Entrepreneurship Archives

How to Sustain Business Growth: Switch From CEO to Adviser

Once your business has achieved success, how should your role change? Should you grow by merger and acquisition or go public? In Ready, Fire, Aim, Michael Masterson explains that successful, multimillion-dollar businesses progress through four stages of development: launch, expand, optimize, and sustain. For this last stage, he recommends moving to an adviser role and focusing on tactics that promote continued growth. Read on to learn how to sustain business growth with Masterson’s strategies.

How to Be More Competitive: 3 Tips for Career Progression

Why do you need to develop your competitive edge in the work world? How can you be more competitive and stand out? To stand out in any career field, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha suggest you develop a unique competitive edge. This is something that makes you different and better than other people. Let’s look at how to be more competitive, with advice from The Startup of You.

How to Mitigate Risk: 4 Ways to Free Yourself to Create

What are some ways to test the waters before you put your product on the market? How can you protect your reputation while you experiment with new things? To be an innovator, you have to take creative risks. Experimentation—and failure—come with the territory. In Decoding Greatness, Ron Friedman shares four ways to lower the stakes for inevitable failures on the road to innovation and success. Continue reading to learn how to mitigate risk as you learn and create.

Suffering From a Lack of Innovation? We Have Solutions

What happens to businesses that lack innovation? How can you come up with ingenious ideas that will make customers swoon? A lack of innovation is a serious problem in many companies. Without it, they fail to come up with new ideas that excite customers and fall behind in the market. Keep reading for some suggestions to help you embrace innovation and start thinking differently about your product.

How to Reverse Engineer Anything to Recreate Greatness

What work do you admire? What if you could make your own version of it? How does reverse engineering enhance creativity? Ron Friedman argues that doing great work isn’t just about being talented or working hard. It’s about learning from the greats in your field by reverse engineering their creations. He explains how to reverse engineer the work you love and make it your own. Read more to learn how reverse engineering works and how to make it work for you.

The Adjacent Possible: Steven Johnson Explains Reachable Ideas

Why did it take so long for the invention of the computer to take hold? How can different people, working independently, come up with the same innovation? Good ideas don’t materialize miraculously from nothing. Instead, they build on existing knowledge and ideas. Emergence from the adjacent possible, Steven Johnson argues, is a hallmark of the most successful ideas. Keep reading to learn what the adjacent possible is and how we can mine it for good ideas.

Tony Fadell, Nest, & the Beginning of the Smart Home Revolution

How did world travel inspire the concept of a smart home? Why did Tony Fadell end his relationship with Nest? In Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, entrepreneur Tony Fadell tells the story of his career. He talks about starting Nest—a smart home device company—and later selling it to Google for billions of dollars. Keep reading to learn about Tony Fadell, Nest, and the start of the smart home revolution.

The Slow Hunch: How Small Inklings Become Novel Inventions

Do you have any half-baked ideas rattling around in your head? What if you could turn them into fully-baked brilliance? Sometimes hunches lead to full-fledged ideas. If you’re patient and keep working on them, you could end up with something quite usable. In Where Good Ideas Come From, best-selling author and theorist Steven Johnson explains how good ideas grow from minor inklings to groundbreaking inventions. Keep reading to learn how the “slow hunch” can mature into something of great value.

Why User Interaction Design Should Include Feedback

What is user interaction design? What is the importance of feedback on products? One of the most important components of product design is that it interacts with the user. The user should be able to receive feedback such as a beeping sound or flashing light when there’s a problem that needs to be attended to. Let’s look at how user interaction design helps consumers, according to User Friendly by Cliff Kuang and Robert Fabricant.

What Is Exaptation? Examples in Biology, Art, & Society

What is exaptation? How can it be applied in practical ways outside of biology? Exaptation is the use of a tool or trait in a context that’s different from the one it was originally intended for. In Where Good Ideas Come From, best-selling author and theorist Steven Johnson provides a few examples of exaptation and shows how it can lead to novel ideas outside of biology. Read more to learn about exaptations, particularly in the context of innovation.