Innovation Sparks

Entrepreneurship Is Fueling Global Change

April 21st, 2013 by admin 2 comments »

Ah, Entrepreneurship…

Entrepreneurship is now fueling the world’s quests to end epidemics, resolve inequities and poverty, increase education and care for our natural resources. Three forces – government environment, bottoms up desire for skills/learning, and conscious capital — have come together to create this sea of change. The Millennials will cause changes like we’ve never seen in the world. In general, there is a growing consciousness that we CAN change our world for the better and entrepreneurial thinking is the key to this change.

For the past two years, we’ve had an amazing set of innovators/entrepreneurs share their experiences @ The Intersection Event on how their work impacts the world. Some of the most memorable moments…

–> Leila Janah, Founder/CEO of Samasource spoke at our event inside Pixar about how her company is creating mico-work opportunities for impoverished women and children around the world

–> Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIn, and Ev Williams, Co-Founder of Twitter have talked about the impact of their game-changing social networks

–> Barry Zito, SF Giants star pitcher, spoke @ Google about Strikeout for the Troops, his entrepreneurial endeavor that supports our nations military families

–> Kushal Chakrabarti, Chairman of Vittana, gave a passion-filled pitch at 2013 The Gratitude Awards for ways in which his company has enabled young people in Africa to complete their educations with help from those of us who care

These …and many many more memorable moments at The Intersection, have reminded us that innovation that impacts social change is not coming from the large NGOs – it’s coming from the ingenuity of the entrepreneurs.

How popular is Entrepreneurship today around the world?

If measured by televisions sets in our homes in the US, Entrpreneurship has reached the pinacle of popularity…shows like Shark Tank, a TV show developed by Mark Burnett (executive producer of Survivor, The Bible, The Voice, and Celebrity Apprentice) and featuring 5 angel investors who love (or shred apart) various entrepreneurs who “pitch” their wares. Thanks to this program, millions of people around the world now know how to calculate the valuation of a start-up, how to evaluate a team, what sales are needed to impress investors, and how to negotiate a term sheet (…and for this I went to Harvard Business School???).

Around the world, Big Governments is encouraging Entrepreneurship. This trend started 10 years ago and has reached a crescendo in recent years. My former professor at HBS and colleague, John Kao, authored Innovation Nation in 2007 to “pour some cold ice” on the US government about how the US is losing its edge as an innovation leader. New institutions, laws, cultural norms will enable other countries to surpass the US in innovation, posits Kao, if we don’t embrace entrepreneurship and ingenuity in new ways in the US. Regardless, with the recent

entrepreneurship in internet search, mobile software and human interface design, the SPIRIT of ENTREPRENEURSHIP still seems embedded in our culture I don’t see it going anywhere in the coming years. Initiatives, under Obama, like the Steve-Case-headed Start-up America are looking for ways to turn around our competitive situation

Grass-roots Desire

While Mr. Burnett is raking in the ratings, there is clearly a grass roots, bottoms up desire for Entrepreneurship among tomorrow’s leaders – who are today in undergrad and graduate schools around the world. I see this with each year that I teach at UC Berkeley and U. Cambridge – more and more students are asking me how they can “do well” AND “do good”.

General Entrepreneurship is taught at every major University around the globe; three dozen of the top business schools now offer a “Center” for Entrepreneurship” or program – without one they are no longer competitive players in the college market - many students are looking to build their entrepreneurial skills as part of their core learning experience in college.

Social entrepreneurship is now the hot new area: courses at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Management illustrate the case. In the past few years, numerous course on innovation, entrepreneurship and now social entrepreneurship have proliferated – and most students take at least one of these electives in pursuing their degrees. These offering have spilled over into the 3-year (“weekend/evening MBA program”) which takes in students who for the most part also have full-time management-level jobs in the Bay Area. According to February 2013 blog on HBR between 2003 and 2009 the average course in US MBA schools has skyrocked over 110% per year.

A recent Fortune article on higher ed illustrates the points: The latest trends in undergrads are programs that develop students as social entrepreneurs. Already Berkeley (Haas), Yale, Stanford (GSB), Harvard MBA, and Duke (Darden School) have entire programs around teaching social entrepreneurship. Abroad, INSEAD has led the way and Oxford (Saïd School) has sponsored The Skoll Foundation’s annual trend-setting conference called Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship.

Not Just the MBAs

Turns out the social entrepreneurship movement is gaining momentum in many undergraduate schools as well – from Dartmouth to Azusa Pacific. For example, at Brown University, undergrad students are leading the entrepreneurial charge. This bottom up approach has led to the continued success of the Entrepreneurship Program, or EP, a 15-year-old student run entrepreneurship initiative, which is now thriving as both an engagement program for blossoming entrepreneurs, and an accelerator program for more experienced founders. In addition, EP has recently formed a partnership with E’ship, the student-run entrepreneurship club at the Rhode Island School of Design. Through partnering RISD designers with Brown coders, engineerings, and creative thinkers, the Brown-RISD entrepreneurship initiative could assert Providence’s College Hill as one of the nation’s top entrepreneurial breeding grounds, all thanks to a grass-roots approach to entrepreneurship. Brown was also ranked recently by US News & World Report as a leader in the area of Social Entrepreneurship, with its unique programs at the Howard Swearer Center including the Social Innovation initiative and a Seed Fund for social ventures.

