Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 11, 2017

Companies and government agencies often make the mistake of viewing innovation as a set of unconstrained activities with no discipline. In reality, for innovation to contribute to a company or government agency, it needs to be designed as a process from start to deployment.

Process 13

Process Innovation Incubator Committee 13

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

Campbell, the food company best known for its soups, is investing $125 million in a venture fund to help finance food startups, according to the Wall Street Journal. Other large consumer companies are doing the same. The largest 25 food and beverage companies contributed only 0.1% Set your company up for success.

Company 8

Company Brand Venture Funding Incubator 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 1, 2016

Moreover, they are commonly misunderstood or mistakenly lumped in with other institutions supporting early-stage startups, such as incubators, angel investors, and early-stage venture capitalists. Set your company up for success. Startups enter accelerators for a fixed-period of time, and as part of a cohort of companies.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Incubator Finance Learning-by-Doing 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 23, 2018

Do you believe that sustainability is important for your company, but that it’s “someone else’s problem?” Unsurprisingly, carbon emissions by the world’s largest companies are increasing and only one third of the 600 largest companies in the U.S. TOSHINORI TARUI/Getty Images.

Incubator 10

Incubator How To Real Estate Business Model 10

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 10, 2013

We need to also teach them to grow by applying the same kinds of methodology and discipline that, traditionally, a venture-funded company may use. The media, business schools, incubators — every part of the eco-system that is supposed to teach good business practices — reinforces this myth. Financing is optional.

Entrepreneur 10

Entrepreneur Incubator How To Venture Funding 10

Harvard Business Review

JULY 10, 2013

You may have another kind of track record, such as working successfully at a large company. You can go to an incubator and potentially try to convince them to write a $15-$25K check to get your idea off the ground. However, the best incubators also look for large, venture fundable business opportunities. Certainly not VCs.

Incubator 8

Incubator Finance Entrepreneur Case Study 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 12, 2024

What role do business accelerators play in boosting the growth of early-stage companies? Accelerators provide a structured environment of mentorship, education, and resources in exchange for equity. And they work.

Succession 21

Succession Education Advice Environment 21

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 26, 2015

If they don’t like a company’s product, or an experience they had, the whole world will know about it. Newer, hipper, more entrepreneurial and web-savvy companies, often founded and run by Millennials, naturally have a strong understanding and connection to younger consumers, who are, after all, their peers. Insight Center.

Company 8

Company Hotels Travel Class 8

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 4, 2018

A recent report by the consultancy BCG documented a general decline in sales among consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies in the United States during 2017, with mid-sized and large companies losing market share and small companies increasing theirs. P&G should follow suit.

Brand 11

Brand Retail Incubator Merchandising 11

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 7, 2012

Our research suggests that investors like us succumb time and again to narrative fallacies, a well-studied behavioral finance bias. The industry has unquestionably helped to support the formation of world-changing companies such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Google, Facebook, and countless others. Maybe that's just the way it is.

Venture Capitalist 15

Venture Capitalist Christensen Incubator Porter 15

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 22, 2016

First, Kickstarter and other crowd-funding sources have opened up new options for initial finance. By contrast, the emergence of new cloud-enabled, incubator-supported manufacturing startups could widen the aperture. Second, a number of important inputs have gotten cheaper. That leaves urban economies narrower than they might be.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Contract Manufacturing Incubator Venture Capitalist 8

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 16, 2011

The metric was an attempt to put a thin veneer of respectability on what are extremely disconcerting profitability numbers for the company. Yet, the company reported ASCOI of positive $80.1 Finally, reaching profitability quickly ensures that when outside financing dries up, the venture can succeed on its own.

Christensen 19

Christensen Fixed Costs Metrics Venture Funding 19

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 7, 2012

Our research suggests that investors like us succumb time and again to narrative fallacies, a well-studied behavioral finance bias. The industry has unquestionably helped to support the formation of world-changing companies such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Google, Facebook, and countless others. Maybe that's just the way it is.

