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Four Questions to Ask Before Scaling Your Business

Strategy Driven

While it’s unclear who said it first, it’s been used regularly at business conferences to fire up audiences over the last few decades. Question 2: How large is the target market for your solution? While each entrepreneur needs to answer for him or herself the question: how large a market needs to be to be worth their attention?

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Venture Capitalists Get Paid Well to Lose Money

Harvard Business Review

2013 had all the signs of being a comeback year for venture capital. Booming public equities and a recovered IPO market generated record portfolio company exits and distributions from VC funds. The ongoing poor performance of venture capital firms should be an obvious problem for institutional investors.

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Should Big Companies Give Up on Innovation?

Harvard Business Review

It’s a common question thrown at me by entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, or the more cynically minded corporate leaders. Start-up companies tend to cluster in industries favored by venture capitalists (like biotechnology or information technology) or ones where there are relatively low barriers to entry (like restaurants).

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What BMW’s Corporate VC Offers That Regular Investors Can’t

Harvard Business Review

This meant that the company was leaving out huge innovation potential — thousands of startups with billions of funding — that could help BMW innovate anything from core vehicle technology (batteries, sensors, artificial intelligence software) to manufacturing innovations (internet of things, cybersecurity, robotics).

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Reversing the Decline in Big Ideas

Harvard Business Review

Many venture capitalists are up in the arms because their returns are down, their funds are drying up, and there appear to be a declining number of entrepreneurs pursuing big ideas. Unfortunately, venture capitalists have mixed up their causality. No 20,000 tech jobs. I know many smart investors didn't. But times change.

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Reversing the Decline in Big Ideas

Harvard Business Review

Many venture capitalists are up in the arms because their returns are down, their funds are drying up, and there appear to be a declining number of entrepreneurs pursuing big ideas. Unfortunately, venture capitalists have mixed up their causality. No 20,000 tech jobs. I know many smart investors didn't. But times change.

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Case Study: Should an Emerging-Market Incubator Help U.S. Businesses?

Harvard Business Review

In fact, her love of the city’s mingled cultures and vibrant local businesses was one of the things that had inspired her to cofound Unamano, now a world-renowned nonprofit that supported entrepreneurship in emerging markets. Unamano’s mission was to help entrepreneurs in emerging markets—not in the United States.