%0 Journal Article %J Open Source Business Resource %D 2009 %T Editorial: Tech Entrepreneurship (August 2009) %A Dru Lavigne %A David Hudson %X Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of any technology business and really describes the character of those who would see their new ideas achieve commercial success. That character includes: risk taking and the ability to deal with uncertainty from many quarters, creativity and the ability to connect ideas in surprising ways, orchestration and the ability to marshal resources, and the ability to deliver a message with impact whether in the proverbial elevator or when the customer is listening to best and final offers. There is so much required of an entrepreneur, in some ways it is surprising that we have any at all. I've recently had the opportunity to witness a wide variety of entrepreneurs in action through the Lead to Win program. Lead to Win was started to assist innovation and entrepreneurship in the Canadian National Capital region. The program is certainly a response to the economic times and recognizes that when the tech sector is depressed, people who might otherwise find employment in established companies are more likely to start a business of their own. Lead to Win is designed to help entrepreneurs who have a deep technology background but need help building out some of the other dimensions of that entrepreneurial character. It has been a great pleasure to discover that the demand for Lead to Win has exceeded our expectations easily by a factor of two or three. The diversity of people, technologies and market opportunities that have come forward in what is often described as a government and telecom town is extremely encouraging. The patterns and themes in this diversity have the prospect of tapping into existing ecosystems and creating entirely new ones. This notion of entrepreneurship and how it unfolds in established and new fabrics of companies and customers is the centerpiece of this month's issue of the OSBR. Successful entrepreneurs do not exist in isolation and are able to see massive opportunity by leveraging those around them. %B Open Source Business Resource %I Talent First Network %C Ottawa %8 08/2009 %G eng %U http://timreview.ca/article/275 %N August 2009 %9 Editorial %1 Talent First Network Dru Lavigne is a technical writer and IT consultant who has been active with open source communities since the mid-1990s. She writes regularly for O'Reilly and DNSStuff.com and is the author of the books BSD Hacks and The Best of FreeBSD Basics. %2 Lead to Win David Hudson is the Director of the Lead to Win program and is with Ontario's Talent First Network. He joins the doctoral program at Carleton University's Eric Sprott School of Business in September 2009. Until December 2008, Mr. Hudson was Nortel's Vice President for Advanced Research and Technology Labs. Since 1988, he held increasingly responsible management positions in Nortel both in engineering and product line management, working in all of Nortel's product lines. He has held the Nortel seat on a number of university advisory boards. Mr. Hudson received Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Engineering from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the Systems Design program at the University of Waterloo and his graduate work focused on pattern recognition and signal processing applied to earth resources imagery.