Ludovic Copéré

Sweden - US Entrepreneurial Forum 2004

Yesterday I was at the Sweden - US Entrepreneurial Forum 2004, which was very insightful in showing the similarities and differences in innovation, legal frameworks and capital accessibility in the two countries. Firstly, as underlined by Mario Cardullo, Counselor to the Under Secretary on Entrepreneurism and Technology, US Department of Commerce, taking the entrepreneurial initiative is by essence an individual responsibility, but it is encouraged (or hampered) by the local environment, which should ideally provide:
- A culture of failure: in this respect, we all have to learn from the USA, where (in most of the cases), failing does not blacklist the entrepreneur, but even gives him credibility in the eyes of investors as a person with guts and drive.
- An appropriate tax structure: high social taxes are in this case not discouraging creation as there are less incentive to go out of one's "comfort zone".
- An consistent training: a component quickly growing here in Sweden, both in Stockholm or Göteborg.

Looking back at the different panels, a shared redline was definitely the concept of networks:
- During the entrepreneurial training, with the close clustering of academia, industry and the support state (i.e. the so-called "Triple Helix" model).
- In the management of innovation and technology: to bridge the "valley of death" gap between funded research and commercial applications, thanks to early-stage funding capital to transform ideas into innovations. This means a rationalized and more daring government through specific programs (e.g. SBIR in the USA) as well as a smoother links between them and the entrepreneurs.
- In the legal and regulatory framework in place. For instance, an organization like the Näringslivets Regelnämnd (NNR - Board of Swedish Industry and Commerce for Better Regulation) maintains close contacts with the private and public sector in order to bring forth laws and regulations promoting entrepreneurship.
- For capital formation: importance of Business Angels Network (e.g. EBAN in Europe, BANSEA in South-East Asia...) and other formal and informal gatherings and associations to use the "catalystic" effect of risk capital the best way.

To wrap-up, some food for thought: quoting a panelist, "The space is divided in three - hunters, gatherers, and farmers". Hunters as the entrepreneurs taking the highest risks, gatherers as the investors, and farmers as the managers settling and growing the venture.

The Bootstrapper's Bible

Just released by ChangeThis, an online think-tank which aim at  giving "rational and thoughtful arguments that help people change their minds to a more productive point of view" (taken from their first manifesto): The Bootstrapper's Bible, an online (and freely available) book on how to "bootstrap", i.e. "entrepreneurs who are working their butts off to start a great business from scratch with no (or almost no) money". I've just begun reading it, but I've already found many insights on how to leverage on being both an "underdog" and a "guerilla" in the business jungle.

The book is written by Seth Godin, an americain entrepreneur and one of my favorite management author: witty, smart and engaging books on strategy and marketing (I heartily recommend Free Prize Inside, and not only for the fun cereal-box package :-) ).

Ericsson and the future of the mobile

Low blogging those past two days, mainly because of the crammed schedule during Armada, the job fair at KTH. Among the many interesting things out there, the grand come-back of Ericsson was probably the most noticeable. More than just a big booth (with nice flashy give-away telephone collars), the company also hosted several events to better understand what's inside the mobile telecommunication giant.

One of those events was a panel discussion on R&D and future technology trends, and it reminded us all, if needed at all, that the telecommunication industry is probably one of the most complex: as underlined by Ulf Wahlberg, Vice President Research, making your shiny new 3G mobile phone able to seamlessly call a 60 year-old phone sitting in a dusty corner in the outskirts of Mexico is no easy task indeed. A perfect (yet of such an ironic coincidence) example of the complexity to handle is the major network failure Bouygues Telecom suffered yesterday, effectively preventing most of its 6 millions customers to make or receive calls during the whole day.

Yet the future looks bright and open: 3.5G is already showing up its potential in the labs, with the new HSDPA (High Speed Digital Packet Access). In Kista (the "Wireless Valley", where Ericsson's HQ are located), Ericsson is experimenting this future generation of mobile access through prototype base stations in vans that drive around in the neighborhood, effectively allowing up to 5Mbit/s. Concerning services, the convergence towards an all-IP, Internet based platform opens up the way for integrated multimedia services (think Triple Play - broadband, Voice over IP and Video on Demand, directly on your mobile phone). In that sense, the development of IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) should hopefully make it easier for terminal manufacturers, operators and service providers to roll-out their contents and services in an always shortening Time-To-Market.

