Algunos mitos del emprendimiento...

from Entrepreneur.com
More people might strike out on their own if they knew the truth about starting a business, according to the Kiplinger Business Resource Center. Here are Kiplinger's top ten myths of entrepreneurship:

-- You need a lot of money. In truth, typical startup costs for a small business run about $25,000.
-- Venture capitalists are good sources of money. The vast majority of new businesses do not tap money from venture capital firms.
-- Most investors are rich. About three-quarters of investors are friends and relatives of the founder, and 32% of those have a household income of $40,000 or less.
-- You can 't use debt to finance a new venture. In truth, 53% of the financing of companies two years old or younger comes from debt and only 47% from equity.
-- Banks don't lend to startups. Federal Reserve data show that banks account for 16% of financing provided to companies two years old or younger.
-- Most new businesses are in "attractive" industries. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs attempt to start businesses in industries in which they are most likely to fail.
-- Growth of a new business depends mainly on the founder's talent. Choosing the right industry is much more important.
-- Most entrepreneurs earn large salaries. Not so. "The typical profit of an owner-managed business is $39,000 per year," according to Kiplinger.
-- Most start-ups attain the returns venture capitalists look for. Actually, very few reach the $100 million sales within six years that venture capitalists typically seek.

Starting a new business is easy. Just ask any business founder if this is true!

Estoy haciendo el PhD en Historia Economica....es Historia Economica???

“Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.” Thus opens Schumpeter’s prologue to a section of his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. One might think, on the basis of the quote, that Schumpeter was a Marxist. But the analysis that led Schumpeter to his conclusion differed totally from Karl Marx’s. Marx believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its enemies (the proletariat), whom capitalism had purportedly exploited, and he relished the prospect. Schumpeter believed that capitalism would be destroyed by its successes, that it would spawn a large intellectual class that made its living by attacking the very bourgeois system of private property and freedom so necessary for the intellectual class’s existence. And unlike Marx, Schumpeter did not relish the destruction of capitalism. “If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently,” he wrote, “this does not mean that he desires it.”

Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is much more than a prognosis of capitalism’s future. It is also a sparkling defense of capitalism on the grounds that capitalism sparks entrepreneurship. Indeed, Schumpeter was among the first to lay out a clear concept of entrepreneurship. He distinguished inventions from the entrepreneur’s innovations. Schumpeter pointed out that entrepreneurs innovate not just by figuring out how to use inventions, but also by introducing new means of production, new products, and new forms of organization. These innovations, he argued, take just as much skill and daring as does the process of invention.

Innovation by the entrepreneur, argued Schumpeter, leads to gales of “creative destruction” as innovations cause old inventories, ideas, technologies, skills, and equipment to become obsolete. The question is not “how capitalism administers existing structures, ... [but] how it creates and destroys them.” This creative destruction, he believed, causes continuous progress and improves the standards of living for everyone.

Schumpeter argued with the prevailing view that “perfect” competition was the way to maximize economic well-being. Under perfect competition all firms in an industry produce the same good, sell it for the same price, and have access to the same technology. Schumpeter saw this kind of competition as relatively unimportant. He wrote: “[What counts is] competition from the new commodity, the new technology, the new source of supply, the new type of organization ... competition which ... strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives.”

Schumpeter argued on this basis that some degree of monopoly is preferable to perfect competition. Competition from innovations, he argued, is an “ever-present threat” that “disciplines before it attacks.” He cited the Aluminum Company of America as an example of a monopoly that continuously innovated in order to retain its monopoly. By 1929, he noted, the price of its product, adjusted for inflation, had fallen to only 8.8 percent of its level in 1890, and its output had risen from 30 metric tons to 103,400.

Schumpeter never made completely clear whether he believed innovation is sparked by monopoly per se or by the prospect of getting a monopoly as the reward for innovation. Most economists accept the latter argument and, on that basis, believe that companies should be able to keep their production processes secret, have their trademarks protected from infringement, and obtain patents.

