Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy [...]

Launching Startups in Retirement

For 15 years, Dorothy Atkins kept a diary during her long train rides back and forth to work as a project manager at a large San Francisco bank. “I always used commuting time to write out my hopes and desires,” Atkins says. She also did a lot of drawing, illustrating “pearls of wisdom” imparted from [...]

Mobile Marketing & Advertising 2009 Report Highlights

When compared to other forms of advertising (print, Internet, TV, radio, direct mail), mobile is likely growing at a much faster rate because it is considered more cost effective, personalized, and results-driven. Mobile Marketing & Advertising 2009: Challenges and Opportunities examines the current mobile marketing and advertising market, evaluating methods companies are using to effectively [...]

The Rise of the ‘Homepreneur’

More than half of all U.S. businesses are based at home. These companies often are dismissed as quaint hobbyist ventures, but new research suggests that’s a mistake. An estimated 6.6 million home-based enterprises provide at least half of their owners’ household income. Together these “homepreneurs” employ one in 10 private-sector workers, and by many measures [...]

Two Kentucky High-Tech Companies Awarded Funding for Expansions

FRANKFORT, Ky. ‘ The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA) awarded two high-tech Kentucky companies, Louisville Bioscience, Inc., and Laboratory and BioDiagnostics, LLC, (LabDx), state funding. The companies are anticipated to create a combined 36 new high-tech jobs at an average annual salary of over $64,000. (Manafacturing & Techonology eJournal, October 29, 2009) Read More

Growth Through Innovation

Innovation can steer a company’s strategy, even in tough times (BusinessWeek) Read More

Chicago Innovation Awards

Chicago Innovation Awards Chicago may have lost out on the 2016 Olympics, but it still hosts an annual competition in innovation. After poring through more than 200 entries, the judges of this year’s Chicago Innovation Awards honored these Top 10. The 2009 winners range from huge institutions such as the University of Illinois Medical Center [...]

Now Is Not the Time for Caution Our special report looks at how innovation can steer a company’s strategy, even in tough times

In times of economic hardship, businesses are more tempted than ever to batten down the hatches. After all, management literature agrees: Transformative innovation involves taking a risk with absolutely no guarantee of a payoff. And who would want to get tangled up in that type of strategy just as a company’s core business is struggling? [...]

‘Hero Pipe’ Wins Chicago Innovation Award

Innovation requires taking risks, and these are risk-averse times. Company startups are down. So are product introductions, corporate research and development budgets, and high-tech payrolls. Perhaps because of his occupation—he’s a Chicago Fire Dept. lieutenant with 22 years on the job—Michael Wielgat doesn’t seem to mind taking chances. Wielgat began designing a new piece of [...]

Entrepreneurs ‘Tweet’ Their Way Through Crises

Twitter has turned out to be a useful tool for some small businesses coping with customer-service or public-relations crises. The social-media service — where users send short “tweets” to followers who have signed up to receive the messages — came in handy for Innovative Beverage Group Holdings Inc., whose drankbeverage.com site crashed last month after [...]