My favorite podcast is NPR’s How I Built This. I love hearing the host, Guy Raz, marvel at how the founders of Airbnb, Squarespace and Lyft went from a one-off idea of two dudes in a basement to a thriving business worth billions of dollars. But, even as I listen to the passion in the… Continue reading Catching the Startup Bug
What a whirlwind of a semester! Working with a diverse group and creating an innovative, stellar idea to fix a common problem is NOT as easy as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates make it look. I mean, we all know their experiences weren’t a piece of cake…it didn’t come without hardship and failure.… Continue reading Is It a Wrap for Startup Sydney?
It’s easy to blame the internet and tech startups like Facebook and Google for the journalism crisis. The internet destroyed the old business model and tech startups stole the ad revenue that newspapers relied on to stay alive. It wasn’t the media industry’s fault — disruptors simply came into the market and took more than… Continue reading Tick Tock, Time to Innovate
All entrepreneurs have something in common: they’re creative, resilient and brave. They don’t take no for an answer. However, even the most successful ones had to work hard to find their perfect startup idea. Unfortunately, like money, startup ideas don’t grow on trees. Paul Graham, entrepreneur and venture capitalist, said it best: “The way to… Continue reading Startup Ideas Don’t Grow on Trees
At a young age, I discovered a love of writing. I wrote full-length stories, complete with compelling female characters who took on everything from fighting crime to everyday life in the suburbs. I also created my own magazines, cutting out pictures from real publications and gluing them onto my own articles, stapling the whole bundle… Continue reading Life of a wanna-be journalist: A state of resilience
As it turns out, building a startup business from the ground up is actually very simple. Step 1: build the entire startup. Step 2: make money. That’s all there is to it. You only need intense dedication, creativity, vision, motivation, discipline, tenacity, failure, and many more words that summarize similar things. Over the course of… Continue reading Innovation: Not Just for Work or Class
Betty Young started her own company, bsYOUNG & associates ltd, 30 years ago. During that time, her business has evolved from an advertising firm and publishers’ representative firm to a publisher in her own right. As an advertiser, she began working in the masonry industry and quickly learned the industry’s language and needs. Today, she… Continue reading Who’d Have Thought? 30 Years of Pivoting Leads to a National Masonry Magazine
In class, we’ve talked about developing ideas and looking for specific problems that we see are ripe for an innovative solution. It’s a glamorous image to have the breakaway idea that takes the world by storm. However, we learn something very important from Brian Chesky and Reid Hoffman in Hoffman’s first episode of his Masters… Continue reading Fostering Innovation from Startup to Global Business
How do you avoid oblivion? This question has plagued me this semester as we’ve learned how to be a disrupter, how to innovate and how to be successful as a startup. I recognize that, as a startup, you have to worry much more about the present than some distant, uncertain future. But it’s bothered me.… Continue reading The Antidote to Oblivion? Continuous Innovation
I found the article, How to Get Startup Ideas particularly helpful because it was packed with information presented in a way that I could draw my own interpretations and explore ideas further. I have never been exposed to a class like this so having guidelines on how to even begin to form ideas allowed me… Continue reading From a T-shaped Student to a T-shaped Professional
Spartans Innovate 