Schumpeter was also a giant in the history of economic thought. His magnum opus in the area is History of Economic Analysis, edited by his third wife, Elizabeth Boody, and published posthumously in 1954. In it Schumpeter made some controversial comments about other economists, arguing that Adam Smith was unoriginal, Alfred Marshall was confused, and Leon Walras was the greatest economist of all time.

Born in Austria to parents who owned a textile factory, Schumpeter was very familiar with business when he entered the University of Vienna to study economics and law. He was one of the more promising students of Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, publishing at the age of twenty-eight his famous Theory of Economic Development. In 1911 Schumpeter took a professorship in economics at the University of Graz. He was minister of finance in 1919. With the rise of Hitler, Schumpeter left Europe and the University of Bonn, where he was a professor from 1925 until 1932, and emigrated to the United States. In that same year he accepted a permanent position at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1949. Schumpeter was president of the American Economic Association in 1948.

Las 30 mejores innovaciones de los ultimos 30 años

from Knowledge @ Wharton
1. Internet, broadband, www (browser and html)
2. PC/laptop computers
3. Mobile phones
4. E-mail
5. DNA testing and sequencing/human genome mapping
6. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
7. Microprocessors
8. Fiber optics
9. Office software (spreadsheets, word processors)
10. Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery (laparoscopy)
11. Open-source software and services (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia)
12. Light-emitting diodes
13. Liquid crystal display (LCD)
14. GPS systems
15. Online shopping/e-commerce/auctions (e.g., eBay)
16. Media file compression (jpeg, mpeg, mp3)
17. Microfinance
18. Photovoltaic solar energy
19. Large- scale wind turbines
20. Social networking via the Internet
21. Graphic user interface (GUI)
22. Digital photography/videography
23. RFID and applications (e.g., EZ Pass)
24. Genetically modified plants
25. Bio fuels
26. Bar codes and scanners
27. ATMs
28. Stents
29. SRAM flash memory
30. Anti-retroviral treatment for AIDS

Patentes, es un tema que hay que considerar al subsidiar Ciencia y Tecnologia

Over the years we've covered numerous different economics studies that have shown how damaging patents are. Most of them have looked at the historical evidence, comparing different societies (one with patent protection and one without, or with weak, protections) at the same time, or comparing what happens right before and right after changes are made to patent law in terms of innovation. The vast majority of the evidence shows that patents create suboptimal results -- often slowing down the pace of innovation. They're usually used not to encourage new innovations but to allow companies to stop competition, and thus slow down the pace of innovation. I've been meaning to put together a comprehensive list of the research, and I hope to get to that soon.

However, now there's a new study to add to the list -- and this one is based not on the historical evidence, but trying to model different methods of rewards for innovatively solving a complex problem. And, once again, the study found that a free market solution greatly outperforms a patent monopoly solution where the "first" provider gets a monopoly. The research was led by economist Peter Bossaerts and a team of others -- and it made a point that won't surprise anyone who's studied the economics of monopolies. Patents tend to function just like any other monopoly system: it shrinks the overall market, decreases net social benefit, provides monstrously excess rewards to a single provider and harms everyone else. In fact, the research found that the patent system created a massive disincentive for many people to participate in the very process, even if their contributions could have been quite helpful in speeding along the innovation.

It's just one study, and the experiment is a bit simplistic -- but hopefully others will build on this research to create more complex models as well. In the meantime, though, it's yet another bit of evidence to throw onto the large and growing pile of studies showing how damaging patents can be. And, given how so many of them seem to approach the question from a different angle and still all come to the same or similar results... at some point you have to wonder why no one creating policy ever looks at this mountain of evidence

What Makes a Company the 'World's Most Innovative?'

From Scott D. Anthony

The current issue of Fast Company was sure to get my attention. "The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies!" the cover blared. I start flipping through. The first eye roll came when the #1 ranking went to "Team Obama," which last time I checked was not a company. Then Google. Seemingly fair enough. Then Hulu, the online video joint venture between News Corp and NBC Universal. Huh?

