BusinessWeek Article on Best Buy Studio and Team UpStart
BusinessWeek today reported on Team UpStart’s work with Best Buy last summer. Jeremy Sevush, one of the dozen or so Best Buy employees who got a chance to create new businesses of their own through the UpStart program, was interviewed about the new business he and his team, Jon Hogan and Jay Sullivan, created – Best Buy Studio.
Here’s the link to the article.
Reena Jana did a terrific job reporting on the program. The Web version was edited down considerably and focused on the ‘living together’ aspect of the program. For a full account of how the program works, check out this video.
And here’s the link for contact info on Team UpStart.
Best Buy Studio may not be the only one of last summer’s projects to make it all the way to becoming a new business. We’re working right now on funding a new free-standing startup based on another team’s project. Stay tuned and cross your fingers!
Team UpStart’s dream is to see projects from dozens of companies running in our location at Sunnyvale’s Plug and Play Tech Center. We want young teams of corporate entrepreneurs living together, building relationships, and proving their dreams. If you are a company with entrepreneurial people that just need a short amount of time and a little money to make great things happen, consider Team UpStart.
Healthcare – A Simple Question
President Obama says there are no sacred cows in the quest to fix US healthcare. So to that I ask this: Why does it make sense to have insurance based on employment at all?
That question usually results in the answer, “because we don’t want totally socialized medicine.” But wait…why is that leap there? Why can we not have PRIVATE insurance as a group based on citizenship rather than whether I work for IBM or some other big group? Why can’t we have competitive markets in insurance but make this something individuals take on (like car insurance)?
Doesn’t it make sense to simplify US business by removing the entire question of “benefits”?
Does anyone know why this is not on the table? What’s missing?
Why I Love Gary
No innovation guru turns a phrase like Gary Hamel. This is from his book, The Future of Management (2007):
If you’ve spent any time inside large organizations, you know that expecting them to be strategically nimble, restlessly innovative, or highly engaging places to work – or anything else than merely efficient – is like expecting a dog to do the tango.
His words stick to your ribs.
I have spent much of the past 20 years in business trying to find ways to innovate collaboratively across corporate borders. Like Edison and his light bulb, what I find is more and more ways to NOT innovate across borders. The world of business is fundamentally wired by the human “us/them” impulse to defeat these border crossings. And when we do manage it, we find that we have merely increased the dysfunction of one firm by an order of magnitude for every additional company we try to involve.
I will spend my life working this problem, and very likely I will find only more ways to NOT invent the light bulb of collaborative innovation. But we try, because I’m quite sure that the next answers to the World’s greatest challenges will come from the combination of insights, resources and capabilities currently trapped inside the stovepipes of today’s legally separate entities.
Keep inspiring us, Gary. And keep making us laugh.
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