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Are SMEs The Overlooked Engines Of Innovation?

The Horizons Tracker

Indeed, the European Commission regards them as the engine of the European economy. Despite this importance, they’re an often overlooked group, as they’re not considered sufficiently high growth to attract the wide range of VC-led support that fuels accelerators, incubators, and corporate venturing.

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Research Shows That Veterans Make Great Entrepreneurs

The Horizons Tracker

Research from the Veterans Future Lab (VFL) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering shows that veterans have similarly appealing qualities when it comes to entrepreneurship too. For instance, they cite previous research showing that many veteran-owned businesses were able to obtain less financing than non-veteran-owned businesses.

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What Your Innovation Process Should Look Like

Harvard Business Review

This prioritization process has to start before any new idea reaches engineering. This way, the innovations that do reach engineering will already have substantial evidence — about validated customer needs, processes, legal security, and integration issues. government federal research agencies to turn ideas into products.

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How GE Stays Young

Harvard Business Review

For example, GE incubated an energy storage company (“ Durathon ”), which has gone from the lab to a $100 million business in five years. In 2009, GE’s transportation unit developed a new sodium battery for a hybrid engine for locomotives. Marketing plays a catalyst role, providing growth funding. They have branded it “FastWorks.”

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Entrepreneurs Take On Manufacturing

Harvard Business Review

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.

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Bring Back the General Manager

Harvard Business Review

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. Finally, carve out innovation incubators that will serve not only to build new businesses but also to grow general managers.

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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. In the Bay Area, however, small venture capitalists, many of whom were ex-engineers themselves, invested in entrepreneurs. Jurgen Ziewe/Getty Images.