I am a big fan of Hulu. Chapter 9 of The Silver Lining names it as one of 10 innovations that are well positioned to thrive in today's tough times. My colleague Renee Callahan has done an excellent analysis of Hulu's success to date. But the third most innovative company in the world?

My pet peeve with these kinds of compendiums is they often don't define what exactly an innovative company is. Often they will list companies that are doing cool things, or companies that have done a masterful job exploiting their core business. I couldn't even find a description of how Fast Company put its list together in the magazine.

I'm even more skeptical of surveys that ask executives to name innovative companies. Those surveys suffer from endless Halo Effects, and really shouldn't be trusted.

I empathize with editors trying to put these lists together, because it's awfully hard. After all, what does an innovative company look like?

In my mind, an innovative company does more than exploit a single idea. It develops the systematic ability to extend into new markets, and create entirely new business models. And importantly, it doesn't just invent new things; it makes money with its new efforts...

Promoviendo la Innovacion en EEUU. Qué podemos aprender?

This is from The Washington Post.

As the $787 billion stimulus is sorted out, we should consider not only what's there but also what's missing.

The stimulus finances important development of infrastructure, renewable energy and scientific research, which is great for jobs in the short-term. But it doesn't guarantee the vibrant economic ecosystem required for sustainability. The credit meltdown, the mortgage crisis and the collapse of automakers have created a climate of fear around investment at precisely the time that new ventures need to be championed as the course to stability.

Products and services drive a healthy economy. To translate the stimulus into long-term growth, we need incentives for business innovators. Entrepreneurs are the fertile soil for job growth and recovery.

Small companies represent 99.7 percent of all employers, generating 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually over the past decade.

Consider a few start-ups from the past century: Apple, Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King. Each opened during a period of economic downturn. Today, these brands employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. We need to prepare for the next Apple or Burger King. By empowering individuals and small businesses, an innovation stimulus can help germinate stable industry players for the long term.

Venture capitalists are biding their time - not for want of good ideas, solid management or stable capital, but to ensure that they can get the most bang for their buck. Similarly, venture capital firms are waiting for the slide to stop and the recovery to begin before investing.

The government should offer incentives for entrepreneurship and innovation. How to get started? First, encourage small business with loans. Apply to the United States the micro-lending model that has proved successful in developing countries, extending credit lines of up to $50,000. Localized innovation develops the economy from the ground up.

Second, welcome foreign innovators. Immigrants have founded more than half of all Silicon Valley start-ups in the past decade. These American tech companies employed more than 450,000 workers and grossed $52 billion in 2005.

For U.S. companies to employ a highly specialized foreign worker, the employee must hold an H-1B visa, but current law allows for only 65,000 such visas per year. Lawmakers should remove this cap while imposing a 10 percent payroll tax above and beyond the benchmark salary for any positions being filled by these visa holders. The proceeds could be channeled into U.S. re-education programs. This compromise would bring the best innovators to work here while subsidizing the continued education of American talent.

Finally, match funds for venture capital. Investors need financial incentives to invest in companies that create U.S. jobs. What if firms with credible histories could receive as much as $100 million in federal matching funds if their investments create jobs in the United States? Investors could keep their normal return plus 50 percent of the returns on the matching funds, while the other half goes back to the government to revitalize further investment. This would give individuals an incentive to double down on investments they would make anyway, but sooner rather than later.

Having invested in more than 60 start-ups since 2000, I know that financing strategy is key in keeping new ventures afloat. For start-ups, the difference between being a dollar profitable or a dollar unprofitable is life or death. Stable financing lets companies develop good product strategies and become self-sustaining - and that, on the micro level, is what we need to do with the economy.

President Barack Obama should take a page from his campaign playbook. Why stop at tapping the grass roots to debate the stimulus? He should seek to fund innovation at the grass-roots level.

Obama is familiar with using YouTube and social networks - products of start-ups and tools of the people. His administration should make it a point not only to avoid propping up failing, overleveraged institutions but to finance new businesses, back promising ventures, welcome the best foreign minds and nurture native talent. We can innovate our way out of this recession.

