One thing I think we can all agree on — government efforts to help New Orleans in the post-Katrina recovery have resulted in minimal success.
Startup New Orleans is, instead, looking to free enterprise to rebuild the city one entrepreneur at a time.
To attract more of these types of individuals, Start Up New Orleans has been established by four of the city’s young business leaders. A resource for entrepreneurs seeking information and connections to other entrepreneurs, Start Up New Orleans is designed to leverage the city’s unique qualities (rich culture, low costs, economic incentives), which distinguish it from anywhere else in the United States.
According to Sean Cummings, a local developer and co-founder of Start Up New Orleans, “New Orleans has always been a beacon for people with imagination, daring, and alternative approaches to solving problems. Our mission is to attract these types of people to New Orleans, and provide them with the information and resources they need to start their businesses here.”
“Silicon Valley became the nerve center for technology in the U.S. because of the investment businesses in the region made in attracting and retaining technology people,” said Nic Perkin, also a co-founder of Start-Up New Orleans and partner in the New Orleans Exchange, a new technology start-up. “The same can be said for New York City with financial people. What we’re doing here in New Orleans is making this the city of choice for entrepreneurs. If you’re smart, motivated and have a track record of success, we want you here.”
Offering a mosaic of case studies of success and profiles of innovators whose ideas are changing the Greater New Orleans region for the better, the Start Up New Orleans website is a portal through which entrepreneurs can access information about establishing operations in New Orleans.
This project is yet another example of how social enterprise can create real social change through the free market.
Forbes Blog Network Announced
The Entrepreneurial Mind will be joining several others in the newly announced Forbes.com Business and Finance Blog Network, comprised of a community of pre-screened, influential business and financial blogs.
This is part of a growing trend among media companies to build networks of existing blogs.
The Forbes.com Blog Network’s content will focus on senior business decision makers and high-net-worth investors. Topics will be relevant to the banking, trading, hedge fund management, affluent investing, and senior business decision-making communities. Participation in the network is by invitation only, and all blogs are vetted by Forbes.com editors for appropriate content, and to ensure that they are in keeping with the Forbes editorial brand.
The network will allow advertisers to target a highly engaged, exclusive niche audience of senior business decision makers and affluent investors easily and effectively. Four hundred-plus blogs have already joined the network, with many more expected to sign on before the official launch in the next few weeks.
“There is no denying the growing importance and influence of blogs within the media landscape,” said Forbes.com President and Chief Executive Officer Jim Spanfeller. “Forbes.com can ensure advertisers are reaching a hard-to-find and very desirable audience within safe, well-lit environments by exclusively inviting ‘best of breed’ business and investing bloggers to our new Business and Finance Blog Network.”
There will be a few cosmetic changes that you may notice over the next few weeks here at the Entrepreneurial Mind. Also, we will be changing the URL address of the blog to allow for the advertising that goes along with joining this network (we are currently on an “edu” address, which does not allow us to accept advertising).
But, the content will not change. I will continue to provide information and advice for entrepreneurs. I will also continue to offer my commentary on issues of public policy that impact small businesses and entrepreneurs.
Happy Easter
We’re off to spend Easter Break in Miami with my parents. I’ll be back some time next week.
If you get a chance, make sure to watch Belmont take on Duke in the first round of the NCAA tournament this Thursday at 7:10 p.m. EDT.
Go Bruins!!
Have a Happy Easter!
Belmont Business Plan Winners
Congratulations to this year’s Belmont business plan winners. Andy Tabar took home first place and the $5,000 Regions Bank award for our entrepreneur of the year for his web business Bizooki. Freshman Cassie Schreiner took the second place $2,000 award for CNS Photography. Emily Swinson took third for her concept plan for Riot! Clothing store.
What’s in a Name?
Some new entrepreneurs give the name of their new business almost no thought. Others agonize over the best name to capture the true essence of their business. I always tended to fall into the latter category. With one new start up we brainstormed and debated for weeks over the best name for our new program. But then, it often takes my family days to even come up with the a name for a new dog.
The Wall Street Journal offers several factors to think about when picking a name.
There’s so much riding on a company’s name. It has to stand out, and be easy to remember and look up. And the pitfalls are many…. [A] bad name can fail to engage customers, or become outdated as the company grows and adds products and services.
Some of their tips:
– Be unique
– Don’t be obscure
– Don’t be mundane
– Make sure it hasn’t been used and is open as a domain name
– And test it out on objective outsiders
Your Mother was Right
Conventional wisdom is that having entrepreneurship in your family is an important determinant of the likelihood that you will also be an entrepreneur.
