Launching Innovations

In "Launching Innovations: A Strategic Guide to MVP Creation and Crowdfunding Mastery," Jordan Michaels delivers a comprehensive roadmap for entrepreneurs eager to bring their visions to life. This guide demystifies the process of developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and launching successful crowdfunding campaigns, with a special focus on leveraging platforms like Kickstarter to maximize visibility and funding. Michaels' insights offer a blend of practical advice, industry secrets, and motivational stories, making it an indispensable resource for any innovator looking to make a mark in today's competitive startup landscape.

By proudly owning the audaciousness of the Big Idea, libraries demonstrate both their resiliency and value to their communities. This resource shares the insights and practical knowledge to make it happen.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Innovation is a translation of a new method, idea, or product into reality and profit. It is a process of connected steps that accumulates into a brand reputation required for success. Unlike Fortune 500 companies, whose projects are self-funded, a start-up must simultaneously have a value proposition that attracts a customer (for revenue), investors (for capital), and acquirers (for a liquidity event or IPO). A high percentage of start-ups fail before attaining positive cashflow, due to a variety of reasons that are detailed in this book. Avoiding the pitfalls and wrong turns are the goals of this book. Innovation, Commercialization, and Start-Ups in Life Sciences details the methodologies necessary to create a successful life science start-up from initiation to exit. Written by an expert who has worked with more nearly 500 life science start-ups, this book discusses specific processes and investor milestones that must be navigated to align customer, funder, and acquirer needs. Successful commercialization requires attention to multiple constituents, such as investors, regulators, and customers. Investors require liquidity for their return, which is achieved through selling their stock in a public or private sale. The reader will gain an appreciation for the necessary data, partnerships, and skills needed to create a competitive and sustainable company. The author discusses such specific issues as customer problems, demonstrating sales access, and ensuring intellectual property is impervious to competitive advancement. This book is intended to be suitable for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and investors in both business and academic settings. These organizations have specific departments, such as R&D, operations, business development, legal, regulatory, and marketing, that would also benefit from this book. FEATURES Focuses specifically on life science start-ups Examines how to determine a company valuation and future "fundable milestones" Explores how to align regulatory and clinical strategies Discusses intellectual property derived from a university or individual through formation to exit. Reviews how start‐ups must simultaneously meet the needs of multiple constituencies at once: investors, regulators, customers and exit candidates James F. Jordan is an author, consultant, and speaker. He is a Distinguished Service Professor of Healthcare & Biotechnology Management, a former Fortune 100 executive, and a managing director of a venture fund. Access the Support Material: https://healthcaredata.center/ Cover design by Sarah Mailhott.

The American economy faces two deep problems: expanding innovation and raising the rate of quality job creation. Both have roots in a neglected problem: the resistance of Legacy economic sectors to innovation. While the U.S. has focused its policies on breakthrough innovations to create new economic frontiers like information technology and biotechnology, most of its economy is locked into Legacy sectors defended by technological/ economic/ political/ social paradigms that block competition from disruptive innovations that could challenge their models. Americans like to build technology "covered wagons" and take them "out west" to open new innovation frontiers; we don't head our wagons "back east" to bring innovation to our Legacy sectors. By failing to do so, the economy misses a major opportunity for innovation, which is the bedrock of U.S. competitiveness and its standard of living. Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors uses a new, unifying conceptual framework to identify the shared features underlying structural obstacles to innovation in major Legacy sectors: energy, air and auto transport, the electric power grid, buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, health care delivery and higher education, and develops approaches to understand and transform them. It finds both strengths and obstacles to innovation in the national innovation environments - a new concept that combines the innovation system and the broader innovation context - for a group of Asian and European economies. Manufacturing is a major Legacy sector that presents a particular challenge because it is a critical stage in the innovation process. By increasingly offshoring production, the U.S. is losing important parts of its innovation capacity. "Innovate here, produce here," where the U.S. took all the gains of its strong innovation system at every stage, is being replaced by "innovate here, produce there," which threatens to lead to "produce there, innovate there." To bring innovation to Legacy sectors, authors William Bonvillian and Charles Weiss recommend that policymakers focus on all stages of innovation from research through implementation. They should fill institutional gaps in the innovation system and take measures to address structural obstacles to needed disruptive innovations. In the specific case of advanced manufacturing, the production ecosystem can be recreated to reverse "jobless innovation" and add manufacturing-led innovation to the U.S.'s still-strong, research-oriented innovation system.

New product design and development is often the result of personal vision. Harnessing this often requires a special receptiveness and enthusiasm at all levels of an organization, which serves to unlock potential and can turn the entire organizational pyramid upside-down. It is particularly important to understand and develop those aspects of design which can be constructively employed by designers in a strategic alliance with management and research.; The papers in this volume result from the conference of the Design Society held at the University of Central England in September 1998. They show how design-led product development has worked in a range of industries, from engineering through to design and management consultancy. Not only practitioners but also students of industrial design and management should find this a valuable contribution to the subject.

The Radical Innovation Playbook is a practical guide that helps innovators and entrepreneurs to harness new, extreme ideas despite complex business barriers along the way. Designed to be easy-to-use The Radical Innovation Playbook provides insight, practical solutions and reusable canvasses to help innovation managers, CEOs, Chief Innovators and directors of innovation labs to develop breakthrough ideas. In this playbook you will learn how to: Make vital decisions about how to plan and share your radical ideas Collect and analyse information to influence and convince others Engage with peers and stakeholders about your innovation project Challenge established company norms and business models Discover, explore and secure investment Gain confidence and skills for a successful launch Reach new markets and commercial channels Build a structure within an organisation that enables innovation to grow Inspire and support future generations to make an impact and achieve success Read The Radical Innovation Playbook and discover how to successfully unleash and develop your breakthrough moment. Olga Kokshagina, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Allen Alexander, University of Exeter, UK