Les dije que gracias a la crisis iba a ser el año del Entrepreneurship en Harvard

From Harbus
Why Now is the Best Time to Start a Business (in the market and right out of HBS)

The current economic environment has sparked worry and confusion as students have begun to struggle with summer and full-time recruiting. Despite the fact that the Dow teeters above 7,000, and we are in the midst of the worst recession since the Great Depression, a subset of students is advancing the rich tradition of entrepreneurship that Harvard Business School has engendered for the past 100 years.

While the typical stories of HBS entrepreneurship are dominated by late-career entrepreneurs, many successful companies, including Yelp, Snapfish, and Guru.com, were launched by MBAs directly out of HBS. In the wake of the downturn, student interest in starting businesses immediately is growing dramatically - entries for the HBS Business Plan Contest are up over 60% in total (20% among ECs) and the Entrepreneurship Club is enjoying record membership numbers.

Over the past few months, many have said that the "opportunity cost" of launching a business is lower. However, this reactive mode of thinking is at odds with the proactive spirit of entrepreneurship. Rather, I believe that increasingly resourceful HBS students are identifying more market opportunities and have better support structures in place to pursue these opportunities and form new businesses.

This proactive mindset is critical in the current market which presents a wealth of opportunity for the right products and services. Current entrepreneurs can find inspiration in the fact that Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco are just a few of the companies that started in downturns. In these market conditions, capital becomes harder to raise, but many aspects of a new business (e.g. recruiting, office space, and technology) are made easier/cheaper. This tradeoff is incredibly nuanced, and thus I turn to a variety perspectives from current student entrepreneurs, recent alumni, faculty, and investors to shed more light on why now truly is the best time to start a business:

Entrepreneurship in this Market:
"Technical constraints breed technological innovation while economic constraints breed organizational innovation. The companies that overcome both these constraints will be the titans of tomorrow." - Marcus Ogawa, Sand Hill Angels

"Shortage and adversity are powerful stimuli for focusing the mind." - Bhaskar Chakravorti, HBS Professor of Entrepreneurial Management
"Many very successful companies have been started in downturns. If you can find customers and investors during a deep recession, you've got a great product, which means your long-term success odds should be higher." - Tom Eisenmann, HBS Professor of Entrepreneurial Management
"There are so many obstacles starting a business that are much harder to overcome than just the overall economy - if you let this one stop you, you'll never start a business anyway." - Michael Reich (HBS '08), Co-Founder/CEO of UpDown
"Startups should be built to run lean and agile always. A startup's sole purpose is to survive until that exact moment when a unique inflection point offers the company the rarest of opportunities to move forward with great success." - Marcus Ogawa, Sand Hill Angels
"If you're a CEO who has some capital, your life is easier: the resources you buy, whether employees, office space, supplies, or travel, are cheaper. People work harder, there's less turnover, and vendors work with you on flexible payment terms. It's a two-way street, though: no one's giving you a free lunch, and you'll need to work twice as hard for a sale. You'll be forced to watch both your expenses and your top line every single day." - David Vivero (HBS '08), Founder/CEO of RentJuice
"Times like this force entrepreneurs to be more disciplined in growing the business. If you're a social networking startup with tons of users but no promise of an attractive economic model in sight, it will be incredibly difficult to get funded. That said, from a personal standpoint, your opportunity cost is at its lowest during this time." - Karen Ong (HBS '08), Founder/CEO of LanguageInternational.com
"In good times, customers are fat and happy. It's more difficult to change the way they do business with an innovative solution. In bad times, customers are in pain - this pain is what opens their mind to new solutions." - Oliver Roup (HBS '09), Founder of VigLink

