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I’ve been listening through a number of startup pitches in Silicon Valley, both as observer, and to give feedback as pretend venture capitalist/angel investor (I will refer to them as VC in this article). The following is a list of phrases that startups mentioned at pitches from what I have witnessed or that I have …
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Category: Automotive, Failure, Innovation
German car makers have been under pressure for some time, and that from an unexpected area. Not the usual suspects are giving them hard times, but newcomers who come with full war chests and lots of ideas to overtake markets that make traditional concepts look old. A recent announcement of Porsche to offer an all …
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Category: Automotive, Failure
At this weeks Chaos Computer Club conference in Germany, one presentation went into details explaining two aspects of the Diesel scandal. First, a dive behind the scenes what the likely reasons, decision paths, and management involvements were that brought VW to this route. Second, an analysis of what the cheat code looks like and what …
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Category: Design Thinking, Innovation
Dec 25
In autumn 2015 I gave a talk about Design Thinking at the Reckoning 2015 conference in Half Moon Bay, California. The talk walks you through the Design Thinking concept and shows a couple of examples.
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Category: Government, Startup
This was a question on Quora, to which I wrote the following response. And there are quite a number of things. The obvious are of course: Make it easy to incorporate (online, no or low registration fees, no need of go-between services such as notaries or lawyers, low or now capital requirements) tax breaks for …
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Category: Innovation, Intrapreneurship
When you browse job postings that are looking for innovation managers, you’ll be surprised how companies are unprepared for them. It often starts with a confusing job description that uses innovation in an arbitrary way. The actual jobs are often nothing else than administrative or managerial jobs that look for keeping the status quo. Once …
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Category: Behavioral Economics, Innovation
When you give people the task to invent alternative uses for an old car tire, or listing all things that one could do with a brick, they for sure come up with some ideas. But if you tell them beforehand to imagine themselves as a seven-year-old child, they not only scored far higher on the …
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Category: Culture, Innovation, Mindset
We generally consider innovation as something that is good and desired, even that we know that people in disrupted industries will lose their jobs and investments destroyed, or that the innovative product or service can be used for nefarious purposes. Innovation to be good needs to create more value for society than it destroys. But …
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Category: Innovation
It was the third pitch that I heard, while serving as pretend venture capitalist at this accelerator in San Francisco. But my reaction to this pitch was different. A quarter of the time in, I stopped listening to what the startup-founder said. Not, because his startup ideas was uninteresting, but because he just had said …
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Dec 11
Nine out of ten startups are failing, and this puzzles someone who is not familiar with startups or businesses. Creating a business is a risky move in every sense. Can you attract enough customers, is the location right, is your service or product attractive enough to have customers come and come again? The Product / …
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