Experts says good business models have three key elements that must be logically consistent with each other. These are: customer value proposition, profit formula, and key resources and processes. Bmat meet them all.
That’s the reason why the company, which is committed to developing new software products dedicated to people’s interaction to music, won the 2009 Global Entrepreneurship Competition (GEC), that offers candidates the chance to obtain financing for their projects and the opportunity to showcase their projects for investors present at HiTBarcelona
Pedro Cano, founder and CTO of Bmat, born as a commercial spin-off of the Music Technology Group, the world’s largest research lab in music and audio, underlines that the GEC was a great experience that help the company to meet its cash flow challenges and get some international buzz. Cano is convinced that the music business is reinventing itself and that this new scenario offers new opportunities to Bmat.
This year, the 22 GEC finalists come from such diverse industries as biotechnology, telecommunications, clean and renewable energies, digital animation, industrial design and finance. They have been selected by an international panel of experts chaired and directed by Jerome S. Engel, Executive Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California (Berkeley), and they will compete for the awards during the conference. The winner of GEC 2010 will be awarded €20,000 in project financing. The second and third prize winners will receive €10,000 and €5,000 respectively.
Analysts agree that innovation is of crucial importance in economic recovery. As businesses attempt to find growth opportunities to overcome recession, HitBarcelona wants to share and discuss the best strategies to stimulate internal R&D, incorporate competing ideas, attract investment finance and be successful.
Which are the best options to consider? Is Corporate Venturing, that is investing in external start-ups, the best way to incorporate innovation right now? HitBarcelona has invited leading companies to explain how Corporate Venturing can be used to generate organic growth within an organization. It will be in the Plenary Congress, a forum in which you will meet the people behind the most recent entrepreneurial success, who will also talk about the characteristics companies should have to attract investment to become international leaders.
Eventually, global entrepreneurs, like Dennis Crowley, Verne Harnish, Gurbaksh Chahal or Marcos Cuevas will share the key elements that have made them succeed. The rendez-vous is the 16th June. They will be there, will you?
He says “most people who are rich are not rich because they have flashy careers. They are rich because they were very methodical about their saving.” That might be the reason why, in 2007, he built a personal finance tool with a simple interface, easy to understand and use, which added its one millionth user 18 months after its launch. Word of mouth spread.
Mint.com founder and former CEO Aaron Patzer is now VP and GM of Personal Finance at Intuit, after the company’s $170 million acquisition of Mint. He is 29 years old and he is convinced that the cloud is secure enough to control personal finance. And “It’s not just network security, — it’s physical security. Our servers are located in an undisclosed facility”, he states in a ZDNet interview.
Mint enables users to know how much they have, how much they owe, and where their money goes. The web-app even shows personalized ways to save and make more money. An “independent and objective view” the banks don’t have, he says, because they want to sell their own products.
Is this the future of personal finance? Are users globally ready to tell about their money on the cloud? Are smartphones the ideal devices to run this kind of personal app? Which are the potential features on mobile? These are some of the questions the entrepreneur will answer at HitBarcelona next June. It will be a great opportunity to convert money numbers into understandable words to keep in our wallet.
Last year, Grasshopper published an inspiring video in which they state that “entrepreneurs can be anyone… even you“. They talk about entrepreneurship spirit, about overcoming what we consider impossible…
Last week, Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake didn’t say a word about spirit and went directly into the education issue. She wrote a comment-baiting post suggesting that wanna-be entrepreneurs should “drop out of college“. After all, she states, “Rob Kalin, Etsy’s founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey — the founders of Twitter — are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And of course Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.”
Creativity expert Ken Robinson might explain it. He is convinced that “schools kill creativity”:
But does this mean being a drop-out is the best strategy? Chris Cameron doesn’t think so. He points out that “the best solution may be to attend college, learn the early basic lessons, gain access to resources and contacts, and begin the early stages of your company while still enrolled. Then, if the company takes off, leave school.”
Being an entrepreneur is about having attitude and the drive to succeed in business. Is it possible to learn this quality? Can thinkers and doers turn a great idea into a business plan? HitBarcelona invites you to discuss this topic…
Some economists say pessimism is slowing job creation and likely weakening the recovery. So, on a more positive note, it’s worth underlining that early-stage investors are still placing bets.
According to Forbes.com, they are looking at Internet, Software, Electronics, Mobile and Communications, Energy and Utilities, and Health Care. Therefore, being in the right sector can make all the difference. For the record, CB Insights enhances that Health Care was the most popular one among venture capitals in the fourth quarter (2009), attracting $1.8 billion spread over 167 deals.
The above mentioned article also states that there is a clear recovery taking place right now in the biotech arena. Moreover, the Internet and digital medical information are having a major disruptive effect on the practice of medicine. Some experts predict in 10 years’ time remote care will keep patients healthy and at home. What do all these changes mean for the Health Care Industry, globally speaking and taking into account the long-awaited Health Care reform in the US?
Some of these topics were discussed in the e-Health week conference, held in Barcelona last March, and in the Health 2.0 congress, held in Paris, a few weeks ago. In her blog, Cristina Ribas points out some conclusions worth to be shared. The 2.0 Health Care products success depends on integration of data from private and public services, access to specialized communities and personalized content and some kind of virtual assistance.
What do you think about it? What’s next for Health Care? HitBarcelona offers you an ideal environment to discuss it. The congress will also bring together well-known experts of the sector, who will reveal the latest investment trends and explain where and how to invest. Will you miss this opportunity?