A new study finds that having friends and associates who are entrepreneurs is an even stronger force behind one’s entrepreneurial aspirations.
I guess our mothers were right. It does matter who we choose to be friends with, after all.
(Thanks to Jeff Williams for passing this along).
The Emotional Ties that Bind Us
Michael Lee Stallard has just released a new e-book on the power of emotional ties in business — he calls it the connection culture. Stallard’s e-book is now available for downloading for free at changethis.com. Here is a brief description from the author:
I want to share something with you I’ve learned over the last decade of my life that I believe can be as helpful to you as it has been to me. In a nutshell, one of the most powerful and least understood aspects of business is how an emotional connection between management, employees and customers provides a competitive advantage. Unless the people who are part of a business feel a sense of connection — an emotional bond that promotes trust, cooperation and esprit de corps — they will never reach their potential as individuals, nor will the organization.
Preparing for Tough Economic Times
My column in this week’s Tennessean offers some tips on how small businesses can best prepare for the possible tough economic times ahead. This will be a new experience for most entrepreneurs in America thanks to the long economic expansion we have enjoyed for most of the past twenty years.
Unlike the last period of stagflation in the late 1970s, we are now in an entrepreneurial economy — 50 cents of every dollar in the economy is generated by small businesses.
Small businesses are always tight on cash flow. And if their inputs of raw materials and other direct operating expenses go up, they may not be able to pass along these costs quickly enough to keep their cash flow positive. And they certainly don’t have large cash reserves to ride out the recession that is part of stagflation.
Can Big Corporations Become Entrepreneurial Again?
Over twenty years ago, I participated in research that looked into factors that made some organizations more entrepreneurial than others. Of particular interest to me was why large organizations differed in their innovativeness and entrepreneurial activities.
We found that in general entrepreneurial organizations differed from what we termed “traditional” organizations in several ways:
– View of the external environment — Entrepreneurial organizations seek to Identify opportunities. They tend to actively seek out change that can create new initiatives. Traditional organizations look at the external environment for threats to their core business, rather than for new opportunities.
– Strategy — Entrepreneurial organizations have a more proactive strategic posture, while traditional organizations take a more defensive position focusing on protecting their core business.
– Control Systems — Traditional organizations control primarily through expense-based budgets, while entrepreneurial organizations also look at longer-term business planning and forecasting to guide the business.
– Structure and Communication — Traditional organizations tend to be hierarchical, centralized and formal, while entrepreneurial organizations are more decentralized and have informal communication flow.
In short, these organizations have fundamentally different cultures.
So the question then becomes can a business that has become “traditional” over time as it grows and matures become entrepreneurial again?
My experience in working with many large businesses on this is that very few are willing to take the concerted and long-term efforts necessary to truly change their culture. Most often, they simply asked me to “make their managers more entrepreneurial.” But, without a supportive culture for innovation and entrepreneurship, these efforts are doomed to fail from the beginning. A few organizations have been able to change to a more entrepreneurial culture, but the larger the business the harder it becomes to make such a fundamental transformation.
My best advice is this — if you have an entrepreneurial culture make every effort you can to preserve it. You do this by:
– hiring people with entrepreneurial orientations and who already practice “entrepreneurial thinking.”
– reward innovative and creative actions independent of immediate success or outcomes.
– delegate, delegate, delegate.
– lead by example, making sure your words and actions speak loudly about your commitment to being an entrepreneurial business.
The Best Innovation Policy
I have been working with a graduate student on a project that is looking into government programs to encourage angel investment that he is conducting for a national angel network group. He sent along an article published last fall in the Economist that said the following:
First of all, stop spreading money around trying to clone lots of Silicon Valleys….
However, there is an even more important factor than money: culture. Nokia’s success was not the result of far-sighted planning or subsidy by the government of Finland. One Nokia executive confides: “The biggest boost to our firm was the deregulation that followed the second world war and the government’s avoidance of protectionism.” One of the most innovative things Nokia did was to spot that the handset could also be a fashion accessory. And coming from such a small and open market, it was forced to think globally.
Secondly, governments keen to promote innovation need to look out for market distortions and over-regulation that can be stripped away. Entrepreneurs can face an uphill battle legally, and not just culturally, in many countries.
As the headline of this story reads, “The best thing that governments can do to encourage innovation is get out of the way.”
This is one graduate student who has been paying attention to his professor!
(Thanks to Jeff Williams for passing this along).