What can Canadian curlers teach entrepreneurs?
In the final week the 2010 Olympics, I witnessed first hand the power of our hockey, curling, freestyle skiing and sliding teams in serious competitive action.
As I watched the teams progress towards gold, I wondered about the profiles and journeys of our medalists. Are there any key learning from their profiles that could be applied to help support our early stage companies?
TiEQuest 2009 winner and MaRS client Aeryon Labs.
TiE Toronto is on a quest for great business ideas—and it’s got over $150,000 to award to the entrepreneurs who have those ideas.
TiEQuest 2010, TiE Toronto’s annual business venture competition, is now open and accepting applications.
Michael McCain: The "Lived-It" lecture
As a child in small town Florenceville, New Brunswick, MaRS Board member Michael McCain sat at the kitchen table listening to two of Canada’s greatest entrepreneurs, Wallace and Harrison McCain, discuss the family business. In last week’s CIBC Presents Entrepreneurship 101 we heard him tell not only their story of the international food giant McCain, but his own story of acquiring the near-demise Maple Leaf Foods in the mid-nineties and turning it around.
The thread linking the two stories was the importance of entrepreneurial professionalism: for a small family business to think big and for a big public company to think small to ensure their future success. In each case, there were challenges to managing these seeming opposites: staying entrepreneurial and innovative while managing professionally.
A fight for a piece of the booming cupcake industry?
Sugar and spice and everything nice might describe cupcakes themselves, but the exploding cupcake industry is anything but. Just in time for holiday baking madness, the New York Times profiles cutthroat cupcake entrepreneurs, who won’t even disclose their profitability for fear of giving an edge to rival enterprises.
Just how big is the cupcake business? One market research firm foresees a 20% increase in US cupcake sales over the next five years. Here in Canada, food and beverage processing is the country’s third-largest industry, with bakeries representing the largest sub-sector.
For my first degree, I majored in marketing, so I figured I was well equipped for the challenges that lay ahead when I joined a software start-up as a product manager for a portfolio of financial software products. However, I quickly discovered that marketing software is something entirely different than marketing soap and detergent – which is what they taught at my business school.
So when I was asked by MaRS to lecture on technology marketing for “CIBC presents Entrepreneurship 101″ on November 25th, I immediately thought about the things I wish I’d known about technology marketing when I first started out in the field of technology.
