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Negative Cost Selling Solar Arrays

School Board Pays Negative Cost for new Solar Panel Installations Rex Parris, Mayor of Lancaster, California doesn’t like to lose. It must come from his class-action lawyer background where he won almost $1 billion in claims for his clients and himself. Three years ago he decided to make the city where the sun (almost) always [...]

Things Every Tech Startup Needs to Know about Self-Capitalization

By Bruce M Firestone, B Eng (Civil), M Eng-Sci, PhD Abstract In the five year period leading up to 2010, approximately 91.6% of all tech startups in the US were self-funded or bootstrapped, 8.1% were Angel-backed and just 0.3% were VC-funded. How to self-fund (self-capitalize or bootstrap) new tech enterprises is the subject of this [...]

Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame Acceptance Speech

By: Bruce M Firestone, Founder, Ottawa Senators Date: June 6, 2012 Thank you for inviting me here tonight. I can’t tell you how excited I am to be here with my family, friends, colleagues, Sens fans and executives as well as Board of Directors from the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame. I got word that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

IOE, Institute of Entrepreneurs

IOE5100, Advanced Business Models Exploriem.org’s Institute of Entrepreneurs presents IOE5100, Advanced Business Models for Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs and Artpreneurs, an MBA level course (For available dates and times as well as more information, please contact: Ms. Theresia Scholtes, tscholtes @ exploriem.org or @tclsholtes) Come study with Prof Bruce, a leader in designing and building business models [...]

Why I Wrote Quantum Entity

Here below is the dedication I wrote for the upcoming release of the first book in my new trilogy, Quantum Entity, which will be available later this year. Below that I include the Foreword. Dedication I wanted to write a great mid-21st Century story, a trilogy as it turned out, focused on five themes—entrepreneurship/science, science [...]

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 [...]

On Leadership (Continued)

(Prepared for Professor Matthew Archibald’s 4th year Seminar on Leadership Development: Friday March 9, 2012 from 1 to 3 pm in DMS 4140) For more on this subject, please refer to: Defining Leadership, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2668. Corporate Culture, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=2656. The Entrepreneur Skill Set: A to Z, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=1274. On Leadership, http://www.eqjournal.org/?p=1155. 10 Things that Entrepreneurs can Learn from [...]

Can You Bootstrap a Chain of Specialized, Cash-Only Restaurants?

I recently had a chance to ask one of the founders of Toronto-based vegan ‘fast food’ restaurant The Hogtown Vegan (http://www.facebook.com/TheHogtownVegan), Madeleine Foote, six questions about her startup. There are some terrific entrepreneurial lessons here—like KISS (Keep It Simple), be authentic, have a sense of humour about yourself, deliver a lot of value to customers, [...]

Old Milwaukee Guerrilla Marketing

How can you outperform a $3.5 million Super Bowl commercial with a $700 to $1,500 North Platte, Nebraska TV buy and a ridiculously badly produced ad? That’s what’s possible in the 21st century via social media. Old Milwaukee aired a 30-second spot on NBC affiliate KNOP-TV 2 in one of the smallest markets in the [...]

Bundling

I think bundling is going to be a big factor in terms of leveraging entrepreneurial ventures in this century. For example, Lululemon Athletica not only sells active wear they also have Yoga classes in their stores. In essence, they are housing two complementary businesses under the same roof. But there is no reason why they [...]