The National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer

And

The Harvard Business School Club of Washington, DC

Present

Innovative Strategies for Entrepreneurs

A Three Webinar Series

The one and one-half hour sessions - all at 1:00 PM Eastern Standard Time:

Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - Introduction to Innovation Strategy

Monday, February 9, 2009 - Disruptive Innovation Strategy Overview

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 - Blue Ocean Strategy Overview

Cost:

Free , but registration is required.

To register, Click Here. Login information is emailed the previous Friday. Registrations after Friday will miss the webinar.

Background . In recent years there has been breakthrough thinking with respect to business building based on innovations.  Particularly notable has been the Disruptive Innovation Strategy work of Professor Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School and the Blue Ocean Strategy work of Professors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne at INSEAD.  It is noteworthy that these professors and their colleagues have had a very practical orientation.  They have developed concepts and tools that facilitate the application of their insights in the real world.

There has been enough experience with these approaches to demonstrate that they can be used to improve substantially the extent and frequency of success in innovation-based ventures and the success rate of venture capitalists and angel investors.  The concepts and tools of innovation strategy are beginning to be used effectively by large corporations.  An early success with the disruptive innovation approach was Intel's Celeron chip, and Proctor and Gamble now uses disruptive innovation strategy extensively, as do the corporate venture units of Hewlett Packard, Philips, Hearst, and Motorola.  Samsung has used the Blue Ocean strategy to develop several extremely successful products; the company has numerous cross-functional Blue Ocean project teams at work, and has ingrained the approach in its corporate culture with a support center and an annual conference presided over by their entire top management. 

Large companies have to go to some lengths to make it possible for them to do effective innovation-based business development within their organizations, and these disciplines incorporate implementation techniques to make it possible to overcome institutional constraints.  Startups do not have those impediments

However, start-ups have other challenges.  A university researcher without business experience who wants to start a venture has a learning curve with respect to skills needed for starting, developing and running ventures before he or she can be in a position to benefit from new approach innovation strategies.

First Webinar .  In this webinar series we will have an introductory session in which we will deal with "pre-conditions for take-off".  We will briefly go over some of the key matters that startup venturers have to take into account.  We will go over elements of a business plan, key marketing and sales concepts, and key financial matters (e.g. cash flow, break even, cash management), as well as a few introductory comments about innovations as background for presentation of innovation strategy concepts and tools in the two succeeding sessions.

For the first session on Tuesday, January 27 there will be three presenters:

• Bob Kolodney , the Moderator of the Harvard Business School Club of Washington, DC's Entrepreneurship RoundTable - Bob is a serial entrepreneur - much of his career has involved the establishment of businesses from Europe in the United States.

• Dick Davies , President of Sales Lab and Planphoria, a "freemium" web-based startup - Dick has extensive experience in marketing, sales and sales training for technology-oriented businesses, involving many successful consulting projects to energize leading corporations, and numerous efforts as a trouble shooter for venture capitalists to help turn around businesses in their investment portfolios;

• Rajesh Rai , a Partner and Co-Founder of New Markets Venture Partners, a leading early stage venture capital firm - Raj was initially trained as a mechanical engineer.  He has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, in product re-orientation, in consulting and in venture capital; he teaches a graduate level course in technology entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland, College Park and participates on review committees of the National Science Foundation's Small Business Innovation Research program, Maryland Industrial Partnerships, and the Maryland Technology Development Corporation.

In this introductory session we will deal with some of the basic matters that are important to the success of startup ventures, and we will concentrate on matters that often cause new businesses to fail when they are neglected.

Second Webinar. The presenter for the February 9 session is Scott Anthony, one of Clayton Christensen's co-authors of Seeing What's Next , President of Innosight, the consulting firm founded by Professor Christensen, and the lead author of The Innovator's Guide to Growth (a book conceived to provide practical tools for the application of disruptive innovation strategy).  There is certainly a need for The Innovator's Guide to Growth - it seems custom-made to help us make progress with our Best Practices in Innovative Strategies initiative. 

The progress made since Professor Christensen first studied the phenomenon of disruptive innovators coming into the marketplace and displacing market leaders is impressive.  His bestselling book, The Innovator's Dilemma, burst like a thunderstorm onto the field of business management.  Christensen astonished the business world by showing how market leading companies would inevitably lose their positions to new entrants that began by serving marginal poorly-paying customers - if those market leaders followed best-accepted management practices and furnished the best possible products to the most demanding and highest paying customers. 

What was once a puzzling phenomenon has now been explained, numerous other insights have been attained, and a new discipline has been developed to help innovators.  Scott's presentation is entitled "Unleashing the Power of Disruptive Innovation".

Third Webinar.The March 10 session is being organized under the guidance of Professor Kim.

Objective/Reference Materials .  The objective of this series is to create an awareness of matters that can help bring success in entrepreneuring.  This is an overview that will introduce ideas, issues, and tools that will require considerable effort to master.  Recommended web resources for the webinars are:

• For the January 27 session - the materials at website of Steven Brandt, www.scbrandt.com , particularly Entrepreneuring: The Ten Commandments and Profit Mechanics (in the "Building a Business" section), which are made available as free e-books by Professor Brandt - who is a legendary emeritus Stanford professor of entrepreneurship, serial entrepreneur, manager and Silicon Valley mentor;

• For the February 9 session - various information on disruptive innovation strategy at the Innosight website, www.innosight.com , the book, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Growth, (as well as The Innovator's Dilemma , and Seeing What's Next).

• For the March 10 session - overview information about Blue Ocean strategy, particularly the diagrams, at www.blueoceanstrategy.com , and the book Blue Ocean Strategy .

With respect to both the Disruptive Innovation and Blue Ocean disciplines there are books, articles and teaching materials published by Harvard Business School Publishing.  This series is an outgrowth of the best practices initiative of the Washington DC HBS Club Entrepreneurship Round Table. The wiki statement for that project is posted on the entrepreneurship tab at the club website www.hbsclubwdc.net .