Venture Capitalist 13

Venture Capitalist Christensen Incubator Porter 13

Harvard Business Review

JULY 10, 2012

But in many large companies, the only true general manager is the CEO. Two decades ago, organizations were designed around stand-alone business units, so all managers had to understand finance, technology, manufacturing, sales, marketing, strategy, human resources, and more. Have you noticed that general managers are scarce these days?

Management 14

Management P&L Incubator Finance 14

Harvard Business Review

JULY 24, 2013

And of course, peer-to-peer lending has been around for a while, and some of it has been trickling over to startup financing. For the most part, the impact of crowdfunding on startup financing is still minimal. Finally, working capital financing is one of the key requirements of all small startups.

Incubator 8

Incubator Finance Entrepreneur Industry 8

Strategy Driven

DECEMBER 16, 2020

Smaller companies, including recent startups, can offer the DoD and its allies’ tailor-made solutions in a fraction of the time it would take a giant like Boeing. A smaller group can dedicate all its resources to the development of a single product and does not have to negotiate the labyrinth of internal politics large companies face.

Innovation 130

Innovation Software Industry Politics 130

Harvard Business Review

MAY 13, 2014

Under CEO Jack Welch in the 1980s and 1990s, they adopted operational efficiency approaches (“ Workout ,” “Six Sigma,” and “Lean”) that reinforced their success and that many companies emulated. But, as befits a company that has been around for 130 years, GE is moving on.

Six Sigma 8

Six Sigma Incubator Payback Period Ries 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 13, 2015

These countries have excellent research systems with a high number of influential scientific publications, relatively high levels of government and business R&D expenditure and venture capital financing, strong public-private collaborations, and a wealth of intellectual assets in patent applications and community trademarks.

Uncertainty 8

Uncertainty Innovation Hofstede Bureaucracy 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

First, you maintain control of the company. Third, if you own the company, you can have a great exit at a low price. Fourth, if you're able to build the company without significant outside capital that may mean your business has even more "real" legs. Junior members of VC teams are paid to source information about companies.

Venture Capitalist 15

Venture Capitalist Advice Venture Funding Incubator 15

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 23, 2018

That fear drives their companies to invest millions into coming up with breakthrough innovations. One major Asian electronics company built a design lab to develop new hardware product ideas. This electronics company had no clear plan for how projects would transition from the small design lab team back into the core business.

Project 8

Project Innovation Team Stage-Gate 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 10, 2012

They all incubated their business ideas while employed by someone else. Indeed, most people start their own companies — or go freelance — in order to stop working for others. In the past two decades, they created 25% of all American venture-backed companies. What do 70% of successful entrepreneurs have in common?

Leadership 16

Leadership GDP Entrepreneur Incubator 16

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 4, 2014

More than two generations ago, the venture capital community — VCs, business angels, incubators, and others — convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. The business had been funded and grown entirely by its customers’ cash.

Venture Funding 13

Venture Funding Entrepreneur Incubator Advice 13

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 5, 2018

In 1968 an investor named Arthur Rock backed executives from Fairchild Semiconductor to start a new company, which would become known as Intel. Stanford provost Frederick Terman, as well as existing companies such as Hewlett-Packard, also devoted resources to broadening and strengthening the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Technology 8

Technology Venture Funding Venture Capitalist Entrepreneur 8

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 1, 2017

Even a star company like Nigeria’s online retailer Jumia ( known by some as the potential “African Amazon” ) is struggling to return profits to early investor Rocket Internet, of Germany. A few of these companies manage to transcend national boundaries and scale to a larger size.

Microfinance 8

Microfinance Hotels Entrepreneur Incubator 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 27, 2011

Listening to Amazon's finance chief Tom Szkutak explain the miss, it was immediately apparent that Amazon's problem was not with the top line. This follows last quarter's 51% growth in sales, the company's largest year-over-year growth in a decade. So why did investors punish the company?

