By Dr. Andrew Maxwell While it is difficult to determine the value of your business before it achieves revenues, it is often necessary to attract equity capital at this stage – which raises the question – how much equity should you give up for a fixed level of investment? Many entrepreneurs are challenged to value [...]

By Dr. Andrew Maxwell. IT managers are coming under increasing pressure to provide enhanced business functionality at lower costs. They are also charged with the responsibility of ensuring system reliability and security. However, increasing pressure to provide enhanced services that deploy new and unproven technology may make the achievement of reliability and security difficult, especially [...]

 By Dr. Andrew Maxwell.    I have frequently written about the challenges organizations face when they wish to become more innovative. Often this is because they either focus on the development rather than the deployment of a new technology, or because their current processes discourage rather than enhance the innovation culture within the organization by reinforcing [...]

by Andrew Maxwell.   When I challenge executives in our Business Innovation course  to become more innovative I am often faced with one of two responses, either they think they are already an innovative company, or they know they need to innovate but struggle to do so. Most of the time I work with organizations in the latter [...]

By John Foreman.   The Internet is a primary marketing channel for young companies, but Internet marketing tools and techniques are still relatively new and constantly changing. The leaders of start-ups and rapidly growing companies need to stay current with the most effective practices in this rapidly developing field.  Practical experience is hard to beat, but [...]

By Andrew Maxwell. I met with a very successful engineering products company this week. They challenged me to identify how innovation could help them to grow their business and explained their strategy was primarily organic growth rather than acquisition. Categorizing growth as organic or acquisition can limit the potential for rapid growth – although I [...]

By Andrew Maxwell At a recent Tie Quest Institute event I was asked to talk about business economics and specifically about financial aspects of the business start-up. The entrepreneurs in the class had been exposed to the idea of doing detailed cash flow forecasts in previous classes I realized that the importance of cash flow [...]

By John Foreman.     IT organizations have a very special role to play in a company’s innovation strategy.  Virtually any innovation that a company may introduce, be it a new product or service, a new business model or an operational process change, requires involvement from the IT team.  Sometimes, IT is an enabler – a [...]

By John Foreman Mark Twain supposedly once commented that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.  For many companies, you could substitute “Innovation” for “weather” and the same statement would apply.  It’s not that innovation isn’t important to them – everybody recognizes its importance to the success of the enterprise [...]