As innovator you need to look ahead and prepare your organization for the future. Not an easy job, knowing the world is changing at an increasing pace. What’s going to happen? How will my market change? What new technology is out there? How are target groups changing? And what impact will it have on us?
In my new book ‘The Innovation Expedition’, web search professional Marc Heleven of www.7ideas.be shares with us 18 top international trend sites in 2014 where you can find a lot of answers on future change the coming years.
My research finds strong evidence that the majority of large companies do not successfully maintain their current revenue streams, let alone grow them over time. My “growth outliers” project looked at publicly traded firms with market capitalizations of greater than US 1 Billion as of 2009, using data from Capital IQ. I found that in the period from 2000 to 2009, over half of the firms in the sample shrunk their revenue by 10% or more in at least one of those years, clear evidence of eroding competitive advantage.
Elephanti, a startup that’s supposed to make it easier for physical stores to connect with shoppers online, is announcing that it has raised $4.5 million in seed funding from LMJ Holdings.
The basic selling point for consumers, according to founder and CEO Lalin Michael Jinasena, is avoiding situations where you end up wandering from store to store, asking, “Do you sell Item X?” Instead, you can just visit the website or open the app, then search for a specific item, bringing up a list of stores that carry it. Or you can look up a retailer and browse a catalog of in-store items.
Providing services ranging from sensor-driven thermostats to bracelets that can track how you sleep or eat, hundreds of venture-backed companies are now part of a category known as the Internet of Things (IoT). The Internet of Things describes technologies that connect to the Internet and to each other through sensors, wireless networks as well as other “machine to machine” methods. Given the Internet of Things theme covers a broad array of technologies and use cases, it is actually comprised of five key sub-categories as detailed below (with illustrative companies provided for each)
Digital health financing is booming as companies in the industry pulled down over $1.5 billion in venture capital, angel, and private equity funding in the last year across 362 deals. Over the past two years, there has been overall YoY funding growth of over 23% and deal growth of over 17%.
Venture capital investing in Washington state started out with a whimper in 2013, but it is ending with a bang.
After the slow start, as evidenced by the chart above from CB Insights in which just $100 million was invested in the first quarter, things roared to life in the fourth quarter buoyed in part by one blockbuster biotech deal.
E-commerce startup Zulily smashed analyst estimates with its initial public offering, with shares soaring 88 percent in its debut.
Zulily’s shares opened this morning at $39, above the IPO price of $22. The Seattle-based company raised $253 million at a valuation of $2.6 billion and has almost doubled to just over $5 billion.
Gordon Ritter led his firm’s first investment in a then-little-known company called Salesforce.com. Years later, after Salesforce rose to prominence as a cloud computing leader, Ritter saw a new trend emerging.
Our prediction proved accurate, with enterprise companies dominating the markets this year. Business-to-business (B2B) companies don’t capture the same attention as their consumer counterparts, but investors perceive them as a safer bet.
