SME Magazine (Asia): New Google Analytics Features Increase Effectiveness and ROI. The SME and Entrepreneurship Magazine of Asia has a recent article
“Google Analytics is now more powerful, flexible and intelligent to help marketers, advertising agencies and businesses of all sizes make quicker, smarter decisions on how to get the most business value out of their online marketing campaigns and websites. We believe that more transparency, data and analysis leads to more effective marketing, from sharing content to converting sales to increasing brand engagement,” said Vinoaj Vijeyakumaar, Head of Web Analytics, Google Southeast Asia
These additional features will enhance the tool’s capability to add more power to existing capabilities and provide new flexibility to further customize and adapt Google Analytics according to the needs of marketers, advertising agencies and businesses of all sizes in Malaysia and Southeast Asia.
Read the full article here: New Google Analytics Features Increase Effectiveness and ROI
Global Entrepreneurship Week, the world’s first-ever celebration of enterprising behaviour, comes at a time of massive economic change.
Recognising the global nature of many of the challenges we face, Global Entrepreneurship Week aims to connect enterprising young people with their counterparts all over the world, and ultimately create a global movement of entrepreneurial people.
Created by the UK’s business-led, government-backed Make Your Mark campaign and the US-based Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the first Global Entrepreneurship Week will see millions of young people participate.
Globally more than 13,000 events are taking place in 77 countries involving an estimated five million people, from Bolivia to Bulgaria and Mexico to Mozambique.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who launched Enterprise Week in the UK – the model taken for Global Entrepreneurship Week, said: “Global Entrepreneurship Week brings young people together across national borders, taking enterprise to the classroom and giving young people the confidence and self-belief not only to develop tomorrow’s big ideas but to put them into practice. “And Global Entrepreneurship Week will reach millions of young people – half a million in Britain alone, and to each one of them my challenge is this:
Believe in your ideas and make them happen. Because entrepreneurial spirit changes the world and it changes it for good. “You can be making a difference, so be bold, be imaginative, be brilliant. That’s really what this week is all about. Enjoy it.”
Carl Schramm, President and CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation said: “For seven days, millions of young people around the world will be introduced to entrepreneurship and encouraged to think about how innovation can take them anywhere, no matter their location on the map. “Now more than ever it is imperative that we do everything we can to promote enterprise. As the world global economic downturn deepens, we are relying on entrepreneurial people with new thinking to lead us out of the recession.”
The President of Portugal, Prof. Aníbal Cavaco Silva said “I’m proud to associate my-self to this movement to wake-up, stimulate and mobilize, in particular young generations, the spirit of entrepreneurship, creativity and initiative.”
INNOVATION & The Pitfalls of Promoting Entrepreneurship – A new book examines the challenges — and potential benefits — of government programs designed to foster entrepreneurship
Lots of governments would like to promote high-tech entrepreneurship and venture capital in their regions — but many don’t know how to do it effectively.
In his new book Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed — and What to Do About It (Princeton University Press, 2009) Josh Lerner, the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, examines which types of policies to promote entrepreneurship and venture capital tend to work — and which don’t
Lerner supports his carefully researched analysis with numerous examples chosen from around the globe
Read a MIT Sloane Management Review By Martha E. Mangelsdorf
SME Financing – When it comes to securing financial support, entrepreneur Jack Ma, chairman and CEO of China’s Alibaba Group, has this advice for small and medium-sized enterprises: don’t rely on the government and the banks; rely instead on your family and friends
Speaking in Singapore, Ma told a regional SME conference that every country needs a financial incentive package to support the growth of SMEs because all big companies start as small businesses, adding that the SMEs of today will be tomorrow’s major companies like eBay, Google and UPS
Ma, himself, knows the pains of growing a business. In 1999, he founded the Alibaba Group, which has grown to five e-commerce companies operating business-to-business, retail, third-party online payment portals and cloud computing development services. The group employs 17,000 people in China, Japan, Korea, the UK and the US
Source: Insead
Read Full Article Here: SME financing: small businesses struggle to survive the downturn
Are Entrepreneurs Born? Or Made?
