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Tom Rand, MaRS Practice Lead in Cleantech, will be releasing his book called Kick The Fossil Fuel Habit: 10 Clean Technologies To Save Their World in October 2009. This book will expose the broader population to the issues, technologies and opportunities around renewable energy.

Tom Rand, MaRS Practice Lead in Cleantech, will be releasing his book called Kick The Fossil Fuel Habit: 10 Clean Technologies To Save Their World in October 2009. This book will expose the broader population to the issues, technologies and opportunities around renewable energy. Aug 30, 2009

eBook reader

Several in the tech industry, including MaRS advisor Lance Laking, have gotten together to produce this book, "The Entrepreneurial Effect" with the foreword by Terry Matthews. It is a collection of practical lessons learned. The book is meant to be a knowledge source for those decisions we face as we start and grow our companies, for example, the real story behind risk and investment, how to pick resellers or strategic partners, selling in China, and the only reasons to consider M&As. It is also worth noting that all the authors have donated their knowledge. All proceeds of the book will go to support student technology entrepreneurship - via University of Ottawa grants and scholarships.

Book Camp will be held at MaRS for June 6.

Book Camp will be held at MaRS for June 6. April 9, 2009

Over the next decade, two out of every three companies will face the challenge of their corporate lives: redefining their core business. Buffeted by global competition and facing an uncertain future, more and more executives will realize that they must make fundamental changes in their core even as they continue delivering the goods and services that keep them in business today. "Unstoppable" shows these managers how to look deep within their organizations to find undervalued, unrecognized, or underutilized assets that can serve as new platforms for sustainable growth. Drawing on more than thirty interviews with CEOs from companies such as De Beers, American Express, and Samsung, it shows readers how to recognize when the core needs reinvention and how to deploy the "hidden assets" that can be the basis for tomorrow's growth. Building on the author's previous books, "Profit from the Core" and "Beyond the Core", this book shows how any company in crisis can transform itself to become truly unstoppable.

From Publishers Weekly\nChristensen (The Innovator's Dilemma) analyzes the strategies that allow corporations to successfully grow new businesses and outpace the other players in the marketplace. Christensen's earlier book examined how focusing on profits can destroy even well-run corporations, while this book focuses on companies expanding by being "disruptors" who are able to outpace their entrenched competition. The authors (Christensen is a professor at Harvard Business School and Raynor, a director at Deloitte Research) examine the nine business decisions integral to growth, including product development, organizational structure, financing and key customer base. They cite such companies as IBM, AT&T, Sony, Microsoft and others to illustrate their points. Generally, the writing is clear and specific. For example, in discussing whether a company has the resources necessary for growth, the authors say, "In order to be confident that managers have developed the skills required to succeed at a new assignment, one should examine the sorts of problems they have wrestled with in the past. It is not as important that managers have succeeded with the problem as it is for them to have wrestled with it and developed the skills and intuition for how to meet the challenge successfully the next time around"; they then provide a real-life example of a software company. Similar important strategies give readers insights that they can use in their own workplaces. People looking for quick fixes may find the charts, diagrams and extensive footnotes daunting, but readers familiar with more technical business management tomes will find this one both stimulating and beneficial.

The book, written by leading venture capitalist Alexander Wilmerding of Boston Capital Ventures, covers topics such What is a Term Sheet, How to Examine a Term Sheet, A Section-by-Section View of a Term Sheet, Valuations, What Every Entrepreneur & Executive Needs to Know About Term Sheets, Valuation Parameters, and East Coast Versus West Coast Rules. In addition, the book includes an actual term sheet from a leading law firm with line by line descriptions of each clause, what can/should be negotiated, and the important points to pay attention to

The corporate world is filled with executives, men and women who have worked hard for years to reach the upper levels of management. They're intelligent, skilled, and even charismatic. But only a handful of them will ever reach the pinnacle -- and as executive coach Marshall Goldsmith shows in this book, subtle nuances make all the difference. These are small "transactional flaws" performed by one person against another (as simple as not saying thank you enough), which lead to negative perceptions that can hold any executive back. Using Goldsmith's straightforward, jargonfree advice, it's amazingly easy behavior to change. Executives who hire Goldsmith for one-on-one coaching pay $250,000 for the privilege. With this book, his help is available for 1/10,000th of the price.

If you are starting out as a social entrepreneur or re-vamping your company, this book is for you. It holds insights on how to think like an entrepreneur, how to start an enterprise as a business not a charity. This book will teach you how successful social entrepreneurs: * Focus on community wants and needs * Match those with core competencies to provide the quality services * Assess risk and gauge opportunity * Develop new project ideas and test their feasibility * Write a business plan * Project finances in the plan * Tap into new sources of funding * Develop the idea of social entrepreneurship throughout the organization * Make sure that mission, not money, is the bottom line

Want 140 characters of information about leading companies? Kyle Lacy reviews Kevin Eikenberry's book #LeadershipTweet by writing his 15 favourite leadership tweets from the book.

