Quote of the day:

“Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good”.

Great advice from Entrepreneur and angel investor Mike Nolan.

It’s an interesting thought;

How does the story you tell about your business (and self) impact the business itself?

If you are an entrepreneur, you certainly need to be able to explain the value your business has.

I had a marketing exec at fortune 100 company once tell me that she ‘got the value instantly’ but didn’t understand the ‘proposition’. That feedback was great, albeit painful, and ultimately resulted in a more refined ‘story’ to the world and to our customers.

Original question posed by Eric Friedman on his blog Marketing.fm

This is a great innovation. The “Brown Mound” from eco-inventor Gaelan Brown.

Special thanks to Keri from @1thing4green
for her help spreading the word. If you want to get updates, let us know here:

The Brown Mound

Carey Hepler, head of innovation at a major health insurance provider highlights that innovation isn’t always easy. This is a funny account of the battles involved with trying to push forward a ‘web cam technology’ in his company.

I think I said, “Whaa?” as I was trying to make sense of what he’d just said.  The Help Desk guy says, “Oh, no.  We’re not allowing the cameras to be used off the network (outside of us) because that would be too risky.”  You must be kidding me.  We created a webcam system so we could look at each other when we chat on the phone?  That’s like creating a phone system that only works to call the other employees in the company.   It has some functionality, but it’s 1% of what it could be.

Entrepreneur and educator Mike Nolan had a great post today about entrepreneurs.

1. The average and median age of company founders when they started their current companies was 40.

2. 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more advanced degrees.

3. Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds

4. 15.2% of founders had a sibling that previously started a business.

5. 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were married when they launched their first business. An additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or widowed.

6. 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one child when they launched their first business, and 43.5 percent had two or more children.

7. The majority of the entrepreneurs in the sample were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of businesses launched by respondents was approximately 2.3.

8. 74.8 percent indicated desire to build wealth as an important motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.

9. Only 4.5 percent said the inability to find traditional employment was an important factor in starting a business.

10. Entrepreneurs are usually better educated than their parents.

11. Entrepreneurship doesn’t always run in the family. More than half (51.9 percent) of respondents were the first in their families to launch a business.

12. The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own companies.

“Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.”

- Peter Drucker

never stop innovating