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One of the most enjoyable and important parts of starting a new business is creating a “corporate culture”; in other words, an environment in which your employees are able to perform at a peak level with the least supervision while developing new products and services that meet the needs and wants of customers while growing your business. That being said, it’s not always easy to make this happen.   Many if not most businesses are so driven by the day by demands that little thought is given to where the company is going and how it’s going to get there and by what route. For example, innovation is always a hot topic in the business press.   How does a company foster innovation?   The short answer is by creating a corporate culture in which innovation is encouraged and rewarded.   Research shows that people innovation when they are given the freedom to explore those things that interest them based on their internal motivation.   Telling people that they must innova...

Funding a start-up is always a hot topic, unfortunately, all too many prospective business owners believe more than a few myths about financing a start.  Below is a small excerpt from a longer article, Six Myths About Venture Capitalists  by Diane Mulcahy, in the current online issue of The Harvard Business Review. Myth 1: Venture Capital Is the Primary Source of Start-Up Funding Venture capital financing is the exception, not the norm, among start-ups. Historically, only a tiny percentage (fewer than 1%) of U.S. companies have raised capital from VCs. And the industry is contracting: After peaking in the late 1990s, the number of active VC firms fell from 744 to 526 in the decade 2001–2011, and the amount of venture capital raised was just under $19 billion in 2011, down from $39 billion in 2001, according to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). But less venture capital doesn’t mean less start-up capital. Non-VC sources of financing a...

Source:  www.fremont.gov We are all creatures of habit, which is good news to owners of any small business.  This may seem instinctive to any business owner, but now this assumption can be considered scientific fact. A comprehensive study of consumers world-wide conducted by the mathmatics department at the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) not only documents this, but has developed a method for predicting people's shopping patterns.  Also participating in this research are scientists at the University of California in San Diego (U.S.A), M.I.T (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and NICTA (Australia).  A pretty impressive group of researchers, indeed. The conclusion of this study is that consumers are more predictable than you might assume and because of this predictability it is possible to know where consumers will shop. As explained by one of its authors, Esteban Moro of the Department of Mathematics at UC3M, " the main conclusion we have ...