Small Business Labs

JANUARY 15, 2019

And one trend and related analysis really jumped out at us.  In our work we regularly see examples of how our policy makers and government agencies can't keep up with the speed of technological change.    The trend is Emerging Technologies and the trend description is written by John R. This is a scary assessment.

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Small Business Labs

MARCH 18, 2019

" They say this is important because if you do the analysis based only on in-house data, you're likely going to miss important information that can be learned from other, similar projects. They describe this as: " building a statistical view of your project based on a reference class of similar projects."

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Small Business Labs

SEPTEMBER 12, 2017

Their analysis shows an estimated 75% of the US drinking age population resides within 10 miles of a brewery. Our interest in the craft brewing industry is due to the fact that it's such a good example of a barbell industrial structure.  The reason is the beer industry is such a clear example the barbell. 

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Small Business Labs

APRIL 9, 2014

.  There are several worth noting: Industry Analyst/Journalism Hybrid : These are firms that are augmenting or replacing their traditional advertising based business models by adding industry analysis and/or research services. Examples include: GigaOm Research : provides research reports on emerging technologies.

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Small Business Labs

MARCH 9, 2015

Strategy & Business , one of our favorite publications, has a good article on trend analysis. We often use the convergence of mobile, cloud and big data as an example. When Megatrends Collide is written by a trio of partners from the giant accounting and consulting firm PwC. 

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Small Business Labs

MAY 4, 2015

According to analysis by Deskmag, global interest in coworking is booming and at all time highs. For example, interest in coworking is growing most rapidly in Canada, Italy, France, Thailand, Australia, and India.  The annual Global Coworking Unconference Conference  (GCUC) is this week in Berkeley, California.

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Small Business Labs

NOVEMBER 14, 2017

According to an analysis by Intuit of its early borrowers: 46 percent of QuickBooks Capital customers had never applied for a loan before. QuickBooks Capital is also a good example of how small businesses are going to take advantage of big data, AI and machine learning.   Intuit is an Emergent Research (that's us) client. 

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Small Business Labs

MARCH 31, 2015

For example, the delivery service Door Dash announced last week it raised an additional $40 million.  Zen99's interesting analysis  of recruitment spend by on-demand economy companies, which we covered yesterday, shows the extent of the industry's recruiting efforts.

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Small Business Labs

AUGUST 29, 2017

For example, building a marketing app as part of a new product roll-out. Spend Matters analyst Andrew Karpie's article Upwork Launches Talent Services Division to Enable Enterprise Use of Online Freelance Workforce provides an excellent analysis of this new effort. Often these projects are sub-projects in a broader task.

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Small Business Labs

APRIL 17, 2013

  A good example of an unrelated spurious correlation is skirt length theory.   An example of a spurious correlation caused by a third variable is the fact that ice cream sales and accidental drownings are highly correlated - they tend to both move up and down in a consistent pattern. 

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Small Business Labs

FEBRUARY 9, 2016

These profiles were developed using cluster analysis to group ODE workers who share similar motivations and attitudes.  Satisfaction is a good example. The Passionistas – Looking for the flexibility to do something they love; 14 percent. The Substituters – Replacing a traditional job that is no longer available; 18 percent.

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 28, 2014

But we consider two to be of the greatest importance to us in our trend spotting and analysis work. For example, we started researching the coworing movement when it first started back in 2007. A good example is mobile computing, cloud computing and big data. .  We use all 7 of the insight sources listed above to do this.

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 31, 2016

For example, adaptive security systems (trend 10) are adaptive because of their use of machine learning techniques.  Machine learning and AI is their 1st trend, which is no surprise. It is a very hot set of technologies.

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 11, 2010

One of my favorite technology trend analysis and forecasting efforts is Gartner's annual Hype Cycle report.     The Gartner chart below summarizes the analysis for 2010.    For example, they have public virtual worlds being 5-10 years away from the mainstream. 

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Small Business Labs

JULY 23, 2014

.  Accroding to the Atlanta Fed the primary takeaways from the chart are: The percent of the workforce that is part time varies greatly across industries (compare for example, durable goods manufacturing with restaurants). Very cool chart and a great way to visually represent data. The article goes on to compare 2013 with 2012.

