Download or read book Turning Good Ideas Into Great Businesses written by Francis Tay and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essence of this book is about turning a good business idea into a great business. The former does not always lead to the latter. Turning Good Ideas Into Great Businesses is the amalgamation of more than two decades of the author’s business experiences, gleaned from starting companies as well as working with companies of various sizes, as an investor and mentor. Whether you are thinking about starting a business, taking the first steps, already running your own business, managing a company, or simply interested in investing in a business, this comprehensive guide provides you with a structured way to study a business from a fresh perspective. The SPARK model is presented, simple and cutting through the clutter to present what really matters in today’s businesses. Each letter of SPARK represents an important milestone in the journey that takes a good idea and turns it into a great business.

Download or read book Awesomely Simple written by John Spence and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-09-08 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The six core strategies to elevate any business-and how to implement them-made simple What do the world's most successful companies and organization have in common? And what can you actually take away and use from their examples? Distilling the best fundamental business strategies, trusted advisor and strategist John Spence helps you take a hard look at your business and together develop specific plans and action steps that will allow you to dramatically improve the success of your company. Delivered in Spence's approachable and straightforward manner, Awesomely Simple reveals the six key strategies that create a foundation for achieving business excellence: Vivid Vision, Best People, A Performance-Oriented Culture, Robust Communication, A Sense of Urgency, and Extreme Customer Focus. Filled with case studies and clear action items, includes easy-to-follow guidelines for implementing the strategies in any organization no matter its mission or size After concisely breaking down each strategy, Spence gives specific examples, tips, tools, discussion questions and exercises for how to execute them successfully A perfect resource for business leaders, Awesomely Simple will help you turn ideas into positive action and achieve lasting business success.

Download or read book Turn Ideas Into Products written by Steve Johnson and published by . This book was released on 2017-04-02 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We've all heard stories of amazing product successes: the brilliant college kid who started a business in his dorm room; the team who built a business from the back of a napkin with just a few friends and sold it for millions. Yet for every amazing success story, there are thousands of stories of products that went nowhere. Most of us aren't looking at billion-dollar valuations; we're not looking for an exit. Instead we have a few ideas -- some innovative, some not -- and we're trying to determine which to pursue. Likely, you're working for a company today and you need a step-by-step approach to turn ideas, regardless of their source, into businesses. In Turn Ideas into Products, author Steve Johnson introduces a nimble idea-to-market process with strong emphasis on personal experience with customers. From business planning to product launch, this approach for managing products empowers your product team to work smarter and collaborate better with colleagues and customers.

Download or read book Why Startups Fail written by Tom Eisenmann and published by Currency. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Download or read book How We Make Stuff Now Turn Ideas into Products That Build Successful Businesses written by Jules Pieri and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2019-04-19 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This step-by-step DIY guide shows today’s entrepreneurs how to create and launch new products, package and market them to consumers, and build a thriving business. Thanks to high-speed Internet, game-changing technology, and innovative new platforms, individuals with vision and heart can go from idea to marketplace on a shoestring budget. In How We Make Stuff Now, Jules Pieri—cofounder and CEO of The Grommet, a product launch platform that helps innovative products reach a community of millions—takes readers through the entire consumer product creation process, showing how individual Makers, inventors, and entrepreneurs have utilized technology, the Maker Movement, and perseverance to turn ideas for innovative consumer goods into thriving businesses, breaking the rules of traditional retailing in the process. Jules details what goes into each of the steps they take: ideation, education, research, design and documentation, prototyping, funding, manufacturing, packaging, marketing, distribution, logistics, payments, customer service, financial and inventory management, and growth. Using case studies of successful startups, she reveals how entrepreneurs overcome obstacles, solve challenges, and rise above them to deliver innovations. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, Maker, or inventor, the first crucial step in your journey to turning your ideas into products that build thriving businesses is learning How We Make Stuff Now.

Download or read book The Executive Guide to Innovation written by Jane Keathley and published by Quality Press. This book was released on 2013-08-26 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is your organization's level of innovation where you think it should be today? Now is the time to shape your future through innovation management. This book provides a wealth of information, tools, techniques, models, approaches, and methodologies that are all specifically designed for excellence in innovation, solution generation, and execution. Within these pages you will find innovation concepts, methods, and case studies that build upon the quality body of knowledge to drive innovation. The successful application of these concepts will help you to be successful in the years to come. In addition to the hands-on material presented, the book also provides advice and counsel on how to align a growth-based strategy with all functions of the organization, how to create a culture for ideas and growth, how to acquire and retain the right mix of resources, and how to sustain what you’ve built over time. Innovation is quality for tomorrow. Use The Executive Guide to Innovation to conquer new challenges and seize new opportunities as you move into your future!

