Daily Archives: September 18, 2015

Hey everyone,

I found the talk about 3D printing this morning verry interesting and therefore I searched a bit on the internet. As we all know I think, 3D printing has been a hot topic the last years. So there is lots of information to find about this topic by just typing 3D printing into google. But I prefer a good presentation above reading an article. Therefore I searched if there were any TED talks about 3D printing. I really like TED talks, because they deal with modern topics and the topics are presented brief and enthusiastic. So when you are interesting in a certain kind of topic or study field, it’s definitely worth it to search if there are any TED talks about it. I liked the TED talks about 3D printing and I wanted to share these talks with you. I just choose four out of many, so for more videos just search on Youtube.

@Michiel posted a text before about Scrive on the subject short versus long term ideas. His main question was if you should launch a short term idea even though it eventually loses it’s customers. I agree with Michiel and would like share my thoughts to bring the discussion further.

I enjoyed the post and it got me thinking of short-term solutions myself. First of all, in some way, aren’t all business solutions somewhat temporary? The market isn’t constant and we live in a changing business environment. When thinking of it more closely, I couldn’t think of any company who haven’t changed their product even a bit. Telephone companies catches up with technical progress, service companies as taxi-drivers like uber update their offer to match the need of their customers. So, is there really a permanent offer and business idea? What do you think?

My second thought was how this affected the example with Scrive. Even though a customer solution might me temporary, they can still make it a successful business. The problem is probably more about the strategy of the startup since the investment costs and the development time has to be minimized for the company to be profitable even in the short run.

And the last thought about the question “should they still launch their idea?”. There’s other aspects to it when starting a business based on a short term solution. If you create an agile company with the possibility of changing their product, they can get long term use out of their short term business idea. First of all, they can build up an installed base of users that represent a customer network that can be used for future business. They can also build up structure capital that can be utilized when changing their business.

What’s your thoughts on this? Can you come up with a company that hasn’t changed their product/service at all?

Yesterday the Global Innovation Index for 2015 was published. This ranking shows that Sweden is one of the top countries regarding innovation which is always nice to hear. You can read more about this in the link below and there are also som nice graphics in the article.

http://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2015/article_0010.html

In Sweden we recently had an increase of the general payroll tax for adolescences, with the main reason to stimulate unemployment rates. As an example, employers earlier were obliged a payroll tax of 15,49% if employees were  born later than 1990, this number today is corresponding to 25,46% – a rise in over 60%.

My question/thought is regarding how this is affects the Swedish startup-climate. Can we consider this an advantage, in terms of seeing a rise in new startups due to fewer employers hiring youngsters- forcing them to try business on their own? Or is this negative –  in the aspect that it’s becoming more expensive for employers to hire.  I’ve been involved with a few smaller organizations that was solely employing people under the age of 26. This I think, not based on any statistics, is the case of a lot of younger employers. Thoughts?

//Isac