Beaches, Barbecues, and Tech Bubbles

Summertime for entrepreneurs means less time at barbecues and more time for business model generation. For those of you planning to spend the summer working on a venture, or developing the next great technology innovation, here’s a quick round-up of cool insights for you to use as you sweat out the hot weather. Of course, you could also make a business out of soaking up the sun.

Hit Your Niche Fast

That’s a key piece of advice offered up by serial entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, who recently participated in a Rebooting Business Live Chat on The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Europe website. In the rapid fire chat, Le Meur discusses the value of different business models and compares the entrepreneurial ecosystems of Silicon Valley and Europe. However, the slew of sage advice for entrepreneurs in the planning stage may be the most valuable piece of the interview.

Plus, enjoy this video of Le Meur sharing his entrepreneurial story at Stanford.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1G4w8EQ5LU

Large Scale Change Won’t be Easy

[quote_right]One of the impediments to successful change is that people use the belief that “it is difficult and takes a long time” to avoid trying to make necessary changes at all.
— Prof. Bob Sutton[/quote_right]Stanford Professor Bob Sutton is currently working on a new book, with colleague Hayagreeva Rao, on scaling constructive action. As the author of Good Boss, Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule, Bob is widely known for engaging work that consistently presents valuable insights into human and team interaction, particularly in the workplace.

Earlier in June, Sutton shared a post on his blog discussing the direction of his current thinking, and examined earlier research on why organizations cannot always achieve large scale change through simplification of processes to reduce cognitive load on employees. Read the full post Sutton’s blog: Work Matters.

Reducing Your Innovation Risk

BYU Entrepreneurship Professor Nathan Furr is currently blogging for Forbes.com on topics related to entrepreneurship and innovation. In a recent post, Furr describes the challenges faced in unlocking the secrets to repetitive innovation. When picturing innovators, it’s easy for most people to become enchanted with the romantic notion of one creative individual repeatedly coming up with big successes.

However, Furr believes reality lies in understanding innovation as a process, rather than a series one-off moments of invention. Furr also provides a model for how to lower the risks of innovation, by increasing the speed with which entrepreneurs attempt to validate new ideas in the marketplace.

Also, check out Furr’s previous post on the innovator’s paradox.

Are We in a Tech Bubble? Yes. No. Maybe…

Last week on The Economist’s website, serial entrepreneur Steve Blank debated the tech bubble issue with venture capitalist Ben Horowitz. Blank, who teaches a Lean LaunchPad entrepreneurship course here at STVP, argued that, yes, we are definitely in a tech bubble. He lays out a cogent argument for this position, including his views on current private and public tech company valuations that, in his words, “exceed any rational valuation to their current worth.”

Perhaps even more interestingly, he goes a step further in suggesting that tech bubbles are not a bad thing for creating long term value and innovation. See Blank’s full closing argument on his blog.