The key challenge might well be beyond the technological development: in order to avoid the self-created and sustained hype around 3G the whole industry suffered from, it is important to always put those innovations back in a user-driven and customer-centered perspective: such said customer might not always be rational, but at the end of the day, he's the one who sets the pace for the sector.

Bloggforum: knowledge, fun and mobility in the blogosphere

Well, as you might have noticed from my lack of real-time posting, there was no wireless at the Bloggforum (at least, none that I could actually use). Nevertheless it was extremely interesting to listen to the three panels, which approached blogs (eller kanske skulle jag skriva "bloggar" istället) through different angles. I especially liked the discussion on how to recognize "true" and "false" information in the blogosphere:  as Stephanie  pointed out, an underlying parameter of blogs are their use as social aggregators.

"It's hard to lie, but it's harder not to be spot" in the virtual world: tools like permalinks and trackbacks make (most) blogs networked instead of being single, stand-alone entities. When thinking on whether blogs can (and should) be considered on the same level as "respected" traditional medias, one can draw the parallel to the attention Wikipedia has received: can it replace established encyclopedias? Can it actually achieve the ambitious goal of gathering and offering neutral and objective knowledge? I think such questions take the issue at the wrong end, and instead we should see those emergent tools as a great opportunity to sharpen our critical reading.

I should not forget critical writing: blogging isn't just about displaying and forwarding pre-digested knowledge; it's first and foremost an open door to produce knowledge: the first signs of the convergence of complementary publication tools - think Flickr, podcasting and Chatango, can help achieving greater synchronization and information sharing, both on a private level and in a professional context, as to bring a new fresh perspective to Knowledge Management. What's really missing however is the real-time and "on the move" capability, which is precisely why the mobile sector is such an exciting environment to be in (I already mentioned Smart Mobs before, but I can't stress enough how deep and inspiring both the book and the weblog are in this domain).

More than just "moblog" (i.e. pictures or short texts) , it is the promise of pervasive "mobile-blogging" that can actually better connect people and information, both in the physical and digital worlds. Sounds far-fetched? Well it is still as of today, but it's up to us to make it real...

Thanks again Erik and Stefan for organizing the event, and to all the inspiring and enthusiast people I met and talked to at Tranan!

Going to Bloggforum Stockholm

A quick post before I head to the Bloggforum Stockholm 2004 in a few minutes. With 15 panelists and surely a large blogging audience, it sounds interesting.

Now, as it seems there will be Wi-Fi at the Forum, I may try live blogging there :-)

3G and Wireless convergence in Japan

Forget about dual or triple-band phones: DoCoMo is (once again) leading the way in Japan with its new mobile phone, the N900iL, which sports both 3G access (FOMA - Freedom of Mobile Access) and Wireless LAN connectivity (the same 802.11b standard used in offices as well as private and public hotspots).

Named PASSAGE DUPLE, this dual access opens up the way for a better integration of mobile phones in the professional sector: whenever Wi-Fi is available, VoIP calls can be made, as well as "presence" services (like Instant Messaging, chat, file transfer). When out of the office, the device can switch back to the (almost omnipresent in Japan) 3G coverage and be used as a traditional phone.

I can't help but relate this to last Friday's seminar at Wireless@KTH, when Magnus Melander of Brainheat Capital  talked to us about the opportunity Wi-Fi has of being a neutral ground between the telecom world and the datacom world - a broadly applicable technology on which new, less-vertically integrated business models can be established on both sides. In that sense, DoCoMo's strategy makes a lot of sense: in 1999, it brought i-mode, the first usable Internet services to a Japanese population that was at the time quite behind in its adoption of web surfing and computer-based internet. 42 million customers after that, it focuses this time on the corporate sector and aims at leveraging on the growing wireless adoption there.

A move to follow closely for sure; now, what I really want to see is Skype for DoCoMo phones!

3G, for real this time?

This Wednesday marks a significant milestone for Third Generation (3G) mobile infrastructure and services: Vodafone, the world's largest mobile operator after China Mobile, is vastly expanding its 3G offerings: after Sweden and Japan, it will expand its Vodafone Live! 3G package in most part of Western Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK).