The Intersection of Need and Talent and Money

The third component, MONEY, completes the puzzle. Over the past 10 years there has been a steady rise in funding sources available to social entrepreneurs. There are angel groups (for example, Investors Circle), foundations (Skoll Foundation, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Kauffman Foundation), social-impact banks (such as Triodos Bank in Europe), and a variety of emerging venture firms (see a great list here, from Olivia Khalili of Cause Capital blog).

At UC Berkeley, my students and I have completed a “Note on Social Impacting Investment” that can be used with MBA students to provide an overview of the options available. The Note, written in 2012, provides an overview of the wide range of emerging options for philanthropic and impact investing, along with overviews of 8 of the top funding organizations. To download and read the Note, click here: A Note on Social and Impact Investing

Put them all together they spell “C-H-A-N-G-E”

Put these three trends together — top-down government policy, rising desire of the Millenials for social entrepreneurship, and Conscious Capital – and one gets a very encouraging picture of impact that global social entrepreneurship is likely to have in the next 20 years. Scores of young minds desire to understand how they can become social entrepreneurs, governments (in the US and abroad) are likely to legislate in favor of the entrepreneurs and capital is becoming more available.

The Gratitude Network and The Intersection community are ready for this change. Are you?

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Posted in Entrepreneurs, Social innovation

Tags: education entrepreneur social social change social entrepreneurship

The Click Moment – great innovations and serendipity

November 4th, 2012 by admin No comments »

Frans Johansson’s book The Medici Effect, is a work about innovation that speaks truths about the way that inventions and innovation have come about over history. Frans points to examples throughout history in which the INTERSECTION of diverse ideas, cultures, disciplines and/or minds yielded a creative or innovative solution or creative work. Frans aptly named his book after the success of the 15th century House of Medici in Italy who brought together a diversity of cultural and artistic talent from around the world. The result birthed The Renaissance.

In his second book, The Click Moment (Penguin Publishing, 2012) Frans goes beyond the observation that diversity yields innovation. He set out to better ask the question: are great innovations and/or creativity the result of careful investigation, strategy and action – or could they often be the result of chance interaction, serendipity or luck. And, if a new discovery or innovation is due to serendipity , then was there a set-up or something that the inventor(s) did to be better prepared for this momentous occasion?

In the book, Frans points to many inventions that actually appear to have been born out of serendipitous moments: the Twilight book series, Starbucks Coffee, Facebook and the Apple Macintosh…and many more examples. These “aha” moments of serendipity that produced at the intersection of diverse opinions, cultures, or disciplines are what Frans calls “Click Moments”.

“….a serendipitous encounter, an unexpected moment of insight or an unplanned culmination of events.There was one instant in which fate turned their way, a moment they can look back at and say ‘that was when it started’. We all have this ‘click moments” – Frans Johnansson, The Click Moment

There is one story that is not told in The Click Moment, but might have been. It’s the story of Twitter — one of the most intriguing cultural and global innovations of the 21st century. The story behind the serendipity of Twitter, like many future inventions that will undoubtedly come, will be told at The Intersection, on January 19, 2013 at Google. At The Intersection, Frans will discuss The Click Moment and will interview Twitter Co-Founder Ev Williams in a unique dialog about what really happened at the creation of Twitter and how a string of failed applications and investments led the team to notice the simple internal tool that Jack Dorsey had developed…and how that tool went on to become one of the great innovations of the 21st century. To come see Frans and 14 other incredible speakers on Innovation, you can apply at: http://intersectionevent.com/join-in.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Innovation for the Fashion-impaired (Fanny packs save lives)

September 8th, 2012 by admin No comments »

I was strapping on my Fanny Pack (FP) last week, and my youngest (college-bound) daughter looked horrified …”Oh, my god Dad, whadaya doing?”, shes thinking, as she rolled her eyes upward.

Daughter #2 had less kinder words for me…”yeah , it’s practical, but it’s FUGLY Dad…”.

Designed for Practicality: the Fanny Pack

Wikipedia’s definition is: is a small fabric pouch secured with a zipper and worn by use of a strap around the hips or waist. They are also known as buffalo pouch, belly bag, belt pack, bum bag, banano, pochete, and moon bag (my favorite descriptor).

I maintain that The FP is one of the all-time great inventions for the male gender of the species. Sure, bows and arrowheads were helpful, Chinese gunpowder was an impressive achievement, and even belts and suspenders helped keep us on the up-and-up. But The FP solves many dilemmas for the modern male. I fail to understand how this modern innovation has been killed by eye-rolling teens and dismissive spouses.

