Pages tagged: 'Innovators'
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Social Innovation
Innovation has helped us ameliorate the pandemic but the social distancing response may be our downfall. As the world struggles to emerge from the pandemic, arguments rage about whether we can beat it or just learn to live with it. Whatever happens with COVID-19 one thing we can be sure of is that it will not be the last pandemic.
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Too Late for the Gold Rush ?
With smartphone sales stagnating and social media in the news for all the wrong reasons, it seems we’ve fallen out of love with technology. But isn’t innovation always in vogue?
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Execution Trumps Inspiration
Many factors influence startup business success but is there one overriding factor? Evidence seems to point that way.
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How Long is Long Enough?
In a couple of years’ time, the world will be marking the 50 years anniversary of the first moon landing. Arguably mankind’s greatest technological achievement, Apollo represented the pinnacle of societal endeavour and technical advancement. The legacy of the US’s ambitions spawned numerous technologies and a culture of can-do innovation. Many argue that we are now too short term in our outlook. But is this true for investors?
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Post Brexit – Tech Blues or Blue Sky?
UK tech is the best in Europe, but does Brexit pose a threat or opportunity? In recent years the team at London’s Tech City has produced a healthcheck of technology across the country, called the Tech Nation report. Even if you take some of the findings with a pinch of political salt (Theresa May wrote the Foreward), there does seem to be good news for the UK tech investors.
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Firework or Flop?
Selecting technology that’s going to change the world can be as simple as not choosing those things which don’t work, don’t get attention or simply flop. As the 2016 year end approaches, more people will be buying more technology than ever before – but there are losers. A brief look at some of the largest tech flops of all time could yield insights on what’s to come.
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ARMing for Innovation
Within weeks of the UK’s Brexit vote, Japan’s Softbank announced that it had agreed to acquire the darling of the UK tech scene – ARM Holdings - for £24bn. At a stroke, not only is this the largest purchase of British innovation but also removes the independence of the last of the UK’s “super unicorn” (i.e. >$10bn value) company. With the acquisition has the outlook improved – or worsened – for UK innovation?
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Visioning Our Future
In 1984 Apple aired a TV ad that introduced the Macintosh. The ad borrowed from Orwell’s 1948 vision of Big Brother and featured a rebellious athlete throwing a sledge hammer into the status quo. The catchline ended ‘…and you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like “1984”’. Apple revolutionised the way we work with computers but how many other visionaries have had such an impact? Recent work by GoBankingRates points the way.
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The Innovation Champions League
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor has just released it’s latest report on entrepreneurial behaviour and attitudes. It’s an impressive piece of work – almost a quarter of a million interviews across 100+ countries with countless institutions and academic establishments contributing. And they’ve been doing it for 17 years so it’s a well established and objective process. It shows how well the UK is doing – and why innovation is key.
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Innovator of the Year
The Christmas season is seeing the usual increase in online shopping activity as each year the impact of the internet eats more in our lives. According to reports from McKinsey and more recently the Boston Consulting Group, the Internet sector contributes 5.5% of the GDP of developed economies. Which country ranks top in terms of innovation and internet impact? Not the US – somewhere closer to home.
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Disruptive is the New Norm
Investors like disruptive businesses because they can potentially lead to outsize returns and the term has been around for a while now – it was first coined by Clayton Christensen in 1995. But how do you identify the winners?
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Inventing Innovation
The respected Boston Consulting Group surveyed 1,500 senior global executives and discovered that innovation is consistently amongst the top three priorities for their companies. Such results are not surprising, given that innovation is seen as the key means of staying ahead of competitors. Everyone likes an inventive organisation but where do the best ideas come from and can you build-in innovation?
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Technology Takeover
This month Apple reported a net profit $18bn, topping ExxonMobil’s previous quarterly record of $15.9bn in 2012. And if this wasn’t enough, the record profit was a huge 37 per cent up on the previous year. Apple has now shipped more than 1billion iPhones, iPads and iPods. With Apple posting the largest ever corporate profit, is technology ready to become the lead sector across the globe?
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A Vintage Year?
The Business Insider publication has a bit of a reputation for putting together lists as well as choosing 14 as its favourite number. So this year we’ve had The 14 Trends that Will Make Someone Billions of Dollars and The 14 Best Companies and so on. But the latest list – The 14 Most Exciting Tech Launches in 2015 - are leaving some lukewarm and it seems that we’ll have to find the next big thing from elsewhere.
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When Single Minded Works and When it Doesn’t
Almost every investment proposition includes a section on the business team, confident in the knowledge that a team will always outperform an individual. Teams are considered almost sacrosanct and we all seem to believe that working in teams makes us more creative and productive. But what really is the optimum team for a tech startup and growth business?
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How Startups Can Avoid Failure
Startups and small companies are the engine room of the economy. In a report commissioned by Santander, SME’s also proved the most resilient during the recession and were by far the biggest job creators in the private sector, accounting for a full two-thirds of new UK employment. Yet, with so much replying on startups, why is it that 90% of tech startups fail? After years of work, real data is now becoming available.
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Making Seeds Grow
This week the UK Chancellor announced that the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) is going to be made permanent. You might be wondering why there’s been so much interest in simply continuing with something that’s already set up. The reason is that whilst the big brother Enterprise Investment Scheme had been going for a while, the Seed version was a bit of an experiment. So has it worked and what can be learnt for other aspiring tech sectors?
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Winning by Degrees
It’s the time of year when those that are finishing their degrees are applying for their first proper jobs whilst those still at school are working out which degree (if any) might be best for them. The latest research suggests that it’s not looking good for the tech sector in the UK as apparently social science graduates are more likely to be in paid employment than arts or science graduates. Does this explain why say the US seems to have such a strong tech sector or is there something else going on?
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Creativity and the City
It’s a received wisdom that innovation happens in clusters – if you get enough bright people together they’ll soon spark off each other and the new ideas come rolling out. Indeed, Rohan Silva – until a few months ago, Downing Street’s technology adviser – last week argued that Britain’s cities “are becoming global centres of technology innovation”. But do cities have a monopoly of ideas and what are the real engines of creativity?
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Is Surge Replacing Hype?
Many years ago, Gartner created it’s Hype cycle – a seminal model that describes how every technology innovation from printing to bitcoins goes through an initial period of interest and hype, then falls into a trough as disillusionment kicks in, only for enlightenment to bring recovery. The problem facing the tech investor is knowing just where you are on the hype cycle and how deep the trough might be. But this week, respected tech veterans have described a new phenomenon: the Surge cycle. Is it time for a new model for tech?
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Rise of the Anti-Business
In 2007 two men and a dog in Aberdeen set out to brew a new kind of beer and take on the leviathans that dominate the sector. Roll on seven years and the self proclaimed anti-business business Brewdog has more than trebled every year, boasts 6,500 shareholders and even global drinks giant Diageo was forced into a humiliating public apology over it’s clumsy efforts to stifle them. If this disruption can happen in an industry that’s over 4,000 years old, what does that tell us for the tech sector?
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Cambridge secures £50M of innovation funding
Cambridge has long been a hotspot for innovative thinking (that was a Fenland apple that landed n Newton’s head) and was one of the first locations to realise the commercial potential of great ideas.
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The Internet is Dead. Long Live the Internet
The old adage is that you get what you pay for, but the internet turned that on its head and most of us enjoy great services for free (I use gmail too). The ability to monetise internet services has long been the bane of providers, from mail providers to media.
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