noah brier on stuff

Posts on: innovation

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Dec 21, 2011
@ 1:02 pm
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It seems to be celebrated in our tech and startup culture that in order to win you need to be as busy as possible. Doing a million little things and running fast is what will get your startup on a Bloomberg show and praised on VC blogs. I’m not sure this model is sustainable. We all have dreams of creating companies that last and aren’t built to be a plugin for Google or a talent acquisition for Facebook. To build a long lasting company requires a tremendous amount of thought. We all know this, but we don’t practice it if we spend our day optimizing for being frantic.
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I like how James answered this question about entrepreneurial trends for 2012.

Trends For 2012: Ten Innovators Share Their Thoughts @PSFK

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Dec 20, 2011
@ 4:51 pm
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These days the second Schumpeter is out of fashion: people assume that little start-ups are creative and big firms are slow and bureaucratic. But that is a gross oversimplification, says Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. In a new report on “scale and innovation”, he concludes that today’s economy favours big companies over small ones. Big is back, as this newspaper has argued. And big is clever, for three reasons.
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Good roundup from The Economist on why big companies are actually much better at innovation than people give them credit for: 1) Growth is driven by big ecosystems, 2) globalization makes size a bigger factor, and 3) innovation is expensive (and big companies have more money than little ones).

Schumpeter: Big and clever | The Economist