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Using Supply Chains to Grow Your Business

Harvard Business Review

Challenged by other entrepreneurs in Scale Up Milwaukee’s Scalerator program to come up with a plan for rapidly ramping up his business, Cronce wondered: “What if I redefined Raphael as a strategic link in the global medical imaging supply chain, rather than as a paint shop?”

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How Dumb Is Your Business?

N2Growth Blog

The dumb factor not only applies to talent, capital, and technology, but it also extends throughout the entire value chain. It applies to your branding, marketing, supply chain, and ultimately to your customer base. Here is a simple rule of thumb…the bigger the key man policy the less scalable the company is.

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The Top Six Innovation Ideas of 2011

Harvard Business Review

They'll increasingly be a source of, and resource for, innovation differentiation in 2011, if not for your organization, then for the firm you most dread competing against. Where professionals once wrote memos to be read, 2011 begins an era in which documents are written with touch both in mind and on fingertips. That's right.

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Community Financing Breathes Life into a New U.S. Manufacturing Firm

Harvard Business Review

Trouble is, two recessions in 10 years have cut the capital fuel supply to the tech-company-creation engine. By 2011 , only three out of the top 10 industries that received 90% of PE funding were industries that tended to build products in the United States. Where did all that money go? based labor. manufacturing jobs.

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The Downside of Best Practices | N2Growth Blog

N2Growth Blog

As one example; if you are a manufacturing organization, innovation in your core could include new and improved materials, new techniques, novel approaches to supply chain management etc. Innovation, improvements, or these 'Next' Practices should be looked at in all facets of your business value proposition, your core.

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What Businesses Need to Know About Sustainable Development Goals

Harvard Business Review

Since 2011, as emerging markets have suffered from slower growth and fresh social unrest, that $30 trillion prize seems more distant. For most governments, financing the global goals campaigns will be a stretch; governments have already reneged in the past on commitments for similar targets.

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Be Your Own Talent Scout

Harvard Business Review

Every month, I have dinner with two of the top people in any field — finance, marketing, I.T., general management, human resources, supply chain, you name it — that I have heard about through our recruiters or by word of mouth. So I began a practice I've kept up to this day.