All posts tagged: sandrine virginie hilaire

Questioning The Definition Of Startup

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Steve Jobs often spoke of Apple “startup culture” and the New York Times referred to the airline Virgin America as “a startup”. Today any small company operating in the digital industry tends to be defined as a startup. Hence confusion in perception, consistence and business models in the startup scene worldwide. Steve Blank, one of the most influential people in Tech and teacher at Stanford, defines a startup as “an organisation formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”. The key attribute is not to be a tech company. Neither to be a small company using digital and/or operating on the Internet. The key attribute is a repeatable and a scalable business model. In recent years, popular lexicon has begun equating startups with tech companies, as though the two are inherently intertwined. But let’s face it. Is Uber with a valuation record of $17bn still a startup or rather a multinational logistics company which generated $213 million revenue in 2013? Mark Babbitt, CEO at YouTern, an online community focusing on careers management, expanded …

Innovation > Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths

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Common sense in Economics claims that the role of the State is to overcome market failures and protect competition. According to this, public intervention is not justified unless private agents are unable to produce a satisfactory outcome for all. The drive for initiative and dynamism would belong to the private sector, whereas the State unduly protects special interests, produces absurd and penalizing regulations for entrepreneurship by wasting resources that could be better used by private firms. These arguments emerge regularly in discussions on innovation and disruption. The “Knowledge Economy” has produced a Schumpeterian Hero. The Entrepreneur has become the central pivot of economic development by taking risks to create new products and jobs that require Venture Capital and a light regulatory framework. This entrepreneurial culture has fostered the development and the myth of the Silicon Valley. In a recent study (1), Mariana Mazzucato, Professor of Economics of Innovation at the University of Sussex, shows how this myth of the Silicon Valley propagates a distorted view of the respective roles of the public sector and private …