With the success and popularity of Zynga’s FarmVille and other such applications, marketers the world over have acknowledged the subtle potential of fusing entertainment with marketing, gamification, as a means of stimulating engagement and encouraging consumer participation with the brand. An exploration of the merits of using gamification tactics as a means of marketing innovatively.

After watching this video, the first thoughts to enter your mind are the classic differences between entrepreneurs and employees.

Scott Anthony is the Managing Director of Innosight, a boutique consulting, training and investment firm that works with Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, non-profits and national governments to improve their ability to create innovation-driven growth.

Tim Campbell was the first winner of the BBC’s annual entrepreneurial slug-fest, The Apprentice. Since leaving his role with Lord Alan Sugar.  Tim has become the founder and CEO of Bright Ideas Trust, a charity that helps disadvantaged young people in London to start their own companies.

Innovate (TM) is an innovation methodology and start-up system exclusive to Innovatrs – we’ve made it freely available to all entrepreneurs as an open source content offering. Innovate is structured into 7 stages and 49 phases covering the critical 3-5 years that it typically takes to bring an idea all the way from concept to exit. Entrepreneurs [...]

For all start-ups getting alternative financing has become increasingly important in these credit junked days. Banks are up their credit committee butts, investors gun shy and friends and family investors increasingly tapped out. So we plan to show you a series of alternatives. Here’s an off the wall starter for 10 – or is it [...]

Six weeks ago we quietly opened our doors to a cool new crowd platform – for entrepreneurs. A place where innovators of all kinds could come together, learn, share and network. A community of entrepreneurs wrapped around Innovate, our ground breaking start-up system and Innovation methodology. We made it free. And you started coming. Gathering [...]

As we come to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Internet – this ones worth checking out. To the next 40 years.

We thoroughly enjoyed reading a post by @asmartbear about keeping it real and small. Photo by simpologist via Flickr Some wise words and case studies in the article include: Your vision is to land $100k deals with big companies — and you will! But not today. Today your product is a shaky version one-dot-oh with [...]

I read a great article on ‘The first Gen YouTube Celebs – Where are they now?’ and it got me thinking. After all, video is the future of the Web and vice versa. We should make Flip camera’s and YouTube a part of all of our communications as individuals and as businesses – not just [...]

Hulu’s CEO on the future of video on the Web and @ha ideas.

Innovate’s (TM) start-up system starts with the @ha idea. Innov@te utilizes a process called CREATE-IVITY (TM) to generate ideas. Once an entrepreneur has developed their @ha idea they need to know what to do with it. Rushing straight from idea to venture is way too hit and miss. Equally, the world over, far too many people [...]

Randy Komisar from Kleiner Perkins on how the biggest successes can often be bred from failures. This is the kick off to Innovatrs ‘Fail to Succeed’ series.

There are some great entrepreneur interviews at Stanford’s eCorner. The wonder of Stanford is its proximity to so much that is successful in and around Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs often come from or are linked to Stanford University so they have strong pulling power. Worth checking out.

The Glasshouse event in London last night ‘Show Me the Money’ was well attended with some interesting VC’s speaking including London’s latest – PRO Partners. It seems that Spotify and Playfish are the VC’s favorite ventures right now – proving that they still hunt in packs/follow each other like sheep. They repeated that venture investments [...]

Innovatrs.com is sponsoring blur’d Meetups for entrepreneurs – initially in London. It is a private member monthly meetup on the West side of London for cool entrepreneurs. We hope it will unearth the next big idea and we plan to launch Innovatrs Start-up TV Network there in the coming months! Join us if you dare.

Following the digital big bang small businesses and start-ups will be able to compete with larger businesses as never before. And anyone will be able to afford to start a small business. Capital will no longer be the scarce resource – ideas, marketing and attitude will. Just look at Twitter. For anyone will be able [...]

Innovatrs is excited to offer full, open access to the Innovate Wiki for anyone to use, learn from and add to. When we developed Innovate, with its 7 stages and 49 phases for taking an idea all the way through to a successful business, we always dreamed of it becoming an open source methodology that [...]

As we look out a few years one tremor looks inevitable: the digital big bang. The point at which the tipping trend to connected networks and devices explodes us into a new dawn. Today there are 3.5 billion mobile phone users each connected to one network or another – in cities across the globe many using [...]

TechCrunch recently put out a list of the top 100 ‘networked’ venture capitalists – following some interesting research. They defined ‘networked’ by the number of co-investors that they had in deals and rated firms by the number of exits they had achieved. The top 10 lists most of the usual suspects. Which got me thinking [...]

I was spoilt. Two companies ago I was introduced to Bill Draper III – a legend in Silicon Valley and reputedly the West Coasts king of early stage venture capital. He invested in the company I ran at the time and sat on its board. He was a legend for a good reason – he [...]

Tim Brown of IDEO wrote an interesting article on Participation in Design. The premise is that innovation will and should increasingly come from groups, not individuals, crowds not buddies – the social Web. I could not agree more. The question is how do we design the next set of systems to drive crowd innovation and what [...]

According to BusinessWeek There is growing evidence that the US’ innovation shortfall of the past decade is not only real but may also have contributed to today’s financial crisis. It seems that the major innovations promised just a decade ago, such as truly fast broadband for all, 3G everywhere, cures for cancer, electric cars and [...]

I have spent the last four and a half years studying, researching and developing the link between creativity and innovation. After all, I spent my early years surrounded by artists and art on the one hand (my mother is a well know art historian and curator) and the Letts media business on the other. In [...]

blur’d is hosting the first in a series of entrepreneur meetups in London tomorrow night, June 30th. blur’d Meetups are designed for interesting entrepreneurs launching or running somewhat disruptive and innovative ventures. blur’d also lets in select digital directors and innovation officers from large companies. They plan to do monthly, invitation only get togethers in [...]