Nation’s Startup Activity Reverses Five-Year Downward Trend, Annual Kauffman Index Reports | Kauffman.org

Nation’s Startup Activity Reverses Five-Year Downward Trend, Annual Kauffman Index Reports | Kauffman.org:

Business Startups are up.

That's great. Entrepreneurship and new business formation is a great advantage to the economy.

The olde adage:  the worst time to start a business is at the onset of a recession. The correlate to that is: the best time to start a business is at the end of a recession. Well, it has taken 6 years but the end of the Great Recession has finally past. Those people who had jobs didn't want to give them up. Now maybe they are willing to step out on their own. Those people who didn't have jobs, may have formed companies out of necessity, not out of strength.

It is interesting that 63% of the new startups were by men. Part of that would be because of the rebound in construction and factories where men dominate. But also, women are generally more risk averse than men. Maybe they will just take another year of healthy economy before they take the plunge.

Minorities, especially Hispanics were up. Blacks and whites, not so much so.

They are saying that 3 out of every 1,000 adults started a business in 2014. That must be annually. (Something said monthly which seems very high; that would be 3.6 out of 100.)

No matter the number, better and more quality businesses that survive and thrive is always better than a large number of startups when most of them fail.

It is always good to see strong healthy signs of progress in an economy that is sputtering a bit.

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Rise of the Rest - Entrepreneur Tour. 5 Cities at a time.

World Stock Markets:

Steve Case from AOL fame is one of the judges going round hitting up start-up business ideas, 5 cities at a time. The south of USA is next.

Revolution, Google for Entrepreneurs, and UP Global

This UP Global initiative is an interesting approach by Google ventures and others to identify and fund new venture ideas.

A very cool approach to jump starting innovation anywhere and everywhere around the world. That the winner gets a boat-load of money and and a blast of publicity is a rather nice perk to the whole process.

See Google Ventures here: http://www.gv.com/about

See Case Foundation here: http://casefoundation.org

I Like the title of an article on the Case Foundation web site: "Running business as if the future matters."

Steve's come some distance since the time when the guppy-eat-the-whale daze of the DotCom error when AOL bought out TimeWarner. This buy-out-merger resulted in one of the greatest indigestion from over-eating of all time.

Read about this Maalox moment in a 2005 book: "The failure of the AOL-Time Warner merger is the subject of a book by Nina Munk entitled Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner(2005)." (Steve Case, 2015, Life and Career, para. 10).

Steve has had a very impressive log of ventures and philanthropic organizations since the AOL days.

Reference

Steve Case. (2015, March 12). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 14:34, March 16, 2015, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Steve_Case&oldid=651091501

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Control of IP on Business Side of Corporation

There's a key point in this IAM magazine article by Joff Wild in the July 9, 2014, issue.  Note that the Chief IP Officer is not an attorney- he a business professional.  This is a significant change, a recognition that commercialization of Intellectual Property in a marketed product, a Patent Licensing Agreement with Royalties, a technology transfer or an outright patent sale is a business decision, not a legal one.  In some companies going back nearly 50 years, (AT&T, IBM, DuPont, Xerox to name a few) the decisions on IP were made by the business side.  But, for most, it has only been since the late 1980s that brought the marked change from predominantly physical assets in a corporation to intellectual assets that has prompted more and more corporations to view IP as a key revenue generator that has a place in the strategic plan.  The business development organization would be an appropriate place for decisions on IP revenue generation.