Blog Profile / Small Business Labs
| URL : | http://genylabs.typepad.com/small_biz_labs | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Business & Finance / Entrepreneurship | |
| Posts on Regator: | 1011 | |
| Posts / Week: | 3.9 | |
| Archived Since: | June 7, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Self-Employment Shifting to the Creative Class
Well known author and academic Richard Florida has written extensively about the rise of the creative class. According to his work, the creative class - a grouping of knowledge-based professions - has rapidly increased its share of total employment over...
Temps Working More Hours Than Employees
Prior to the Great Recession temporary workers worked, on average, fewer hours per week than regular employees. But as the chart below (from a NY Times Economix blog post) shows, this shifted in 2009 and temps now work, on average,....
Cleantech 2.0 = Cleanweb
The cleantech industry has fallen on some hard times. The U.S. energy boom - and especially the "shale gale" of cheap natural gas - has led to lower prices for fossil fuels. While good news for the U.S. economy, the...
Will Obamacare Lead to Lots More Small Businesses?
The Wall Street Journal's Will Health Care Law Beget Entrepreneurs? suggests that once fully implemented, the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) could lead to a substantial increase in new small businesses. Key quote: The Obama administration has touted a boost...
Are Small Business Owners the New Left?
That's the claim of The Nation's article Meet the New Left: Small Business Owners. Key quote from the article on what you will hear if you listen closely to small business owners: "you will hear jarring expressions of distinctly liberal...
Coworking Showing Up on Small Business Surveys
We were very excited last year when coworking was listed as a primary or secondary work location for 1.7% of the respondents of our annual independent worker survey. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first time coworking...
Self-Employment Increases With Age
One of the interesting aspects of self-employment is that the likelihood of being self-employed increases with age. The chart below shows self-employment as a percentage of total employment by age group. The data comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor...
The New York Times on Hackerspaces
The New York Times article One Big Workbench covers the growth of hackerspaces, which are coworking facilities for people who like to hack or make things. Think of them as shared workshops instead of shared offices. Like coworking facilities, hackerspaces...
Boom and Bust in Construction
The Calculated Risk blog has an article on construction spending falling in March. But more interesting to me was the chart shown below. It illustrates how big the pre-recession housing bubble was. Not surprisingly, employment in the construction sector also...
Art Gallery on Wheels
Axle Contemporary is an art gallery on wheels. Housed in the back of a custom retrofitted 1970 aluminum stepvan, Axle cruises around Santa Fe, New Mexico showing and selling art at strip malls and other locales not known for artisti...
The Rise of Handmade Bike Manufacturing
Barron's The $22,500 Bicycle covers the growing demand for handmade, customized and high end bicycles. The title refers to an expensive custom bike made by bike studio Signature Cycles - and yes, it costs $22,500. Of course most custom bikes...
The End of Work - Or the Beginning of an Independent Economy?
Well known tech journalist and analyst Tom Foremski's Futurists... and the 'End of Work' looks at the employment disruption being caused by digital technologies. He argues that technology is destroying more jobs that it's creating, leading to a potential...
The Rise of the Underground Economy
Last year we suggested growth in the underground economy is likely a key reasons workforce participation has fallen so much in the U.S. Others are starting to also suggest this. Noted author James Surowiecki's New Yorker article The Underground Recovery...
The Growing Independent Worker Ecosystem
The growth of the independent workforce (freelancers, temps, self-employed, etc.) has also led to a growing ecosystem of companies supporting independent workers and the firms that hire them. This ecosystem includes a wide range of firm types, including: Talent marketplaces:...
TV Show on Spoiled Pets
Regular readers know we like pet trends. And in particular, anything related to the trend towards "pet humanization" tends to catch our eye. This is the trend towards pet owners viewing themselves as "pet parents" and treating their pets as...
Can Entrepreneurs Save Detroit?
In case you haven't heard, Detroit's a mess. It has acres of empty buildings, frightening crime rates, crushing public debt and sky high unemployment. Despite these problems, there's been a flurry articles on entrepreneurs partnering with foundations and grassroots organizations...
Hotels Providing Office Space
CNN's Hotels vie to become the offices of the future looks at the growing trend of hotels offering office and meeting spaces as well as coworking-like lobbies. The key quote comes from Mark Gilbreath, CEO of workspace marketplace LiquidSpace: "Hotels...
What is a Spurious Correlation?
This is a bit more geeky than we like to get here at Smallbizlabs, but the rise of big data is resulting in growing numbers of people being exposed to statistical data and jargon. A spurious correlation is a statistical...
Flexibility is Why Companies Hire Contingent Workers
Staffing firm Allegis and the Human Capital Institute teamed up on a study on how corporate procurement and HR departments view the growing contingent workforce. It's a broad based study looking at a number of issues related to the contingent...
The Emerging Gender Gap Favoring Women
Wayward Sons: The Emerging Gender Gap in Labor Markets and Education is a fascinating study by noted MIT economist economist David Autor and MIT PhD student Melanie Wasserman. They suggest that an emerging economic gender gap favoring women is developing....