking financial

control of them when the original investors decide to exit their investments.

Other documents available from the government of Canada, include: Knowledge Matters: Skills & Learning for Canadians

This document addresss, at a very high policy level, how the government can foster learning for in public education, build the workforce, and attract more immigrants.

The series of government documents on innovation are good for those planning initiatives that they wish to align with government policy – good until the next election.

A shorter paper, by Peter Josty on technology commercialisation focuses on Alberta’s situation, and provides some case-specific information, as well as a short SWOT analysis. This is a quicker read than some of the others, with a Western perspective.

I’m sure that you’re seeing some common themes (tax credits), and there are more documents that I haven’t read yet. I hope that this quick summary provides a bit of an overview for my colleagues who will be at the meeting in Fredericton this week. See you there.

Innovative Entrepreneurs

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Dave Pollard has written a concise article on how to stimulate and measure Canadian innovation. He trashes the methods used by the federal government and the BC science council to measure and promote innovation. I agree with his verdict – they’re lame.

And if you want to stimulate innovation, invest in the people that live and die by innovation — entrepreneurs. Their profits stay in the community, get reinvested, and create jobs. By all means subsidize those entrepreneurs to do their research at Canadian universities — you better believe that research will be focused on commercial opportunity.

To continue the thread started by the Atlantic open source gatherings this Summer, as well as the blogger meeting in Moncton this week, the common threads of interest appear to be:

  1. open source models for software, innovation and learning
  2. new business models, including natural enterprises
  3. networking and learning in the digital commons (blogs, YASNS, wikis, etc)
  4. economic development at a grassroots level in Atlantic Canada

I’m sure that many of the small, outwardly focused, technologically savvy companies in the region would not been impressed by measurements like "percent of population completing university", as a means to determine innovation. There are many successful entrepreneurs here who have skipped university in order to really innovate.

At the blogger dinner in Moncton there were at least three new business initiatives that we discussed and these will be followed-up. Not bad for seven folks in the space of a couple of hours. This was more successful in fostering innovation that most sponsored conferences on innovation. So let’s keep the conversation going, especially in the blogosphere, and let’s have a mass innovation meet next month. With 20 to 30 entrepreneurial individuals networking over pizza & beer (or your choice of brain food) I’m certain that we can start an Atlantic movement to help each other, and kick butt internationally.

All of the ingredients are here – smart people, nimble companies, a sense of community, existing relationships, and a hunger for something better. There are still a number of us who have to get to know each other a bit better, so I hope to see many of you in Sackville at the end of next month.

Please post your comments as well as your preferred dates.

 

Wisdom of Crowds for Health & Education

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In Deschooling Society (1970), Ivan Illich explained why we must disestablish school:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

There is almost an arms race quality to the way in which we are trying to save our current education and health care “systems”. I am coming around to the notion that the system is the problem. Much in the same way that The Support Economy diagnoses ‘managerial capitalism’ as the primary cause of the disconnect between corporations and markets, I am seeing that Illich had it right over 30 years ago – we have seen the enemy, and it is us. Through our large, corporatist systems we have created self-perpetuating monopolies in both health and education.

In order to get back some semblance of control, I would suggest that we stop paying the supply side of the equation. Instead of paying the suppliers (teachers, doctors, administrators, etc.), a socialist country like Canada would instead offer education and health insurance to all Canadians. Let the people decide where their money is spent. If the average Canadian is allowed to vote for the governement, why not be allowed to vote where education and health (our topmost priorities) money should be spent? This system would have some problems, such as wealthier people opting into expensive facilities out of reach of average Canadians, but I believe in the wisdom of crowds, and feel that communities would develop to support all members of society. At least we would have the tools to do something other than lobby government on how to spend our money.

  • Does the wisdom of the crowd reflect this sentiment?
  • Would it be even remotely possible to try to implement this kind of approach?

Update: Dave Pollard has posted another article on how to use the wisdom of crowds in business planning and decision-making. His flow chart shows how the solutions team needs facilitation skills much more so than subject matter expertise or managerial skills. hmmm?