Israel Innovation Tour

I’ve been irregularly following the reports from the alpha geeks‘ Innovation Tour of Israel.

Israel as a hub for innovation is often underestimated or overlooked by Europeans yet the troubled country has one of the largest and most active venture capital communities this side of the Atlantic. There’s also a great deal of innovation and new ideas coming out of Israeli engineers and geeks in the web and mobile arenas.

It’s enough to keep in mind that ICQ was co-founded by an Israeli, arguably one of the first internet apps to begin the shaping the web as we know it today, i.e. centered around peer-to-peer and real-time communication. Point is, it’s worth looking out of Silicon Valley and having a peek at what’s happening in Silicon Wadi, the next big thing might just be coming from the Eastern Mediterranean…

Procrastination: Perfectionism in disguise?

A philosopher friend recently directed me to the work of one John Perry, a philosopher who writes about structured procrastination. A procrastinating philosopher you might say. Of course, I procrastinated for about 2 days before getting around to looking properly at his stuff. He says:

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing.

Apart from being an accomplished procrastinator myself, I was recently looking into procrastination as a tool for positive action. A kind of “stick”, or negative driver if you will, that, by being something people want to avoid, acts as a catalyst inspiring positive action.

One can look at this as a sort of mental martial art, i.e. using a negative trait to your advantage. It’s worth reading his essay and browsing his site if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a procrastinator… while you should be doing something else of course…

Tech Questions & Answers

Thanks to Jim at EzPzApps for inviting me to answer a couple of questions about technology and creativity. You can get the full article here.

I met Jim at an entrepreneurship event some years ago in Malta and I’ve followed some of his very interesting software projects. His most recent “ClipaSearch Pro” is definitely worth checking out!

The importance of early-stage entrepreneurship

Early-stage entrepreneurship encompasses a spectrum of stages in the entrepreneurial life: ranging from the “idea-in-the-shower-phase” to business planning through to prototyping and launch.

This period of time is crucial in the life of an entrepreneur. Not only do decisions taken at this time impact upon the eventual success potential of the start-up, but more importantly they play a significant role in helping the entrepreneur decide whether or not she actually wants to be an entrepreneur. Early-stage entrepreneurship is therefore important because this period will determine whether:

1. the idea the entrepreneur has convinces her to launch the venture, and
2. impacts directly on probability of success of the venture if the answer to (1) was “yes”

Therefore developing skills at dealing with the issues arising in early-stage entrepreneurship will lead to:

1. more entrepreneurs
2. higher success rates

What’s The Fuss?

This blog is intended to be a coming-together-place of snippets, thoughts and ideas about entrepreneurship, creativity, and simplicity.

The main driving topic will be early-stage entrepreneurship, or in more conventional words, “start-ups”. The terminology is important however because I take ‘early-stage entrepreneurship’ to mean something slightly different from ’start-up’. Or rather, slightly more focused.

Typically, a start-up is a business venture that is in the process of commencing operations based on a specific business idea/model. In other words, the entrepreneur and her team have come up with a business idea and are executing. ‘Early-stage’ however refers to the subset of start-ups within which there has not yet been made a significant commitment of resources to a specific idea/model. Both the idea and the organisation are still fairly ‘embryonic’ at this point and can still be changed, moulded and refined much more easily that would be the case at a later stage.

Secondly, I use early-stage entrepreneurship and not early-stage start-ups to emphasise the innovation element. Every new venture is a start-up yet arguably not every one is necessarily entrepreneurial. I like to differentiate between ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘businessperson’, lightly defining the distinction as being that the former is being somewhat innovative while the latter is simply trading using tried-and-tested ways.

So early-stage entrepreneurship is all about the subset of new ventures that are in an innovative idea development phase.