Christensen 12

Christensen Retail Long-term Incubator 12

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 3, 2014

Most industry observers take the position that companies get distracted if they try to bootstrap a product with a service. AgilOne, a company that provides cloud-based predictive customer analytics, was founded by Omer Artun in 2006. Andy Chou, a PhD student at Stanford, also bootstrapped his company, Coverity, using services.

Productivity 8

Productivity Products Customer Intimacy Benchmarking 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 27, 2014

At the time, Apple was a less-than-successful computer company, and Steve – ever the loner – had moved on to create Next, another less-than-successful one. I’ve often been told by spectacularly intelligent Stanford students, sheepishly, that they have accepted a well-paying job at a big established company. Noura Al Kaabi.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Venture Capitalist Business Incubator IPO 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 13, 2012

An impatient marketing or finance manager would, on the sly, secure some extra budget money and hire a contractor to build a little database that tracked mailing addresses or top-line financials. CEOs remain reluctant to invite CIOs to the executive table, insisting that IT is a cost center, not the innovation incubator it could be.

Supply Chain 15

Supply Chain CIO Budgeting Project 15

Strategy Driven

DECEMBER 6, 2021

We would recommend you to choose the LLC (Limited Liability Company) categorization for your business. There are entrepreneur outreach programs and incubators that offer physical office spaces, conference rooms and other business amenities at the fraction of the price of the main real estate market. Start out as an LLC.

Budgeting 106

Budgeting Real Estate Incubator Cost 106

Harvard Business Review

JULY 7, 2015

Typically, tourism involves guided tours, pitch events, conferences with lots of panels, and well-planned visits to companies, universities, and government agencies tasked with increasing entrepreneurship and innovation. This is harder than it seems: Around the city of Milwaukee there are 14,000 companies in this size range.

Innovation 8

Innovation Planning Tourism Venture Capitalist 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 8, 2013

USA Today ran an excellent — if over-flattering — profile of YouTube's splashy but serious effort to provide a high-tech incubator for content and channel creators. These investments are more about the development of human capital than finance. What does it mean for your company and industry? What should it mean?

Innovation 8

Innovation Lean Production Disintermediation Automotive 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 12, 2012

It was only a few years ago that Governor Deval Patrick poured some $58 million into the company and their much-lauded breakthrough solar technology (String Ribbon). Demand response, grid management, solar financing and installation, and electric vehicle infrastructure companies might fit this bill.

Disruptive Innovation 10

Disruptive Innovation Competitive Advantage Business Model Technology 10

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 23, 2015

Here at Machine Shop , the wholly owned innovation company of the alternative rock band Linkin Park, we identified the need to think differently years ago. I had experience in marketing, business, and finance — all of it outside the traditional music business. We also looked beyond music for insights.

Business Model 8

Business Model Merchandising Restructuring Fashion 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 24, 2017

Through a coordinated, systemic, prolonged intervention with dozens of institutions and thousands of individual participants, new growth of the local companies we trained has directly created over 1033 jobs, fueled by dozens of new private sector financings. strategic hires). day, scale-focused workshops and related activities.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Mentor Banking Self-aware 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 29, 2011

The next most-represented originating organizations--the San Francisco Public Schools, Newark Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, Americorps, the White House Fellow program, McKinsey and Company, and the United States Department of Education--each appeared in the work history of a founder of two (or about 4%) of these organizations.

Entrepreneur 14

Entrepreneur Education McKinsey Sample 14

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 10, 2013

As one Rio-based entrepreneur told me, "I got to nine people, took one look at the huge regulatory stair that I would have to climb to get to ten, and went back to opening up additional small companies instead of growing one big one. For example, in France it is twice as likely to find a 49-person company as a 50-person company.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur IPO Incentives Venture Capitalist 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 18, 2011

British law created the Community Interest Company in 2005, and a number of U.S. states have passed new corporate forms legislation in recent years, including Low Profit Limited Liability Companies, Benefit Corporations, and Flexible Purpose Corporations. Federal lawmakers in the U.S. are also considering enabling legislation.

CEO 11

CEO Incubator Supply Chain Entrepreneur 11