Download or read book Scrappy Startups written by Melanie Keveles and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-11-12 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fifteen successful female entrepreneurs tell their stories—stories that will inspire other women to follow through on their dreams of starting a business. In Scrappy Startups: How 15 Ordinary Women Turned Their Unique Ideas into Profitable Businesses, acclaimed author and highly successful career coach Melanie Keveles presents the stories women looking to start their own businesses need to hear—stories of women just like them who realized their entrepreneurial dreams while discovering their own greater creative capacities. Scrappy Startups is more than a book—it is mentorship in print—in which highly successful women entrepreneurs share their best advice in an utterly inspiring way. Representing a wide range of business fields, with enterprises ranging in age from newly begun to a couple of decades old, these women explain their thinking, their alliances, and the singular creative impulses that led to a viable and meaningful commercial endeavor. As presented here, each woman represents a part of the "Dream, Courage, Action" model that Melanie Keveles developed to demonstrate the process of bringing an idea to fruition.

Download or read book Good to Great written by Jim Collins and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2001-10-16 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

Download or read book Testing Business Ideas written by David J. Bland and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-11-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder’s global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

Download or read book Making It Happen written by Peter Sheahan and published by Random House Australia. This book was released on 2012-05-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turning your good ideas into great results! Do you find yourself asking what's next? You have a ton of great ideas but you are unsure how to make them work. What's next? You have started your business but it is not making the money you'd hoped it would. What's next? This book is what's next. The world is not short of ideas, but it is short of people who know how to carry them out. If there is something more that you want - money, influence, impact - then this book will guide you through the five competencies you need to master to make it happen. You know you are ready! It is time to answer the call - the call to take control of your own life, to make a difference, to start your business, launch your charity, get promoted. It is time to take the good ideas in your head and make them a reality. Peter Sheahan has a reputation for making it happen fast. By 30, he had established two international multimillion-dollar consulting practices and authored five books, including the bestsellers Generation Y and Flip. Let him share with you the strategies that make Google, BMW and Goldman Sachs his clients.

Download or read book Business Alchemy Turning Ideas into Gold written by William R. Cobb and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2012-06-21 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entrepreneurs play a vital role in economic development as key contributors to technological innovation and new job growth. We discovered that many people, just like you, have the urge to create an enterprise; to help themselves and to make a difference in this world. While successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates are well publicized, the harsh reality is that most new businesses are prone to failure because they dont have access to accurate information about the entrepreneurial process. This book is a word map for guiding you through that process, from refining your business idea and securing capital to a successful launch into the marketplace. There are many types of business ideas to pursue and you are probably better educated than many historic entrepreneurs - both Thomas Edison and Ray Kroc being high school dropouts and both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates being college dropouts. If you hunger to be your own boss and to make a contribution to society with your ideas, then Business Alchemy: Turning Ideas into Gold has the information for which you have been searching.

Download or read book How to Transform Your Ideas Into Software Products written by Poornima Vijayashanker and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Create products people will pay for before they're even built. You have an idea in your head. Maybe even more than one! But you're stuck simmering on it because you just don't know if it's the right one to pursue. You're wondering whether people will even use your product, let alone pay for it. The uncertainty is overwhelming, so you do ... nothing. But what if you were confident that your idea would help people? How would you feel if you turned your passion into a living, breathing software product ... and you made money from it? Poornima Vijayashanker has founded 3 startups and personally guided 100+ people who have launched products that make 6 and 7 figures per year. Everyone started with varying levels of technical and business know-how-or none at all-but everyone was passionate about an idea. Now, Poornima travels around the country teaching people how to bring their ideas to life. With the right roadmap in front of you, you can launch a winning software product too. "But I don't know how to code or run a business." The tangled world of startups and software development is intimidating and hard to navigate. To start with, not every entrepreneur knows how to code. Even the ones who do still need other skills to succeed; they need to design a good user experience, figure out how to attract paying customers, and hire and fire technical talent. There are hundreds of tools and services to help build products, and they need to know which ones are useless and which ones will save them time. They'll eventually run out of cash to keep paying rent and developing, and will need to figure out whether to get investors, apply to an accelerator, or bootstrap. Trial and error takes years of research, setbacks, and heartache ... not to mention a lot of money. You could go to design school, teach yourself how to code in the off-hours, and spend thousands of dollars testing marketing campaigns. Or you could... Follow a proven guide for turning your ideas into successful products (and even 6- to 7-figure businesses). This book will teach you how to: - Validate your idea before you spend time and money on it. - Talk to prospective customers without feeling awkward or pushy. - Leave competitors in the dust with good design and positioning. - Save time and heartache by building only the features people will actually use. - Hire talented people to build your product for you. - Get more paying customers with scrappy marketing strategies. - Find money to fund your business. This guide includes time-tested strategies and tools that entrepreneurs love: Over 13 case studies with the inside scoop on companies like Mint.com, AirBnB, and Zappos. The exact systems and tools Poornima and other startup founders have used to build rock-solid products. 7 interviews with successful startup founders and early employees like: - Melody McCloskey, CEO & Co-Founder of StyleSeat - Brittany Forsyth, Head of Human Relations at Shopify - Ben Congleton, CEO & Co-Founder of Olark - Julia Grace, Head of Engineering at Tindie - Thomson Nguyen, CEO & Co-Founder of Framed Data - Alyssa Ravasio, CEO & Co-Founder of Hipcamp - David Cummings, CEO & Co-Founder of Pardot

