Every entrepreneur needs a backpack. Success comes from knowing what to put in it. Here’s a starter for 12. 1. An Apple MacBook 2. An iPhone 3. Google Wave, Gmail and Google Apps 4. A kick ass idea and approach 5. A network of early adopters to bounce your idea off (on Facebook or Twitter) 6. [...]

Umair Haque, from the Havas Media Lab,  talks about the current crisis and what future innovation should look like – profound.

Less than 1% of entrepreneurs reach their goals and fulfill their dreams. That means 99% are left dissatisfied. Why bother? Yet, so many do. The world has tens of millions of entrepreneurs or wanna be entrepreneurs – and growing. The definition of entrepreneur “is a person who has possession of a new enterprise,venture or idea, and assumes significant [...]

There are a bunch of common mistakes startups make when trying to get to the top, here’s a list. Photo by iTopher via Flickr Feel the need to succeed? Got your funding but lost about what to do next? Pressure can often translate into getting things wrong. Here’s a great article from @Scobleizer on what [...]

Because being a successful entrepreneur is ALL about leadership.

If you’re puzzled about where your next business idea might come from, these consumer trends will help. Photo by MorBCN via Flickr There’s a gap in the way businesses speculate about the market and how consumers are shaping it. Globalization, Web 2.0 and user generated content are defining new markets. Adapting to next gen consumer [...]

Design thinking is driving how we develop products and services in the 21st Century. Watch the video – and learn how to develop and prototype user experiences – not just products. Particularly interesting is the concept of shifting ‘design to build’ to ‘build to design’ which means launch fast – learn faster.

There is one question every first time or wanna be entrepreneur asks me; ‘what trick do I most need to learn before becoming an entrepreneur?’ Is it general business skills, marketing skills, management techniques, Web design skills, software development skills, presentation skills – WHAT? The dumb and irritating answer is all of the above. Nice [...]

Pitching ideas is becoming an art, here’s how the pros do it. Pitching is the art of transforming your audience into stakeholders. Some say that the audience is not buying your idea – it’s buying you. Which doesn’t necessarily make things any easier. We stumbled over a great collection of videos from the masters of pitching, [...]

The impact of new mobile technologies and the boom of the iPhone OS and Android powered devices is having a powerful impact on the way brands market themselves. Here’s what you need to know. We stumbled upon a neat video posted by Penn Olson. It’s a great synthesis on how ‘mobile’ is making its impact [...]

Research by the Kauffman Foundation has just shown that ALL net job growth in the US over the last 30 years was created by businesses less than 5 years old. Let me repeat that: ALL net job growth. ALL. Governments and analysts used to think that small businesses generated most net employment growth. They measure [...]

If you run a startup or are planning to do so you’ll bump into venture capital (VC) funding. So what is it? Photo by Darrren Hester via Flickr Venture capital is the backbone of a select few, more successful startups but reality is few entrepreneurs really understand what it is about. Getting the mechanics of [...]

We regularly get asked by entrepreneurs and wanna be entrepreneurs what they need to do to become better entrepreneurs. We have 2 answers: ‘launch a blog’ (and read Innovate). Mostly – launch a blog! Find a topic that you can be master of – make sure it’s a tight niche and build a blog around [...]

Finding early stage investors can be like looking for a very small needle in a very large haystack. And in downturns it gets even worse. In depressions like we have just gone through its like finding nats on camels asses while they sprint for their lives in a sandstorm. Given that venture capital dudes have [...]

I don’t know how many business books or rags remind us time after time that customers come first – customer obsessed businesses win and so on. Unfortunately none of these writers or pundits have ever built or run a startup. Few of them write with entrepreneurs in mind. They write for the well heeled dudes [...]

Social Media offer a great alternative to traditional media to get your startup out there, but you need to be aware that they change fast. Photo by baboon™ via Flickr Huge marketing budgets do not belong to a startup environment. That doesn’t mean that letting people know about your cool idea is a prohibitive task. [...]

The venture capital industry as we know it is going the way of the Dodo. There are 3 key reasons for this: 1. As startups, technologies and innovation become more global the ‘Silicon Valley’ ecosystem is sidelined. And VC’s outside the Valley have poor track records and weak managers. Startups abroad happily build businesses without [...]