What could be one of the most overlooked retrospectives, appearing in the Business Section of the Christmas Eve edition of the Toronto Star, is a retrospective of significant events in Canadian Tech Law. Most relate to online privacy and piracy.
For anyone who follows tech law, it makes for an interesting stroll down memory lane, which many of us are prone to do this time of year.
Happy Holidays.
Read more: “The year in Canadian tech law, A to Z”
If you’re like me, your best-laid plans to get your holiday shopping done early this year once again fell by the wayside. But don’t panic yet - get help from my favorite kind of advertorial, the holiday gift guide. For the entrepreneur in your life, Ja-Nae Duane, founder of Wild Women Entrepreneurs, gives you a musical short list in “The 12 Days of an Entrepreneur Christmas,” while Darren Herman focuses on the basics at Silicon Alley Insider.
Last evening, attendees at Entrepreneurship 101 heard Prof Ajay Agrawal discuss three key questions that technical entrepreneurs often fail to adequately answer:
online social network
During a breakout session at the Social Entrepreneurship Summit, an interesting dialogue about connectedness, more specifically social technology, got the table riled up. The discussion seemed to break into two camps (as most interesting discussions do): Team “the human touch” representing one side and, in the opposing corner, team “technology.” Albeit simplified categories, this division served as the underlying counterpoint. Read the rest of this entry »
Strategy Guru C.K. Prahalad addresses the Tie Summit, India
A recent invitation to join a Canadian delegation to India sponsored by TIE (the Indus Entrepreneurs) and the Canadian Venture Capital Association (CVCA) led to a real eye opener. The trip left me with a lot to ponder about how this corner of the world will play a significant role in the way we bring science and technology to market. As they say, it’s not what you don’t know that will kill you in business. Rather, it’s what you think you know but get wrong that will. I’m happy to say that some of the misconceptions I had about India have quickly been “realigned.”
Indeed, India does live up to all the hype we’ve seen in large part driven by the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry. But there is so much more to India than what the VIP tour of the Infosys headquarters can reveal. Take a closer look at India and you will see huge implications for Canadian business, including the way we approach entrepreneurship and even social innovation.
Management lessons from Peter Drucker
In past postings I have touched upon two of the big ideas that came from the Social Entrepreneurship Summit that have community building as their common denominator. Next we will examine a fundamental fact of social business: sustainability is dependent upon having a clear business design that facilitates profit.
This should not be taboo but it is sometimes loaded with connotations of greed and excess for those choosing to see social businesses as a retreat from the extremes of capitalism. I would argue that this paradigm is not only unproductive, but will occasionally lead to a cycle of dependence on other entities for investment and funding, but more often initiate a spiral toward extinction.
Nature’s spiral
The festive season is with us once again, and if you’ve never spent much time looking at pine cones, perhaps now is the time to take a close look at those marvels of nature. Or any other vine, tree branch or a sunflower. The article “Mathematical lives of plants: why plants grow in geometrically curious patterns” describes how these natural structures also show some surprising mathematical properties.
“As a plant puts out leaves or seeds around some central structure, each seed or leaf spaced from the last by about the golden angle, interlocking spiral arms form in clockwise and counterclockwise directions.”
The new issue of Fast Company features the fifth annual FAST COMPANY/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards. The 2008 Awards highlight 45 social entrepreneurs - both non-profits and for-profits to watch. This year’s list includes a number of initiatives from my hometown of Boston, but no Canadian organizations - let’s get busy changing that for 2009!
At last week’s Entrepreneurship 101 lecture, Steven White from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce discussed the importance of an entrepreneur developing a strong relationship with their banker. There are many ways in which your bank can help you, but there are limits, particularly when it comes to the need for credit versus equity investment.
Skymeter’s congestion-pricing solution for NY
We at Skymeter Corporation, an outlier client at MaRS, have been getting some interesting blog-press recently. We submitted an alternative approach to New York City for the implementation of Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion reduction initiative in the Big Apple.
Three weeks ago, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, the body managing the congestion proposal process, published 21 of the 30 of the proposals submitted online and the next day the grass-roots Streetsblog, New York’s healthy-streets advocate published a very favourable report.
Bern Grush founded Skymeter in 2002 in order to return to his first love, Geographic Information Systems. A graduate of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Skymeter is Bern's fourth company -- startups, all.
