Shaking Up the MBA | Dirty Fingernails Entrepreneurship

There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the MBA curriculum has led business leaders astray. To the point that this year’s crop of Harvard Grads decided they needed to take an oath to look beyond stock price and financials in making business decisions. Hmmm. This got me thinking about my own grad-school days. My favorite prof taught entrepreneurship at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business. Of all my classes at IU, this one clearly informed me of how little I would know when I escaped academia for the workforce. He was less a professor and more a serial entrepreneur who chose to teach business students a bit about the ‘real world.’ If memory served, he favored what I call ‘dirty fingernails’ entrepreneurship, where it isn’t as much about managing at first, as it is about creating value that didn’t exist or is in short supply – finding the … Continue reading

Texting Innovation For Rural Medicine

What do you do when patients are so isolated and travel is so difficult and money is so tight that symptoms go untreated because information travels so slowly? Oh, and there’s not a dime to spare. This is the challenge faced by many rural health centers utilizing a system of community health workers who travel from clinics to reach patients in very isolated regions. They usually travel by foot or bike. They often cover such large areas that they may not return to the base clinic more than once a month. In wealthier regions solutions would probably involve large scale databases, interactive web pages, medical equipment hooked up to doctors in centralized locations and maybe even a car or two. Sometimes a lack of resources and a will to succeed is more than ample to create a real world changing difference. Frontline SMS:Medic was one of the business plans presented … Continue reading

Reality Check – –
Have You Out-Innovated Your Customers?

Innovation is a critical survival technique. New strategies, tools, products, technologies are fun to grab hold of. But have you left anyone behind? Customers perhaps? When you’re moving at the speed of light it’s easy to think those who don’t keep up just don’t get ‘it.’ Word processing software is so productive, why do they even make pencils anymore? (We still use about 100 million a year.) Email is fabulous, why phone? (Oops, showing my age. Substitute Twitter) Online listings are always up to date. Why do 19 billion paper catalogs keep showing up in my mailbox? (At least it feels like my mailbox.) Innovation Reality Check. If you are in a dynamic product development environment your eyes might be so focused on the future that you miss opportunities in maturing markets simply because it seems passe’. (Buggy whips anyone?)