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Why Some of the Most Groundbreaking Technologies Are a Bad Fit for the Silicon Valley Funding Model

Harvard Business Review

Over the past few decades, Silicon Valley has been such a powerful engine for entrepreneurship in technology that, all too often, it is considered to be some kind of panacea. The Silicon Valley model, for all of its charms, was developed at a specific time, for a specific industry, which was developing a specific set of technologies.

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Don’t Move to Silicon Valley Without Preparation

Harvard Business Review

You have no funding, but you have to convince some engineer who’s already juggling 15 job offers (including offers from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google) to join you to help finish your product. Is this engineer going to accept your job offer? The answer, in most cases, is no. Costs are low. Quality of life is high.

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Three Headwinds for Facebook's IPO

Harvard Business Review

Web developers can personalize recommendation engines, allow users to see their friends' purchase history, and draw on detailed demographic data available through the Facebook network. Whether Facebook IPOs for 80B or 100B, the venture funds that invested prior to 2011 will have plenty of capital to return to their limited partners.

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Four Innovation Trends to Watch in 2013

Harvard Business Review

Hollywood and content creators worldwide have taken notice and readjusted their business models accordingly. While recommendation engines have been fantastically successful for the Amazons and Netflixes, they remain relative underachievers given their technical and algorithmic potential. Taking 'Recofriendations' More Seriously.

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The 5 Requirements of a Truly Innovative Company

Harvard Business Review

Over the past two decades, we’ve led dozens of innovation projects and have talked to thousands of managers about the challenge of building a high-performance innovation “engine.” The engine may be otherwise well built, but without just one of these components, it will be essentially worthless.

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Lessons From BIF-7

Mills Scofield

What I see is the opposite – incredible innovation in products, services, processes and business models. That’s what makes the annual BIF conference so important: 30 plus stories of amazing, cool, disruptive, transformative innovation models. It’s just not in the mainstream media.

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