Tag Archives: entrepreneurship

bill negotiators

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I just learned of two companies that will negotiate with your cable company on your behalf, in exchange for a share of the savings. Shrinkabill.com and BillFixers.com.

There should be a lot of business opportunities out there like this because we have so many subscriptions and bills now and they are so complex and screwed up. Beyond utilities, you have screwed up medical bills obviously. Shopping around for homeowners and car insurance periodically can really pay off. Then there are simple repairs and maintenance that can lower energy and water bills. Property tax assessments can sometimes be challenged successfully. Mortgage and other lending terms can be negotiated, and if companies are not willing to negotiate they can be refinanced or consolidated. And yet most of us are too busy to spend time doing all this. It wouldn’t make sense to take time off work to do it, and we don’t want to give up our limited family and leisure time. But if there are businesses out there who will do it for you and it puts a little money in both your pockets that wasn’t there before, it’s a win-win.

 

Comcast

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I engaged in some Comcast bashing recently. I’m not really sorry. You can argue that they do a lot for the Philadelphia economy. Well, that would also be true if they were manufacturing land mines. But here’s an article talking about how they do support some local startup companies.

Comcast invests in local startups through Genacast Ventures, a partnership between investor Gil Beyda and Comcast Ventures that helps fuel early-stage companies in the area, including LeadID, Invite Media and Packlate.com. One past success is a seed investment in Divide, a bring-your-own-device enterprise security company formerly known as Enterpriod. Divide eventually sold to Google.

“Our passion has always been to turn great ideas into powerful businesses — and that starts with finding talented entrepreneurs,” said Beyda, who leads Genacast Ventures. “Comcast Ventures, with the help of the Genacast and Catalyst funds, has provided unparalleled strategic and financial support for entrepreneurs just getting started. Identifying innovative leaders is the mission of all our partners, and the ability to support them with the assets from Comcast and NBCUniversal provides startups with a distinct advantage.”

Comcast has also collaborated with DreamIt Ventures to invest in minority-owned startups, including Philly outfits ROAR and LIA Diagnostics.

City Accelerator Guide

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This City Accelerator Guide for Embedding Innovation in Local Government says surprisingly little. However, one thing caught my eye:

The innovation team should run a large number of projects in order to sustain a robust pipeline. It is unknown which innovations will be successful and which ones won’t, so the team always needs to be building plenty of partnerships and pursuing many pilots. Having many irons in the fire ensures that regardless of whether projects succeed or fail, there are always new innovations in development. In some ways this may happen naturally, given the “stretched-thin” nature of local government teams, but a little extra nudge here and there can really help keep things moving. It is also important to think strategically about the range of projects we are engaged in from the perspective of a portfolio so that we can manage risk and reward effectively.

Does this mean your innovation team is running a pyramid scheme, constantly starting more projects every day than it can finish, so that the whole thing collapses under its own weight? Well, the advice there is “most projects won’t need to have a high level of polish until they are quite advanced, and only a subset of projects will reach that stage.” So, I guess you take a large number of small risks, loudly publicize the successes, and let the failures die a quiet death.

innovation units within big companies

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According to the BBC, some big companies are forming small internal units to act more like startups:

Kassir Hussain, director of connected homes at British Gas, says Hive was founded on the “lean start-up principles” espoused by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses.

In practice, this means developing a product or service step by step, constantly consulting with customers so that money isn’t wasted on features they will not want. Each stage of development is tested – so-called “validated learning” – so that future success is almost built in to the process. Normal management structures don’t apply.

“We believe that job titles can actually prevent co-operation and teamwork,” says Mr Hussain. “It’s about encouraging an entrepreneurial mentality throughout the business. Hive’s product development is in days and weeks, not months and years.”

Hive’s Active Heating system, which lets you remotely control your home heating via smartphone, now has about 80,000 customers. But the service could not have come about from within British Gas’s complex corporate structure, Mr Hussain believes.

“Nearly three-quarters of Hive’s business is staffed by people with digital backgrounds from outside the group,” he says.

I see a few lessons here. First, the group has outsiders. Second, it is protected from the internal bureaucracy. Third, it has permission to take risks, which implies permission to fail. But it tries to limit the size of failures by staying in constant touch with customers. Not mentioned here is the idea that it has adequate resources, but that must be the case.

The other important question is how you would take this concept that seems to work well with consumer products and apply it to other sectors like, say, services or government.