What’s in Your Fanny Pack?

My own FP allows me to:

remove the bulky wallet from back pocket

keep me from losing my umpteenth pair of sunglasses

hold my compact camera safely

contain bulky house/car keys (they look horrible in pants pockets)

organize 4 sets of business cards (that’s right , four….don’t ask) for quick presentation

keep foreign currency organized, and hold various sizes of foreign money (I have traveled all over Europe and China without missing a Euro or a Yuen)

hold my iPhone safely, along with several iPhone peripherals

keep tickets, admissions and discount coupons organized

store maps freshly (I hate wrinkled/torn maps on an excursion through )

hide earphones and – choose from among 3 types

iPad AC adapter (that damn iPhone runs out of juice by mid-day if you REALLY use it properly)

keep hotel keys safely

hold loose change (keeps falling out of my pockets)

The FP is good for city use, sports workout use, travel, in-car coordination, airports, and weddings.

Oh sure, I could wear cargo shorts, but who wants to distribute this loot across my derrière? Or, I could get a shoulder bag, but most are built for computers or iPads , not 3-dimensional items like keys, phones, wallet, or headphones. And, in my case, that solution would clearly balloon over time to a 5-lb fiasco.

In short, the FP saves lives.

Excuses, excuses…

Need I say, as we get older, we are already testing the limits of our clothing – hanging on to old pants, jeans and shorts that USED TO fit (and what has happened?). Who needs this additional bulk to highlight those few extra pounds we’ve gained. The FP saves clothing. It extends the use of those jeans we have from college years, those slacks that looked trim on our first job, those shorts that have been to Santa Cruz and back dozens of times…

Innovation trumped by fashion?

Why are millions of men now suffering from innovation-deprivation at the expense of fashion? When is the last time you saw a woman without a purse, pocketbook, or shoulder bag nearby or on her body? To be human is to juggle possessions no our bodies, to hold on to things that nobody else wants, and to walk on 2 legs, carrying our lives with us.

I noticed that many men are still wearing watches (look for a future blog post by me on the stupidity of this). Our cell phones track the time better than most watches, and can display it in 20 different variations, voice-synthesis, any zone in the world, stop watch format, and timer. Why are men still porting watches. This is vanity at its worst. Society has pushed these poor men to wear a watch that is no longer necesary, yet give away their Fanny Packs to good will. This seems perversely reversed.

I can not make it in a foreign city without my FP. I cannot hit the gym properly without my FP. I cannot go on a weekend trip to Napa without my FP. The Fanny Pack has fallen pray to the fashions of the millennium . It isn’t COOL to wear this anymore, I’m advised , or one could be dated back to the time of cavemen (or at least to the time of ABBA or the Bee Gees) .

Perhaps I’m getting old (or just losing too many sunglasses per week) but it seems to me that we’ve lost one of the greatest innovations know to man. So, who will invent the next FP? Will another “Wright Brothers” or serendipitous “click moment” occur for the fashion impaired.

I hope this happens in my lifetime.

In the meantime, roll your eyes all you want. I’m opting for practicality.

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Posted in Design, Functional Creativity, Product / R&D, Tools

What is Creativity? (perspectives from the Far East)

June 30th, 2012 by admin 13 comments »

This week, I begin a relationship with University of International Business & Economics (UIBE), a fast-growing university in Beijing, China that is training MBA-level students, primarily in Asia (Russian, China and Far East). In our class, we’ll have students from Mainland China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Russia, Uzbek (and Germany thrown in for good luck!).

Our first class together will explore the nature of creativity on an individual level – what makes a person creative? – as well theories on entrepreneurship and relationship to creativity. I’ve seen this first hand, working with dozens of Silicon Valley start-ups ,but it’s always interesting to tear it apart and try to explain it to students/practioners who are 9525 kilometers away from the Silicon Valley.

I’m anxious to hear the students’ initial thoughts, from their perches in Asia Major and Minor, as to what their views on Creativity and Innovation are. Coming into our class, what do they think Creativity is? How is it different from Innovation?

I’ve asked them to respond here to this question…let’s see what they have to say.

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Posted in Defining Creativity, Uncategorized, University

How Many Ways to Kill Innovation?

February 21st, 2012 by admin 2 comments »

One of my favorite posts on the topic of Innovation-Killers, comes from the innovative blogsite, ThinkJar, created by Ben Weinlick. Ben attended The Intersection 2012 and has created a great site for convergent and divergent creativity. Take a look at this post on 21 Ways to Kill Creativity, written by Michael Michalko (author of Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques).

I would like to add one or two of my own creativity-killers:

1) don’t ever, ever, listen to your children’s ideas

2) immerse yourself in lots of television (especially sitcoms, game-shows, and reality tv series) and mobile games.

What other innovation-killers are you experience at home or work?