Entrepreneurs, take note

I have mentioned before that I am a graduate of Carleton’s Technology Innovation Management program. This is a really unique business/technology program that you will not find anywhere else in Canada. The program helps teach students how to develop technologies between the R&D stage and mainstream adoption. There have been a number of successful business ventures to come out of the program and each year the Talent First Network and the Lead to Win program help entrepreneurs get their new business started.

Next Wednesday, December 2 at Carleton University (in Ottawa) there will be a meet and greet session where TIM students and prospective TIM students will pair up with companies developed out of Lead to Win to create pitches for a $5000 grant. Existing TIM students and students interested in applying to the TIM program are welcome to attend the event. Feel free to pass this invitation on to anyone who may be interested. For more information or to RSVP, go here.

The open source science movement

The ideals and ideas that make up the foundation to the open source software movement may be applicable to other fields. One such field is research science. Open source science means that research, data, results and ideas are all freely shared so that new breakthroughs can be made faster cheaper and more collaboratively in a global community. Walter Jessen, of the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital was interviewed by LinuxInsider about what open source science is and how it works.

With the controversy currently shaking the climate change research community, maybe open access to research isn’t such a bad idea.

Read the whole interview here.

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(image from opensourcescience.net)

Snoop Dogg on differentiation and brand identity

Legendary rapper and businessman Snoop Dogg sat down with CNBC to talk a bit about how he created his personal brand and how he differentiates himself from the competition. Although he is not what you would traditionally consider a business icon or mentor, Snoop is very successful in both the music and media industry and as a serial business owner and entrepreneur.
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Open sourcing your startup – a good idea?

Novell VP Miguel de Icaza recently stated that “making a successful open source business has been incredibly difficult” and “If your livelihood depends on the product that you’re selling, until you can figure how you’re going to make money on that thing, I say, keep it proprietary.” Now, while these statements may sound as though open source is a terrible business model, let’s look a bit closer before we decide.
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Data centres and the green cloud

Over at the BPM Blueworks blog, Mihnea Galeteanu has posted about mitigating a data centre’s negative effects on the environment. Although data centres do use massive amounts of energy, their consolidation and management practices actually make them more efficient than a number of disparate servers providing the same services. Without the huge amounts of processing power data centres provide, we would be without many of the new technologies we have today including grid computing, cloud applications and complex web applications like the Google search engine.  Read the whole thing here.

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*Image used with permission from Mihnea Galeteanu.

Build your disruptive innovation toolkit

Disruptive innovation changes everything. Incumbents are toppled and upstarts are victorious simply because they turn everything on its head. Business models, markets even customers are re-defined in a disruptive innovation. Organizations that can disrupt successfully can carve entirely new markets and enjoy immense success. Organizations that can disrupt consistently will achieve rock star status in no time.

So what exactly does it take to disrupt? How can you come up with the next big idea? John Sviokla posted on his blog at Harvard business publishing about four things you should have in your disruptive innovation toolkit. Here is my spin on those four concepts: Simplification, there is nothing cheaper then free, take advantage of new technologies to drastically reduce cost and build a small team of phenomenal people.

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Why Great Innovators Spend Less Than Good Ones

I’m a bit behind on my blog reading these days so I just came across a great piece written by Scott Anthony of Innosight Ventures about 2 weeks ago. Scott talks about the fact that cash-strapped innovation enterprises often achieve more success than their wealthy counterparts because large commitments “lead people to chase the known rather than the unknown, lead people to frame problems in technological terms and they lead innovators to shut off emergent signals”. Read the whole thing here.

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Google to demo Chrome OS tomorrow

With all of the rumors that Google would be releasing their new Chrome OS this week, the world took a disappointed sigh yesterday as word came this was not the case. Since July, it has official that Chrome OS is coming, and tomorrow the it will be demoed and future plans for the operating system will be detailed. For the moment, Google-loving netbook owners will have to bide their time.

Chrome OS will be a new Linux distribution specialized for netbooks which will be available free of charge for anyone who wants to download it. Much like Android, Google’s specialized Linux distro for smartphones, ChromeOS will come pre-bundled with all of Google’s services including Mail, Search, Maps etc. A free, snappy and secure netbook operating system could be exactly what users are looking for and may be a threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the netbook market thus far.

To be honest, I don’t think Chrome OS is going to take a huge bite out of Microsoft because the general public just doesn’t know enough about Linux yet. I think the new OS will be very popular with the technology crowd and hopefully it will join Ubuntu as an operating system that helps bring open source to the masses. Time will tell.

Microsoft releases .NET Micro FW as Open Source

This might be old news for you by now (first announced yesterday morning), but Microsoft has decided to release version 4.0 as open source, licensed under the Apache license. For the whole story, read it here.

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(image from http://www.microsoft.com/netmf/default.mspx)

Innovation in uncertain times

The past four weeks have been extremely busy. Thankfully, I have had the time to squeeze in a number of interesting lectures and talks. Over the next few posts I am going to cover some talks I attended covering topics such as innovation, systems science, design and design thinking and on creating a smarter planet.

I have mentioned before that in an uncertain economy, innovation becomes more important than ever before. Scott Anthony of Innosight Ventures and author of “The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times” recently gave a talk at University of Toronto’s Rotman school of business covering innovation and its increasing necessity.

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