Monthly Archive for December, 2011

Inside Johnson & Johnson’s Innovation Shop

Published on December 28, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

J&J is seeding small, high-risk ventures through RedScript Ventures, a two-year-old accelerator program.

A huge health-care company like Johnson & Johnson requires a steady stream of innovation, but that’s getting harder and harder to create. So the 125-year-old company is getting more aggressive at mining ideas from outside. It’s seeking out very early ventures that it once would have considered far too risky and seeding them with money or dishing out advice on how to nudge untested ideas out of the laboratory.

Some experts say J&J’s relationship to innovation is the right model for a large company. “It lets the marketplace do what it does best, which is have an explosion of different kinds of companies in various fields,” says Richard Foster, lead director of the board at Innosight, a consulting firm that has done work for J&J. “These companies will need major infusions of capital, or a global distribution chain. At that point, J&J says, ‘We are very effective in rolling innovations out—very quickly and cost efficiently [Source].’”

The Year on the Web

Published on December 28, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments

Social networking grew up in 2011, becoming more of a fundamental underpinning of the Web.

We’ve been living in the age of social media for a long time, but 2011 was the year that all the information we share online began to accrete into something greater than the sum of its parts. It is creating a layer of intelligence that anyone can mine in Web searches and that content creators can use to hone their services.

But all the while, our growing reliance on the Web is animating a debate about the potentially catastrophic effects of a cyberwar—an attack, or series of attacks, meant to disable consumer or military resources online. A top computer scientist recently suggested that the U.S. consider striking first against enemies who would be hard to pin down if they struck first. It’s a reminder of the limits of social networking: even as companies like Facebook map more and more of the online world, some sectors will remain in the shadows [Source].

The Venture Capital Winners of 2011

Published on December 16, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Did someone say economic slump? Not in Silicon Valley. The initial public offerings of LinkedIn (LNKD) and Groupon (GRPN) brought billion-dollar paydays* to venture capital firms New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital, and Greylock Partners, while Kleiner Perkins Caufield & is expected to profit handsomely from Zynga’s IPO on Dec. 16.

For venture firms that missed out on those high fliers, plenty of money was made in vacation-rental site HomeAway (AWAY), which helped Redpoint Ventures crack the year’s top 10. Khosla Ventures was the only investor to make a splash unrelated to the Web with its majority ownership of KiOR (KIOR), a biofuel maker that is valued at over $1 billion even though the company has yet to generate a penny of revenue [Source].

Technology 2012: Virgin territory

Published on December 5, 2011 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

In some parts of the new digital world, it is obvious who is in charge. Google rules in search; Facebook in social networking; Amazon in retail. These territories are still being fought over: Microsoft’s Bing is attacking Google in search, Google is attacking Facebook in social, and so forth. But these are all large, relatively mature fields.

During 2012 the more interesting battles will be those taking place on the smaller, lesser-known territories on the fringes of the technology world, in areas such as mobile payments, location and augmented reality.

They may seem marginal fields now, but it is worth remembering that social networking went from obscurity a decade ago to being used by hundreds of millions of people today, accounting for more time online than any other activity, according to a survey of American internet users by Nielsen, a market-research firm. Like search, social and online retail, these promising new territories have the potential to transform people’s lives, but have yet to be conquered [Source].