saturation3
Marketing

Market Driven Inventions

Stephen Key posted about The Single Most Important Issue You’ve Forgotten to Answer today. I got really excited by the title and he makes some good points. But he does not go far enough. Stephen points out that for a new idea just being new is nothing worth bragging about. In fact if there are no competing products, there might be a reason for that. I go one step further. If any inventor tells me that there is nothing like it out there, I know that they have not done their homework. There might be nothing that has the…

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Sustainability

Nature Knows No Waste

On the last day of the Sustainable Living Festival I sat near the Yarra River with a friend I had not seen in four years. We had a wonderful time and suddenly she spotted a bike in the water. Rubbish! How could anyone do that? It was probably stolen, too. Just dumped into this pristine nature (well, pretty clean anyway). So I got it out. And what wonder it was. It could not have been in there for too long, the wheels were still turning. But it was full of life. Lots of tiny water plants and shells were…

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Sustainability

Noosa Population Cap, is it really Sustainable?

I had an interesting conversation with one of our local councillors two days ago. Noosa (the community I live in) has been really innovative and forward thinking and worked out how many people can be sustained by its resources. They looked at water, infrastructure and giving nature enough space. Taking all this into account, the number of people that Noosa can accommodate was calculated. This figure was called the population cap. It is nothing enforcible by law, not directly anyway, just the number of people who can sustainably live in this shire. To make sure the population does not…

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Finance

Raise Profits: Become More Sustainable

If you want to raise profits, becoming more sustainable is a great way to achieve that. This was probably the biggest message I got from the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne last weekend. And I also got a better insight into the most important step for becoming sustainable. Build Your Community At the very core of all companies that presented was the realisation that it is all about people. Rather than seeing staff as numbers who contribute to the bottom line, an appreciation of the individual and their contribution is needed. Tim Cotter, a psychologist showed that human values…

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Sustainability

Sustainable Living Festival, Melbourne

The first day of the Sustainable Living Festival is drawing to a close. I’ll be writing in more detail, here just a quick summary of what my impressions are so far. Even though the Festival is in its 6th year right in CBD Melbourne, it is still mainly converted that visit it. That might change on the weekend, though. Small companies are run by people that believe in the importance of sustainability. They cannot answer any questions with regards to the financial bottom line: What do consumers save? Larger companies are really onto the savings that can be achieved…

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Systems

Stuck in the Operations

I have just come back from a mentoring session. One business presents itself, outlining a major issue they have. 12 mentors ask questions of fact, then give their viewpoint. It is so amazing to see how blind some entrepreneurs can become from being stuck in the day to day operations. Every suggestion from the mentors was answered by the entrepreneur with an explanation of why that was not possible or that they are doing that already. That brings me back to my frustration with inventors. They do not seem to listen. And I guess we probably all have a…

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Sustainability

From $714 million to $5.18 billion

2001: $714 million 2002: $899 million 2003: $1.7 billion 2004: $1.8 billion 2005: $2.5 billion 2006: $3.6 billion 2007: $5.18 billion No, this is not how much money Bill Gates has made. It is the investment in Green-tech over the last few years (in North America and Europe). Sounds promising at first glance. But one detail Cnet News Green-tech Blog added struck me: “Energy generation was the most active sector with 172 deals, totaling $2.75 billion.” It struck me, because of another post in there: “Do environmentalists contribute to global warming?” It is about how clean nuclear energy is.…

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Passionate Management