How Ideas Take Flight - Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner: Jennifer Aaker, Stanford University, GSB

Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jennifer Aaker shares the power behind creating ideas that can build momentum. Through her research on the perception of happiness and meaning, Aaker describes how these concepts relate to a successful and powerful social media campaign. A well-planned effort catches audience attention and offers them an engaging story. Aaker, co-author of The Dragonfly Effect, also offers several personal and corporate examples of effective viral campaigns that garnered real world, and even life-saving, results.

The 5 Key Discovery Skills NeededTo Be A Creative Entrepreneur - INSEAD

A major new study involving some 3,500 executives has highlighted the key skills that innovative and creative entrepreneurs need to develop. The six-year-long research into disruptive innovation by INSEAD professor Hal Gregersen, Jeffrey Dyer of Brigham Young University and Clayton Christensen of Harvard, outlines five 'discovery' skills you need. But, says Gregersen, you don’t have to be ‘great in everything.’ Some well-known business leaders such as Apple’s Steve Jobs and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos rely on their own particular strengths since innovative entrepreneurs rarely excel at all five discovery skills. For example, Scott Cook of Intuit is strong in observational skills. Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, does a lot of networking, he says. As for Bezos, “experimentation was his forte,” while Jobs is “incredibly strong at associating.”

Click to read more ...

What We Look for in Founders - A Paul Graham Essay

This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most important quality would be intelligence. That's the myth in the Valley. And certainly you don't want founders to be stupid. But as long as you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is determination. You're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily.

Click to read more ...

What Startups Are Really Like - A Paul Graham Essay

I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months. So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup. This amounts to asking what I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them.

Click to read more ...

Entrepreneurship as Disease - Jeff Stibel - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? I have heard far too many answers to this question. Everything from being an inventor, a small business owner, to being just plain crazy or lucky. But none of these things have anything to do with entrepreneurialism, and frankly neither does much of what I have read in business books.

Click to read more ...