Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Thursday, August 9, 2007

Embracing Innovation

The National Commission on Entrepreneurship has published a report on Entrepreneurship and American Economic Growth. The report is available as a PDF here:

http://www.zeromillion.com/files/embracing-innovation.pdf

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Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Does it pay to be green?

In manufacturing terms, exponential population growth means more factories taking up more land, using more raw materials, and allowing more emissions and waste into the environment. Demand for products and services will grow, but the availability of supplies isn’t guaranteed. Competition for Earth’s finite resources will heat up and it’s easy, yet unsettling, to imagine the socio-economic and political consequences.

A variable-speed drive saves energy that the La Union sugar mill in Guatemala is able to sell for additional revenue of $158,480 per harvest season. Source: Rockwell
A variable-speed drive saves energy that the La Union sugar mill in Guatemala is able to sell for additional revenue of $158,480 per harvest season. Source: Rockwell

“To achieve and maintain world-class sustainable manufacturing, you need continuous improvement – not just of your capital assets but the utilization and return on your raw materials, utilities and human resource assets as well,” says John Blanchard, principal analyst for CPG industries at ARC Advisory Group. “Manufacturing companies should recognize that it will become increasingly difficult for manufacturing operations to drive new growth and margin without considering manufacturing ‘sustainability’ in their business decisions.”

The benefits are practical as well as financial. Blanchard explains, “Maximizing the utilization of assets always brings a return on investment. If you can bring a packaging line from 50% efficiency to 80% efficiency without buying new equipment or using more energy, then you have reduced the cost per unit of product and demonstrated one of many approaches toward achieving world-class sustainable manufacturing.”

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Friday, August 3, 2007

The Entrepreneur: Bringing Innovation to Life

As the global economy continues to evolve, scientific discovery, technological invention and commercial innovation are fast becoming the hallmarks of our socioeconomic well-being. Although, transforming science into technology can be fraught with intimidating doses of hard work and hard thinking, the hard truth of the matter is that bringing technology to the marketplace is just as essential to wringing out social benefits from science and technology as the discoveries and inventions were in the first place. However, in contrast to the advanced knowledge it takes to develop new products, it takes age-old personality traits such as vision, leadership, self-confidence and intestinal fortitude to bring bright ideas to the light of day. Those among us who do the things that bring the benefits of technology to people are that separate breed of individuals we call entrepreneurs.

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Yo Governments! Here's How Not to Blow It

A wholesale open-access license for a major chunk of the 700 MHz band would dramatically expand the number of competitors offering mobile voice and Internet access. This would be a huge public policy breakthrough for American broadband. Like the Internet, wireless would have a sandbox for innovation. Small entrepreneurs with novel ideas could bring products to market and get direct consumer feedback. No more groveling to the marketing departments of the cellular carriers for an opening. If you have a good idea, build it. "Let the market decide" would mean let consumers, not some telco executive, decide.
Four Principles

To achieve this vision of a healthy, competitive wireless industry, open access must include four basic principles: open devices, open services, open applications, and—crucially—open networks. We must open a portion of the 700 MHz band to a wholesale operator with the incentive to sell affordable access to this valuable spectrum to all third-party service providers.

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Entrepreneurs Getting Younger

They’d rather strike out on their own. In fact, nearly 71 percent of the 1,474 youth who participated in a 2006 Junior Achievement survey said they wanted to be self-employed sometime in their lives—up by 6.9 percentage points since 2004. Credit the opportunities that come from growing up in a technological society, experts said. That’s not to say there haven’t been downtrends throughout the years.

Reasons for the trend: About 3.9 percent of adults ages 20-34 started a business in 2005 and 2006, according to the Missouri-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation’s 2006 Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, up slightly from the 3.7 percent who took the plunge in 2000-2001—but down from 4.3 percent in 1996-1997.

Not many other national studies track the age of entrepreneurs, but experts agree that an increasing number of startups have young people at the helm.

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