What do you think? Are you born an entrepreneur? Do you become one early in life? Or are entrepreneurs likely to start businesses out of hard-won expertise who then start a business around their skills and networks?
Recent research shows that entrepreneurs are not likely to come from entrepreneurial families. And not all business owners identified themselves as being entrepreneurial-minded in college. Instead, 69% started their own businesses within 10 years of working for someone else
In other words, the most likely path to entrepreneurship is the simplest one: you work for someone, become an expert in a technical area, build a network of contacts, then strike out on your own, presumably with a believe that you can solve a problem or build a better mousetrap than competitors
Social entrepreneurship is nothing more than offering innovative solutions to significant problems within a society
Social entrepreneurship as a way of life. For most entrepreneurs, the priority seems to be just getting a business going, and worrying later about making it socially and environmentally sustainable. There are many reasons for that. Most entrepreneurs consider it a luxury to focus on social or environmental issues. They want to find financial security first, to get on their feet and move beyond the daily survival worries
It’s not easy to find entrepreneurs whose businesses revolve around a social or environmental issue. Dedicating oneself to another, bigger cause is a daunting responsibility, and most businesses focus on much more immediate goals of simply making a profit
Read Whole Article: Social entrepreneurship as a way of life
Asia Responsible Entrepreneurship Awards recognizes and honors Asian businesses for championing sustainable and responsible entrepreneurship in the four categories namely:
- Green Leadership
- Community Engagement,
- Investment in People, and
- Responsible Business Leadership
This is in line with Enterprise Asia’s two founding pillars, which are Responsible Entrepreneurship and Investment in People
Imagine doing business in a place where you can easily be connected to potential clients, business/research partners who are just less than an hour‘s car ride away
How about getting work permits for your team approved – in less than 2 days? Sounds too good to be true? These are exactly the things that foreign start-ups will find in Singapore
Singapore has established a reputation for being one of the most business-friendly countries in the world. Start-ups will also be able to tap on the country’s Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network which will reach every home and office by 2012, providing ultra high-speeds of up to 1 Gbps and pave the way for innovative new online services
Finally, there will be no trouble staying connected with more than 7,500 hotspots island wide providing free wireless access
More than 7000 MNCs and 10,000 small-medium enterprises that have already set up their strategic operations here, providing various collaboration opportunities for Singapore-based start-ups
It’s not surprising that the country is emerging as one of the hottest start-up hub in Asia
China Entrepreneurship – Jia Shaohua is helping his students set up their own online shops to learn business and management skills
Jia says his e-commerce entrepreneurship classes, in which about a fourth of the college’s students participate, offer real-life skills to students who graduate better equipped to compete against the millions of other university students who enter the job market every year
An educator at a vocational school with about 8,000 students, Jia is at the forefront of efforts to make higher education more relevant to China’s job market at a time when an economic downturn means university graduates face bleak prospects
Read Story: Hit by job crunch, China trains entrepreneurs
The European Union is considering a regulation change that would require online etailers in Europe to also own a brick and mortar store
Shopping online has been becoming more popular in Europe over the past few years as they have been hit by an economic recession, which has forced many consumers to visit Internet retail sites for their purchases
Overall for Europe, it is expected that online retail sales will jump almost 20%, most of which coming from countries catching the online shopping craze like Spain, France, and Poland
As more consumers remain conscious of their budgets, it is likely that this online shopping trend will continue in Europe. This means that the brick and mortar retailers need to find a way to combat the shift towards online spending
If nothing else, every brick and mortar store should consider adding an online retail site to their portfolio to try and increase the likelihood that they will generate enough sales everyday
Investors and industry analysts in Europe will continue to watch this trend as it could alter the retail landscape in the region as consumers change their shopping methods
