Management. How hard can it be, really? Is management just dressed up common sense, or is it something magical? It’s a question that has exercised minds since the industrial revolution, and with good reason. Watching the slow-motion collapse of British Leyland, or...
As a kid my favourite cartoon scene was Bugs Bunny running off a cliff, legs frantically whirring while he goes nowhere, till suddenly he realises he’s no longer on terra firma, and only then plummets to the ground.We got asked in to help recover a startup recently. ...
Back in 1985, Modigliani and Miller won a Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that a company’s value was unaffected by its debt/equity ratio. It didn’t matter, they said, how you divided the pie, the pie was still the same pie.Which returned to mind this week when...
Black Coffee and Kicking the Furniture (Or, Why Writing a Decent Business Plan is So Hard).Every year investors receive hundreds, thousands even, of business plans. And most of them are hopeless. Worse, they’re dull. They ramble, they waffle, they pad. They’re...
It’s interesting how resistant this one seems to be. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard speakers say it, books say it, investors say it. Opportunity starts with customers. It’s obvious, right? Yet it’s a perspective that seems to get lost time and...
We waved goodbye recently to a prospect with a really great invention. Not only was it a great invention, but he’d hired top quality patent lawyers, filed it in half the globe and… maintained it for ten years.Heaven know what all this had cost him. North of £100k...
Last month I took part in a technology commercialisation conference in Spain. The question furrowing brows (European and north American, mostly) was a very focused and interesting one: If most science based businesses are ‘born global’ by market niche, how do we...
If you’ve been involved in startups for more than, oh, a week or so, you’ll have noticed there’s never enough resources in them. And if you’ve been around a bit longer, you’ll also know that most startups die.I believe these are linked, and not in the way you may...
According to Theodore Levitt of Harvard Business School, “Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things”.Tot up the number of university researchers and potting shed inventors, throw in the army of patent lawyers, TTO staff and others helping...
Almost all of us who work in technology innovation would agree; This is very different to blue chip work. But what exactly makes it so? Is it the ability to get a lot done on a little money? Is it flexibility? Is it even the evident passion so many of us bring to...