As reported by Bloomberg, Vodafone "plans to lure more than 10 million customers to the company's high-speed mobile- phone services by March 2006", a number that stresses again, if needed, the dire needs of operators to recoup the large investments they made for acquiring 3G spectrum licenses in the late 90's (Vodafone alone forked out nearly $28 billion world-wide). More than the new shiny phones and video calls (which 3 has already understood as being insufficient for attracting customers to switch to 3G), it will be user-centered services and innovative applications that make the operators' gambits less risky.

In that sense, Vodafone seems to take an interesting first-step by providing a "mobile iTunes" equivalent in Sweden. With 3000 songs already available, and the promise of 100000 by the end 2005, it's not the choice of or the technology (CD-quality) that is problematic, but rather the underlying business model: the songs cannot be transferred to a fixed computer nor a digital music player, and traffic costs are added when using the service from abroad. Still some way to go for the operators for providing true mobile media...

Collective Action and Creative Destruction

Listening to Howard Rheingold this morning, I was especially sensitive to his insight on how emergent mobile and digital technologies such as location-based services, distributed computing, social networks as well as ubiquitous communication actually integrate themselves into the underlying fabric of our post-industrial societies: whether it is the teenage Finns using SMS as a vector of friendship bounds (example taken from Smart Mobs), the daily casual (and unnoticed) C2C deals on the virtual marketplace of eBay, or even this very act of blogging, they all contribute to building new habits and practices that clearly and voluntarily differ from the incumbent ones, whether it is about going away from operator-centric and vertically-integrated communications, B2B or B2C transactions or mass-media.

Like the personal computer in the 80's and the Internet in the 90's, this new wave of pervasive services is today still in its infancy. As the consequences of the excessive hype around the Web are still fresh in minds, prophetic predictions and unbounded optimism is not the way to go. Yet, there are several encouraging signs showing that this may well be a promising field:
- Wide availability: Ericsson and the GSM Association now envisions the next billion users, which will means that "The lion's share of the GSM family market growth is now in the lower-penetration markets, primarily China, but also some other Asian Countries, as well as India, Russia, Africa and South America".
- Integration to the "physical" world: the idea of Cities without Borders means that such technologies bring information, media, culture and property beyond the geographically-bound metropolitan clusters. The phone in your pocket is not only a means to reach you easily, it is now an immediate tool that anyone can use, forget, and rediscover again and again, hence becoming far less demanding than dedicating one's full attention span in front of a computer.
- Active end-users: the backside of freeing users is that they can, and will, take a pro-active role in the use of mobile services. Many "revolutionary" services have failed because they were based on technology-push (i.e. geeky dreams) rather than on user-driven, demand-pull analysis. As hilighted  by Rheingold, "additional questions such as 'Do people really need this?' and 'What are they doing in their lives where this is a large value?' need to be asked" when working on such innovations.

Referring to Schumpeter, these coming innovations have the potential of "creative destruction", that is to say they hold both the seeds of encouraging a new type of growth and usages, while at the same time threatening today's accepted business practices and structures (for instance rethinking intellectual property, media distribution as well as privacy issues). An exciting time to live, work and play in, indeed!

Underground Entrepreneurship

Well almost. At least some inspiring advertisement such as this one I saw on the subway today from Östermalmstorg: a banner promoting entrepreneurship and innovation by advertising the services of NUTEK, the Swedish Business Development Agency - as seen on the (low-quality and unfortunately cropped) picture on the left.
It may seem anecdotal, but I really don't think we would even just consider of seeing similar initiatives back in France (correct me if I'm wrong - and I'd like to be wrong on this peculiar one).

Howard Rheingold coming to Stockholm

Howard Rheingold is coming tomorrow morning at Handelshögskolan in Stockholm: for those who have not heard of him, he is an Internet Guru, founder of The Well, one of the first (if not the first) true online Internet community,first redactor-in-chief of HotWired - the online presence of Wired, the journalistic emblem of the worldwide digital society, and more recently author of Smart Mobs, a book on "the next social revolution" through digital and mobile technologies enabling individuals, groups and societies as a whole  organize and coordinate themselves better and thus transforming themselves into "Smart Mobs".

It goes without saying that I'm looking forward to it - rest assured that I'll blog more on that after tomorrow's seminar!