A New Model for Mentoring Startups in Emerging Markets - Linda Rottenberg’s High-Impact Endeavor

A great new piece from strategy and business.

Growing up in one of Rio de Janeiro’s impoverished favelas, Heloísa Helena Assis realized that there was enormous demand for an affordable product that would tame Brazilian women’s unruly curls. In 1993, Assis and her partners — a former nanny, a cabdriver, and a McDonald’s employee — started a business called Beleza Natural (“Natural Beauty”) in the basement of a modest house in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro. The company was an immediate success. Beleza Natural was soon scrambling to keep up with demand, unsure of how to pursue strategic growth with limited funding. Now she’s replicating it around the world.

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How to Make a Region Innovative - Booz&Co

A great new paper from Booz&Co on how to foster economic growth via innovation clusters that need to draw on the power of an interrelated “quad” of sectors: public, private, civil, and academic.

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Creativity is Not A Talent, It Is A Way of Operating - John Cleese

Two great Cleese videos on creativity

Cleese talking about his own creativity

This 1991 video is erudite and comic yet right to the "creativity"point

What makes a Mozart? Secrets of extraordinary performance - YouTube

Why Some Think P&G's Innovation Is Slipping | Jack Neff - Advertising Age

Tucked in an area north of Cincinnati is an office-warehouse building that looks like a movie set. It contains fully functional mockups of two homes (one upper-middle class, one lower-income) complete with kitchens, bathrooms and laundry rooms. It has two mock grocery stores and a virtual-reality lab where you can fly over store shelves. And, just like a front operation in a spy thriller, the complex is innocuously called BRI Research -- to avoid letting consumers know that they're involved in studies for Procter & Gamble. This is the Beckett Ridge Innovation Center, or BRIC, in P&G parlance. And P&G, whose innovation record has come under growing scrutiny, hopes it can deliver. Analysts and investors are decidedly unimpressed with P&G these days.

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