Launching upon Graduation or Later in Your Career:
"If an opportunity presents itself and you've been waiting for it, take it when it comes (maybe before graduation, immediately after, or beyond). There are no rules, you can find examples at all career stages, just make sure you are prepared for the strain a startup will put on your life (finances, family, etc)." - Jeremy Stoppelman (HBS '05), CEO/Co-Founder of Yelp
"You can always tell yourself the story of why you need a few more skills or a little more experience, but sooner or later you have to do it or not do it." - Oliver Roup (HBS '09), Founder/CEO of VigLink
"As you head into later stages of life, with a mortgage to pay and kids to feed, it'll be a lot harder to make the leap, so if you have the passion now and your personal life lines up with a market opportunity, carpe diem. The big caveat is to make sure you have a clear picture of the problems that your early-career leap could introduce and that you should focus on finding the right people and resources to help you avoid those problems." - Noam Wasserman, HBS Professor of Entrepreneurial Management
"I think one of the creativity killers for MBAs is that so many fantastic and high paying positions have historically been presented to HBS graduates. If the options available aren't as attractive that will likely push more talented people towards starting a great business they otherwise might not have. My only warning to those considering is this: Are you ready for the ups and downs or do you value stability? The entrepreneurial lifestyle is a roller coaster with extreme highs and lows, you need to be prepared for that." - Jeremy Stoppelman (HBS '05), CEO/Co-Founder of Yelp
"Only start a business if you have found a market you love. Starting a company has very little to do with age, and has everything to do with passion, insight, and sacrifice. Your age can't be a factor, now or decades from now." - David Vivero (HBS '08), Founder/CEO of RentJuice

Industry/Sector Focus for Startups
"Good entrepreneurs find opportunities in changing environments. In the current economic climate, major sectors of the economy - the entire financial sector, energy, healthcare and education will be going through gut-wrenching restructurings that will require new services and solutions. It will be an opportunity rich and resource-starved environment that is a fertile breeding ground for new ventures." - Shikhar Ghosh, HBS Professor of Entrepreneurial Management
"There will be an unprecedented amount of federal dollars for business ideas that dovetail into the stimulus package. In other words, the creativity, obsessiveness and resilience of the entrepreneur is going to be tested in ways never seen before by any of us." - Bhaskar Chakravorti, HBS Professor of Entrepreneurial Management
"A new venture might not exit for 5 - 10 years, so you don't want to make a long term commitment due to a temporary market condition. I advise pursuing the experiences and relationships that can get you to where you'd like to be when the economy rebounds… You have to do what you're passionate about." -Phil Michaelson (HBS '09), Founder/CEO of KartMe
"During downturns we need substitutes for many necessities that we have to scale back on; for example, we need to repair old cars to keep them running longer instead of buying a new car. We also need to have affordable luxuries - after all given the gloom and doom, we need to indulge ourselves in some way without busting the bank; upbeat, low-cost distractions are great." - Bhaskar Chakravorti, HBS Professor of Entrepreneurial Management

Tips for Running a Startup in this Environment
"1) Relentlessly prioritize: there's never a more important time to make sure your limited resources reflect the right people doing the right activities, with all fluff off the table

2) Aggressively accumulate top talent: downturns are great times to upgrade human capital resources with little or no cost uptick

3) Manage capital investment: Seek funding early because capital can become unreasonably scarce in times like these--we're lucky to have no such problems, but as a Venture Capitalist during a downturn I've witnessed the funding environment become overly conservative

4) Aggressively contain costs: it's amazing how many things you realize you don't need, and employees will understand if you do a great job of communicating with them

5) Overcommunicate: Whether it's investors, employees, customers, or partners, playing the false morale game is counterproductive in the long term. Be open, even-handed, and extremely honest, and you'll maintain credibility when discussing the long-term strategic viability of your business" - Rishi Garg (HBS '08), Co-founder/VP of Business Development of FanSnap.com

"If you choose to start, you'll probably have to rely on close friends and family for capital. Keep the burn super light, pay yourself as little as possible. Get your personal overhead low. Paul Graham likes to talk about getting "ramen-profitable", and I think that is a good strategy right now (when the economy still hasn't bottomed out)." - Jeremy Stoppelman (HBS '05) CEO/Co-Founder of Yelp