The adage that “our world runs on data” means that decisions are being based on vast amounts of statistics. Data-derived insights drive what time trains stop running, when Starbucks introduces holiday cups, and the temperature of the building you might be sitting in right now.

Even though most corporate roles now work with data, it’s shockingly easy to forget that people generate most of it. When a user clicks a link, gets blood taken at the lab, or sets up a smartwatch, that person generates data. As people move, buy, sell, use, work, and live, their actions nudge numbers up or down and drive organizational decisions, big and small.

If it’s your role to communicate data insights and persuade people to change their behavior, you’ll have more influence and promote better decision-making if you emphasize the people behind the numbers. In a story, we root for the hero as he or she maneuvers through roadblocks. To use data to steer your organization in the right direction, you need to tap into the human tale your data can tell. Read More >>

As Blue Origin and SpaceX democratize access to space, small companies will get to explore an array of promising new ideas that lie beyond planet Earth.

In early February, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the planet’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, dropped the bombshell announcement that he would be stepping down as CEO to free up more time for his other passions. Though Bezos listed a few targets for his creativity and energy—The Washington Post and philanthropy through the Bezos Earth Fund and Bezos Day One Fund—one of the highest-potential areas is his renewed commitment and focus on his suborbital spaceflight project, Blue Origin.

Before space became a frontier for innovation and development for privately held companies, opportunities were limited to nation states and the private defense contractors who supported them. In recent years, however, billionaires such as Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson have lowered the barrier to entry. Since the launch of its first rocket, Falcon 1, in September of 2008, Musk’s commercial space transportation company SpaceX has gradually but significantly reduced the cost and complexity of innovation beyond the Earth’s atmosphere. With Bezos’s announcement, many in the space sector are excited by the prospect of those barriers being lowered even further, creating a new wave of innovation in its wake. Read More>>

For startups that are typically reluctant to work with the government, there are plenty of reasons to seek federal grants and contracts.

In many respects, startups embody the American way. If you’re not building something bold with funding in short supply and a little uncertainty over its addressable market, you’re probably doing something wrong.

World-class talent and an unmatched support infrastructure have long been the bedrock of U.S. innovation. Even with limited IP, founders are able to attract investors and scale. But the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has caused capital investment and traditional startup revenue streams to dry up.

The outlook is particularly stark for enterprise-focused tech startups. A PwC report of U.S. CFOs last year found that half expected to cancel or defer less-critical projects in 2020. Startups that are short on runway are already feeling those measures. Read More>>

Entrepreneurs trying to build big companies turn to equity investors to raise capital. If a company is an established ongoing concern, investors can look at cash flows, growth rates, customer retention, capital assets, leverage, and other hard metrics to determine whether to invest and how to value the company. An early-stage company has few if any hard metrics, however. Startups are often just emerging from the idea stage into market trials, and the minimum viable products and services they offer are being tested by beta customers. 

This presents a challenge for the entrepreneur. What will convince angel and early-stage venture investors that what she is building is not only a feasible company but one that has the potential to generate a large return on investment, and maybe even become one of those rare unicorn companies that will make its investors rich?  Read More >>

From the freemium business model to an aggregation business model, the 21st century digital economy has shown that serving customers well may not necessarily provide sustainability for a company unless the firms actively find ways to capture value in the process. It sounds obvious, but many media and e-commerce companies have gone bankrupt, despite improving customer experiences through digital channels, simply because they neglected to capture value.

For instance, many startups emerged and provided cheaper or completely free means of making national and international calls via the web, but later collapsed when they struggled to capture value. A direct 30-minute traditional phone call from Lagos to New York may cost $10, but using an app, the same call may cost an equivalent of $1, where that dollar is the cost of mobile internet services spent on the call. If the app is free (and most are), it has destroyed a value of $9 for the traditional phone operator, even though the app maker has not captured any for itself. Read More >>