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To fulfill our promise to you, we bring you the Entrepreneurial Resources essential to the success of your business. We have articles, white papers, case studies, and efficiency tools to make sure you stick to a successful business plan.

Recent articles

  Universal Lessons From The World's Most Successful Family Businesses

By Wayne Rivers, CEO Family Business Institute

We were lucky enough to be invited to appear at an extraordinary family business meeting. Campden Conferences of England pulled together notable family businesses from all over the world to meet together in Miami in February, 2008. The conference was unusual in that a family business couldn’t just apply, write a check, and sit in on the workshops. To get into a Campden conference, a family business has to qualify by virtue of the size and scope of its operation. This is quite rare in the world of business conferences, and many family business applicants had to be turned away. It was an impressive group to say the least.

There were closely-held businesses from Columbia, Mexico, Germany, Sweden, Argentina, Venezuela, and the USA. Among the group there was only one first generation entrepreneur; most of the companies were in their third generation or later, and one of the attendees was a sixth generation member of his successful family business. The companies ranged in size from about $70 million in sales to well over $3 billion. These were some of the most successful family and closely held businesses in the entire world.

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  Will Apple’s iPad Value-Disrupt The Market?
By John Sutherland, President, Ennova, Inc.

There’s been much negative press about Apple’s launch of the iPad.  Some commentators have focused on the product’s name.  Yet others have lamented the lack of features: no multitasking, no video, no touch keyboard, to name just a few.

Missing The Point

But they’re missing the point about creating new market spaces. New market spaces evolve when you allow new behaviors to emerge in a target population.  Specifically, if what you offer (the market disruptor) allows people to do something they couldn’t do previously, and if many people want to do it, then it takes off.

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  What Exactly Creates Value?
By John Sutherland, President, Ennova, Inc.
 

Factors Defining Value Creation

Recently I’ve written about how Behavior Space predicts new product or service successes.  This article uses a recent announcement by FORD to drill down into value creation by uncovering the role Relationship Space plays.  As you’ll see, size of relationship space determines new product success.

Ford recently announced an agreement with Microsoft to incorporate its Hohm technology into Ford’s new Electric Vehicle.  As an article in Fast Company explains

“. . .the home energy management service will be integrated into the Ford Focus Electric in 2011, another unnamed hybrid in 2012, and a third, yet unnamed hybrid in 2013. Hohm will assist drivers in figuring out the best time to juice up their vehicles based on when electricity rates are lowest. The service might indicate, for example, that electricity is cheapest between midnight and 6 a.m. on a certain day–a potentially money-saving piece of data. In addition to saving drivers cash, the feature will also hopefully help utilities reduce consumption during times of heavy stress on the electric grid.”

In previous articles I’ve written about how new behavior space helps create value, specifically, I’ve written about the Apple iPad, and the Google Nexus.  The concept I introduced was how a new product or service creates value by allowing new behaviors to emerge with the product or service only as good as the new behaviors it enables the user to express.

Well, that’s not entirely correct.  New behavior space is simply a stepping stone to where value is actually created.

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