EQ Journal

Category

Publishing

Why so many established enterprises let entrepreneurs eat their lunch There is no industry that is changing faster than this one. Not music, film, television, nothing. It’s not just book publishing that is changing at an incredible rate as e-publishing platforms proliferate across the Internet and tablets, smart phones and computers become the medium of [...]

C.O.M.M.U.N.I.C.A.T.E.

As readers of this Journal already know, I have become more convinced than ever that artpreneurs play and will play a larger role in carving out sustainable city-state economies in the future than at any time in the past or, at least, since medieval times. Creativity cannot be outsourced and is much harder to knock [...]

Renaissance Repair

Ottawa’s Next $100 Million Tech Startup? (Portions of this article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, April 16, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.) When you first meet Len Anderson in his company’s bustling headquarters—a capacious Kanata office building on Leggett Drive which looks more like a warehouse once you are inside—you are struck by his sense of humour [...]

Moneyball Movie

10 Things You Can Learn about Sports and Business from Moneyball What the Ottawa Senators did Right to Make the Playoffs 12 out of 13 Years Television’s Golden Age could be Ahead not Behind I am an Aaron Sorkin fan from his days writing A Few Good Men, The American President and, of course, The [...]

Great Art

At TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) 2011, U2′s Bono made an offhand, almost throwaway comment that stopped me in my tracks. He said something like this: ‘The difference between good, maybe even very good art and great art is HUGE.‘ Entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and artpreneurs would do well to keep this in mind. Steve Jobs was [...]

How did Ross Video Experience 21 Consecutive Years of Growth?

(Portions of this article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, March 30, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.) The sky is falling, the sky is… Many observers of Ottawa’s tech scene seem to think it’s the end of Silicon Valley North but try telling that to David Ross, 90% owner of Ross Video. The other 10% is owned by [...]

How, Why and Whether to Write a Media Release

Understanding the simple arithmetic of how blogs, Twitter, FB, Digg, Reddit and YouTube are cratering mainstream media In case you missed it, I added Exploriem.org’s media release about 2012 Bootstrap Awards winners to this blog. See below. Writing media releases is tricky to do and these days many people are saying that they are less [...]

Internet Pioneer Morphs Business Model to Include Kiosk Stores

(Portions of this article originally appeared in Ottawa Business Journal, March 5, 2012: http://www.obj.ca/Opinion/Bruce-Firestone-5444.) Rob Hall was into the Internet before there was one. In high school in the 1980s, he dabbled in web technology and was ready for the Internet revolution circa the early 1990s. I met him when he was a young man [...]

MMB, Magic Marketing Button

(How Picture Inc can Develop a Sustainable Community Built Around its Redesigned Biz Model) If your enterprise cannot connect efficiently and cost effectively with customers and clients, you’re dead. This is the sine qua non of marketing. It also means that each enterprise (non-profits, charities, for-profits, even NGOs and gov’t departments) needs to have a [...]

70 Ways to Raise Bootstrap Capital

There are certainly hundreds or even thousands of clever techniques entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs are using to raise cheap/free capital, aka bootstrap capital. No list is ever going to be complete. But here is our summary of what people are doing these days to self-capitalize their new products/services/enterprises. If you would like to add to our [...]

Finding Bootstrap Capital Where You Least Expect It

(How one company made $800,000 from their below market office lease) Entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs work their magic every time they launch a new company/product or service with little or no funding. They’re amazingly good at finding niche opportunities and exploiting them to raise cash. Here’s one I learned from Rod Bryden who was on the [...]

More About Curation

(Curating Sweden: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2995) (Profession to Watch for in the 21st Century: Curator: http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=487) The proliferation of information in the last Century and this one is beyond belief. In 2008 alone, 487 million gigabytes were added to the collection of digital information world-wide according to an IDC study: As the Economy Contracts, the Digital Universe Expands, [...]