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 30, 2013

The growing use of labormetrics - a buzz word that's a play on sabermetrics , baseball's term for the use of statistics and empirical analysis - is interesting to us on two levels. The very popular Results Only Work Environment movement, for example, is based on providing employees flexibilty and autonomy.

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Small Business Labs

JUNE 12, 2014

Ethnography , for example, uses field observation to study a group.    For example, we use Intuit's Small Business Indexes to follow and better understand how the small business economy is performing. It's also leading to more timely and accurate analysis and deeper bahavior insights. Big Data trends'

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Small Business Labs

NOVEMBER 3, 2015

  For example, Hill spends 10 pages oddly attacking the left leaning Freelancers Union and it's founder Sara Horowitz. For example, the U.S. It's a non-stop attack on Uber, Airbnb and any other company or person who offers contract work or suggests freelance work isn't awful. 

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 30, 2014

  For example, the New York Times article No Picket Fence: Younger Adults Opting to Rent focuses on the shift away from home ownership and towards renting by young adults. According to several recent articles the financial problems of millennials is leading to changing behaviors and purchase patterns as well as broader societal shifts.

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Small Business Labs

JULY 30, 2015

For example, we changed our surveys to ask about "other sources of income" instead of "other jobs" about 3 years ago. This is done by thorough data collection and rigorous analysis, both of which require a lot of time - often years in the case of the data. 

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Small Business Labs

JANUARY 22, 2013

  Also, the experts' usage of Big Data made it clear they include data analysis when they use the term. For example, we heard things like "we use Big Data to target customers better" and "Big Data has really improved our supply chain" This usage makes perfectly good sense.

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Small Business Labs

JULY 29, 2013

  The academic fields of behavioral finance and behavioral economics have changed this by including social, psychological and emotional factors in the analysis of economic and financial issues.   For great, nightly examples of confirmation bias, watch Fox News or MSNBC.

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Small Business Labs

JULY 23, 2012

 Kodak is a great example.  They're also more willing to challenge our assumptions and analysis.  They're also more willing to challenge our assumptions and analysis. For example, we're very pro small business and self-employment.  Our Big Data category covers this trend in more detail.

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 20, 2011

We get a lot of questions about what information sources we use in our trend analysis work.     For example, yesterday's post on trends featured infromation from Bain and Company and tuesday's post had info from the Boston Consulting Group.    Nice range of articles.

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Small Business Labs

JUNE 22, 2011

  The New York Times has an article covering McKinsey getting hammered over their analysis of the new health care law.    An Urban Institute study , for example, shows that slightly more firms may offer employee health insurance due to the new law. 

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Small Business Labs

SEPTEMBER 18, 2012

Enterprises have gotten so good at contract analysis and negotiation that it's very hard to wring profits out of this segment. Google, eBay and Intuit are good examples.  There is a growing view that the small business segment is more profitable to serve than the enterprise (meaning large businesses) segment.

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Small Business Labs

OCTOBER 5, 2010

  The best know example is the tech industry cluster in Silicon Valley.     While the PWC analysis focuses on 5 big industries, clusters can be large or small.  Industry clusters are place where there is a concentration of companies and services related to a particular industry. 

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Small Business Labs

FEBRUARY 22, 2018

The good news is quantum computing would greatly improve many things, including weather forecasting, financial analysis, logistical planning, drug discovery and curing disease.  D-Wave systems , for example, has been in market for several years.  Many are speculating this will happen within the next 5-10 years.

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Small Business Labs

SEPTEMBER 25, 2017

The quick summary of our analysis of the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill on independent workers is: Low and moderate income independent workers would likely be worse off due to the reductions in medicaid and elimination of subsidies provided by the ACA (Obamacare).   But the bill seems at best half-baked, rushed and lacking specifics.

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Small Business Labs

NOVEMBER 6, 2017

  Some examples are: Owners of very profitable hedge funds, PE firms and real estate development firms : The owners of these firms are often wealthy and make lots of money.   Finally, see the Tax Policy Center's analysis of the bill.  So who would be the winners? This plan cuts their taxes by a substantial amount.

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