Logo of the Open Graph Protocol (image from opengraphprotocol.org)
In an interview done by Robert Scoble, David Kirkpatrick, who worked for Fortune for more than 20 years and just finished the book The Facebook Effect, states it clearly: “This is not just another company, it is a transformational phenomenon.”
Facebook has become a reference site on the Net. Some say it will be the Social Google. And given that the search engine has not done very well in the social sphere (see Buzz), Mark Zucherberg’s company seems to have the road to his objectives paved in gold.
In 2008, the CEO of the social network, which currently has more than 400 million users worldwide, predicted that there would be a wave of social Web sites built on top of the information users give to social networks. He also said that social networks were going to start to decentralize into a series of social applications across the Web. Even more, that this fact was “the beginning of an industry”.
Two years later, at their third annual F8 conference held in San Francisco a few days ago, Zucherberg presented the social plug-in which is meant to turn any web page into a Facebook page.
Check the tech-blogs. Many marvel at the high level of personalization that Open Graph enables, while others fear the potential privacy issues. In essence, the Open Graph concept means that you can go to your favourite shopping site and check, without having to log in to Facebook, that some of your friends “like” the product you are seeing. You can then click the “I Like” button included on the site and the information will automatically be added to your profile. No need to say what it means for advertisers and ad targeting. As Nick O’Neill writes, Facebook will have the best data on the web for advertisers to study. Bad news for Google.
How will users react to these new features? Let’s remember the controversy created by Beacon in 2007. Is the Open Graph concept different? What has changed? What do these features mean to your business? Is this the future of Social Networks? These are some of the topics that may be discussed at HitBarcelona. Do you want to join the debate?
We were looking at new ways to tell you that Hit Barcelona is a unique global event which brings together business leaders, innovators, investors and entrepreneurs to share ideas, promote projects and redefine the keys to business success. So, we’ve tried the coolest new feature now in YouTube:
When great ideas turn into business... (image from innovation-applied.com)
Bringing new technology to market is hard. “A crap shoot”, according to the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen. With a little training, people can display an amazing amount of inventiveness and come up with new products or services that are downright excellent. But how many of them see the light of commercial day? This is the tough part. Is there any recipe, any rules to seduce the market? Which are the tools required to turn an opportunity into a competitive and sustainable business?
The books published generally focus on the innovation process. In Serious Play, Michael Schrage, a research associate at MIT Media Lab and columnist for Fortune, describes the kind of culture that is needed for encouraging innovation and lays out the 10 rules of “creative improvisation in corporations”. He advise entrepreneurs to be willing to fail early and often, to know when the costs outweigh the benefits, to build a prototype that engages customers, vendors, and colleagues and to create markets around prototypes.
In another book published in March 2010, Robert F. Brands, former CEO of Airspray N.V. - manufacturer of the ubiquitous foaming pumps on soaps of all kinds-, offers as well a 10-step program to “create and sustain NEW in Business“. The keywords/phrases are: Inspiration, Risk, New Product Development Process, Ownership, Value Creation, Accountability, Training and Coaching, Idea Management, Observation and Measure, Net Results and Reward.
They are certainly useful…and catchy, but what do they mean in practice? Can Innovation be applied following a 10-step program? HitBarcelona wants to escape theory to offer some practical examples of successful application of innovation to help entrepreneurs to turn ideas into a solid business that can transform society. It will be exciting to discuss on this issue next June.
He has pointed out several times that the place where we live is not a destiny to be accepted passively but a choice that shapes everything about us. His ideas on the Creative class that fosters an open, dynamic, personal and professional environment, which in turn attracts more creative people, business and capital, have turn into global best-sellers. And for good reason.
Richard Florida is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals on economic competitiveness and cultural and technical innovation. In his latest book, Great Reset, coming out the 27th April, the professor and head of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the Rotman School of Management (University of Toronto, Canada) explains how new ways of living and working will drive post-crash prosperity. According to him, an economic convulsion—dubbed a Reset—“transforms not simply the way we innovate and produce but also ushers in a whole new economic landscape.”
In this respect, Florida is convinced that “our economic system needs to stop channeling funds into super-risky, highly leveraged, and speculative areas”. “Instead we must return to the original vision and purpose of the financial markets: supporting innovation and the growth of the real economy”, he says. He makes oneself clearer in a recent video realeased by The Wall Street Journal:
He will surely explain further on this topic at HitBarcelona, in June. 54 days left.
Nobody denies it’s a great idea. The theory says Open Innovation helps to develop better new products and services at a lower cost. But in a world in which business means competition rather than cooperation, some companies still find difficult to embrace a more inclusive and partnership form of innovation.
So what is the best approach to Open Innovation? How can we break the barriers raised by issues such as intellectual property, the complexity of new collaborative spaces or less obvious challenges as inertia?
A report from Nesta, the English National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, recommends “starting at the end with a win-win business model in mind”, trying not to be “prematurely judgemental” and not to “manage risk down to zero”. “It’s all about managed uncertainty.”
Another paper published in the MIT Sloan Management Review discusses whether external innovators should be organized in collaborative communities or competitive markets.
HITBarcelona has invited the person who coined the concept to shed some light on the topic. Henry Chesbrough is the executive director of the Center for Open Innovation and will open the Plenary Congress. He is also the author of Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology (HBS Press, 2003) and two other books on this subject: Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape (HBS Press, 2006) andOpen Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm(Oxford, 2006), an edited book of academic papers.
He has recently been thinking on how to bring innovation into the services sector. In that sense, he considers that working next to the bench with the costumer to understand new challenges and new problems is crucial.
We will surely have more hints on that topic in June, the 16th.