Download or read book Turning Great Ideas Into Great Companies written by David Dunne and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-28 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turning Great Ideas into Great Companies is an easy-to-read guide for business owners of any size in any industry. It is intended to help raise awareness and understanding of four components critical to success-product, sales, customer, and marketing-and to help with a simple self-assessment of a company's health in these areas. If you are an entrepreneur just getting started, this book can help you develop your business around your great idea. If you are the owner of an established business who may be feeling the exhilaration and anxiety of accelerating growth, this book can help you break through to the next plateau. If your established business has stalled or is listing in heavy seas, this book can help you right the ship. Bill Bierds and David Dunne know that transforming good ideas into successful businesses is not easy. (Each year, a half million companies go out of business-some 30,000 via filing for bankruptcy-and nearly half a million new ones take their places.) Bill is a 30-year information technology veteran and entrepreneur from Citigroup, IBM, Solace, and BCC Group. These companies have provided him with multiple opportunities to experience the detailed challenges associated with great ideas and what makes them succeed or fail. David has also spent the last 30 years leading business transformations, mergers, and acquisitions centered around technology. His experiences serving as a Chief Data and Analytics Officer, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur have given him a clear understanding of the key metrics and data that a business must have to thrive. Bill and David have written this book to share what they've learned to help businesses such as yours succeed.

Download or read book She Means Business written by Carrie Green and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are you ready to turn your ideas into reality and build a wildly successful business? There has never been a better time to say yes! With a computer and an Internet connection you can get your ideas, messages, and business out there like never before and create so much success. In this book, Carrie Green shows you how. Carrie started her first online business at the age of 20—she knows what it’s like to be an ambitious and creative woman with big dreams and huge determination . . . but she also knows the challenges of starting and running a business, including the fears, overwhelm, confusion, and blocks that entrepreneurs face. Based on her personal, tried-and-tested experience, she offers valuable guidance and powerful exercises to help you: • Get clear on your business vision • Move past the fears and doubts that can get in the way • Understand your audience, so you can truly connect with them • Create your brand and build a tribe of raving fans, subscribers, and customers • Manage your time, maintain focus, and keep going in the right direction • Condition yourself for success . . . and so much more! If you’re a creative and ambitious female entrepreneur, or are contemplating the entrepreneurial path, this book will provide the honest, realistic, and practical tools you need to follow your heart and bring your vision to life.

Download or read book Start Your Business in 7 Days written by James Caan and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2012-03-01 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work for yourself in just one week with Britain's most dynamic entrepreneur 'Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. Every single day of my life I am bombarded by people with pitches. But 90% of new businesses fail, because their founders failed to ask themselves the simplest of questions. I can save you years of wasted time and thousands of pounds of wasted money by giving you the ammunition to ask the right questions, and helping you make the decision that is right for you. I will show you how to spend a maximum of seven days deciding if your idea is workable and bankable. How to say 'I'm in', but equally importantly, to have the courage to say 'I'm out'. How to become your own Dragon. Each piece of advice in this book is based on my thirty years of starting businesses. You will find all the fundamental ingredients for any new company, whatever sector you want to be in, whatever size of business you have in mind, along with the tools to make it work. Answer all the tough questions I am going to get you to ask yourself and you will have a business that genuinely has a chance of success. You can be one of the 10% of businesses that do make it.' - James Caan. James Caan is one of the UK's most successful and dynamic entrepreneurs, having built and sold businesses since 1985. After dropping out of school at sixteen and starting his first business in a Pall Mall broom cupboard - armed with little more than charm and his father's advice - Caan went on to make his fortune in the recruitment industry, founding the Alexander Mann Group, a company with a turnover of £130m. A 2003 graduate of Harvard Business School, Caan's most recent endeavour has been to set up private equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw. Caan hit our screens when he joined the panel of the BBC's Dragons' Den in 2007. He is a regular in the national and business press, advises on various Government programmes, and initiates numerous philanthropic projects via the James Caan Foundation.

Download or read book The Founder s Dilemmas written by Noam Wasserman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

Download or read book Startup written by Judy Peachey and published by . This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More people are starting tech companies today than ever before. Tech incubators are popping up all across the country, and shared office space is available everywhere. When people think about building a startup, they immediately jump on the seemingly tried and true path...find a co-founder, get into an incubator, start pitching venture capitalists on your business plan, then crush it! Enhance your business and your investment, wealth, all techniques. - We hear many inspiring stories in our lives, but we do not know where and how to start? - We know that many startups fall completely after a short period! - These two factors always make us stop in the same place, one of which pulls us towards success and the other pulls us toward failure. Start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable economic model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential.