In the 15th century, British noblemen decided that they needed brighter colors for their coats of arms to help their armies more easily distinguish them on muddy battlefields. They naturally approached suppliers in their own nation. But when British tradesmen refused to accept this innovative approach to their traditional ways, the noblemen turned to Germany, … Continue reading “Innovation Has Deep Roots That Require Constant Tending”
Author: Howard Anderson
Howard Anderson is the William Porter Distinguished Lecturer at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where he teaches courses in the management of High Tech companies and dealing with Adversity. He has been elected to the Alfred P. Sloan Society, an organization of leading CEO's. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth University.
He sits on the advisory board of 3 Com, A123 Systems and Outside The Classroom. He is the founder of The Yankee Group, a leading high technology analysis firm which he ran from 1970 to 2000 and which was sold in 2000 to Reuters, a New York Stock Exchange firm.
He is also an early investor in such companies as VMX, which invented voice mail and Sonus, the first voice over IP company, both of which returned 50 times the original investment. He is the Co-Founder of Battery Ventures, which was formed in 1984 and whose investments include Akamai, InfoSeek, Qtera and Nextel. Battery Ventures currently manages over $1.8 Billion and focuses on early stage investing.
He has written on The Language of Pattern Recognition and Why Big Companies Can't Invent which have been published in Technology Review. Mr. Anderson holds a patent on a wrist watch that tells the next day's weather. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in 1966 and The Harvard Business School with an MBA in 1968.
Isolating the Elusive Management Gene
They have done it. Finally. Biologists at the National University of Singapore have isolated the Management gene. Now DNA technology will forever change how we think about business—and who runs it. That same rigor that was used to sequence the genome can now tell us who is going to be a good/great manager from the … Continue reading “Isolating the Elusive Management Gene”
Welcome to the New World Order, Where Our Gadgets Rule Us
I refuse to live in a world where my computer appliances are now smarter and more powerful than I am. Last week, my Kindle wouldn’t download new books because I was too far away from the cell tower—I had to drive ten miles from my Vermont house to the nearest town, go around the green, … Continue reading “Welcome to the New World Order, Where Our Gadgets Rule Us”
The Quest for MIT’s Next Billion Dollar Idea
[Editor’s Note: The other day, upon checking Xconomy’s e-mail, we discovered the following message, encoded using quantum encryption. We ran it through our nifty decryption matrix, and at first all we could decipher was the reply-to address—MIT’s Howard Anderson. But then we realized that we’d intercepted the description for a new course that Anderson is … Continue reading “The Quest for MIT’s Next Billion Dollar Idea”
The Best of Bad Times
Could the recent meltdown of the subprime lending market be good for tech? Let me argue a domino effect: subprime markets crater, which precipitates a pull-back on banks financing mid-tier debt for private equity, which means lower returns. The allocation of money to private equity slows, but there is a wave of money that must … Continue reading “The Best of Bad Times”