Julia Moulden, reporter for The Huffington Post attended and interviewed Tom Rand, MaRS Cleantech Advisor at Rand's book launch event. Rand has written a book about clean technologies that he feels can change to 100% renewables called "Kick The Fossil Fuel Habit: 10 Clean Technologies to Save Our World."

Ben Casnocha will be speaking at the MaRS Centre on May 16th. Casnocha wrote a NY Times best selling book The Start-Up of You written with LinkedIn co-founder.

Advertisers are criticized as people who look for the creative and edgy, not the obvious. They will not be happy.Marketing people are criticized for getting hopelessly entangled in corporate egos and complicated projects. They will not be happy.Research people are criticized for generating more confusion than clarity. They will not be happy. Some big companies are criticized for their ill-fated marketing programs or lack of proper strategy. They will not be happy.Wall Street is criticized for putting too much emphasis on growth that is unnecessary and can be destructive to a brand. They will just ignore this criticism and continue trying to make as much money as they can. But this is a book not written to make people happy but to explain to marketers what their real problem is. Only then will they begin to look for the obvious solutions that will separate their products from their competitors -- in a way that is equally obvious to customers. All this comes with no jargon, no numbers, no complexity, and a great deal of common sense.

From Booklist: Joachimsthaler offers another book that promotes use of reinvented basic marketing principles to assist highly innovative companies. The author describes his DIG model (Demand-First Innovation & Growth), which consists of three interlinked parts: explore the demand for their products and services through an in-depth understanding of how people behave and live their lives and how they consume; apply an innovative routine of structured thinking to identify opportunities that customers cannot articulate; and formulate a strategy for effectively pursuing new opportunities. We learn that although most companies conduct some type of market research, they may fail to look for real opportunities and quantify them or fail to develop viable action plans that lead to results. This model illustrates how to become an unbiased observer of people's consumption and usage behaviors and offers a new approach to identifying and executing a company's growth strategy. Joachimsthaler, a consultant, reports that "successful opportunities for innovation and growth are right here, in front of us, and we often can't see them or don't act on them." Mary Whaley Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"Technology Ventures" is the first textbook to thoroughly examine a global phenomenon known as "technology entrepreneurship". Now in its second edition, this book integrates the most valuable entrepreneurship and technology management theories from some of the world's leading scholars and educators with current examples of new technologies and an extensive suite of media resources. Dorf and Byers's comprehensive collection of action-oriented concepts and applications provides both students and professionals with the tools necessary for success in starting and growing a technology enterprise. "Technology Ventures" details the critical differences between scientific ideas and true business opportunities.

A marketing book by Geoffrey A. Moore that focuses on the specifics of marketing high tech products. Moore's exploration and expansion of the diffusions of innovations model has had a significant and lasting impact on high tech entrepreneurship.

This is the first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline that explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. Superbly practical, Innovation and Entrepreneurship explains what established businesses, public service institutions, and new ventures need to know and do to succeed in today's economy.

A new way for inventors/innovators, investors, technologies, and entrepreneurs to approach commercialization and build portfolios. The book guides you through the lifecycle of innovation, from screening to funding to development to commercialization. It presents discusses strategic issues, it discusses solutions towards successful commercialization, and it provides guidance from well-respected entrepreneurs.

Robert Lawton Burns focuses on the key role of the 'producers' as the main source of innovation in this wide-ranging analysis of business trends in the manufacturing branch of the health care industry. Written by industry academics and executives, the book provides a detailed overview of the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, genomics/proteomics, medical device and information technology sectors. Most importantly, it describes the growing convergence between these sectors and the need for executives in one sector to increasingly draw upon trends in the others.

Since ancient times, people have believed that breakthrough ideas come from the brains of geniuses with awesome rational powers. In recent years, however, the paradigm has begun to shift toward the notion that the source of creativity lies "out there," in the network of connections between people and ideas. In this provocative book, Richard Ogle crystallizes the nature of this shift, and boldly outlines "a new science of ideas." The key resides in what he calls "idea-spaces," a set of nodes in a network of people (and their ideas) that cohere and take on a distinctive set of characteristics leading to the generation of breakthrough ideas. These spaces are governed by nine laws--illuminated in individual chapters with fascinating stories of dramatic breakthroughs in science, business, and art. "Smart World" will change forever the way we think about creativity and innovation.