Reshma Sohoni – CEO of Seedcamp gave a talk to students at Cambridge on Enterprise Tuesday. Her perspective was that on the whole startup costs had come down by a factor of 10 – especially in software ventures, because there was so much more open source available, many more tools, platforms and other forms of [...]
Archive for the ‘Archive 2008’ Category
Tell tale signs of opportunity – surviving the economic winter
When the world is in crisis – it is easy to talk yourself into a gloomy “do nothing” period of inactivity. But is this what entrepreneurs do? At the moment the reality is that it is hard to find money to get going, customers willing to commit to purchasing anything, budgets that can be signed-off [...]
Going global means thinking global
As an entrepreneur there are some choices to be made. First of all – do you want to build a global business or go for a more lifestyle business? Both are good – but the consequences of the next steps are very different. Lord Karan Bilimoria who has built Cobra Beer from an idea to [...]
Understanding customers needs – The story of Viagogo
As we run into a brick wall of uncertainty in the world of entrepreneurship – I can remember the last time there was a kind of melt down. It had been caused by dangerous over-speculation on the web. I had been told – it’s not cash flow and customers – it’s about the number of [...]
Entrepreneurial Motivation by Dr Paul Webster and Prof Andy Hopper
Professor Andy Hopper FRS and Dr Paul Webster of Ubisense gave an audience of 400+ at Cambridge University (21st October) a canter through why they started their company and what has kept them going through the roller coaster ride of a new venture. Paul was introduced to Andy via a common connection and found himself [...]
Surviving the economic downturn
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to give a talk at a Masterclass to a conference for the Association of British Travel Agents (ABTA). The timing of this conference was quite something. The news all round us at the conference was basically about the meltdown in the financial markets and the panel discussions [...]
Why should big companies be interested in entrepreneurship?
The usual answer to this question and it is a fair one – is that unless big companies are interested in being innovative and sustaining the entrepreneurial spirit they will get wiped out. There may well be some truth in this – because mature organizations get into a kind of stasis with their product lines, [...]
It is not luck that drives entrepreneurs – it is timing
Getting a technology to market can take a long time. Ensuring its robustness, trialling it, researching markets, gathering resources are all long winded processes. By the time one can achieve this – it may be that a faster moving competitor enters the market and takes a dominant position. Or that by the time the technology [...]
Born or made entrepreneurs – It is not just in the genes!
“I never thought I had it in me” is a phrase I hear so often towards the end of an entrepreneurship course at the several Universities in which I have had the good fortune to teach or present a seminar or in some way be in touch with graduates. Why? Because it seems that the [...]
Creativity and business in entrepreneurship education
Over the past few years I have been involved with many events and activities that have tried to stimulate creativity and buzz among undergraduates in business. It seems to me thataprt from the whole ideas generation bit, unless these are tied down in later processes with howto then communicate the value of the idea, make [...]
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