This week I thought I would discuss two entrepreneurial ideas that caught my eye. They were not in any way linked, except that they were both entrepreneurial.
The first of these was a communication device produced for the British air force that operated on the principle of bone conduction. There have been bone conduction hearing aids for a while, but this one built a speaker and a microphone facility into a device that clips onto the back teeth.
Whilst the invention seemed pretty impressive, I wondered why bone conduction was not commonly talked about as a listening technique, and yet, the concept had been known for over 200 years.
Beethoven discovered it when composing as he steadily lost his hearing. He found that if he fixed one end of a metal rod to the piano and the other end was clasped between his teeth then he could make out the tune he was playing.
So the real entrepreneurship in this latest product is getting the technology from a long metal rod into something small enough to fit onto the back teeth.
The other interesting idea that I came across was the concept of e-residency in Estonia. For a fixed sum one can apply for e-residency that entitles you to register a global business in Estonia and to run it virtually from wherever in the world you reside.
One of the main benefits of the e-residency appears to be that, as your business is registered in Estonia, it gives you access to the European Single Market. While I wouldn’t want to debate the pros and cons of such access, it is clear that access to the single market during Brexit negotiations has been a major issue.
Now I may be appearing a bit naive and simplistic, as I see both sides of the Brexit negotiation fight over this issue, I wonder if there isn’t a simple solution that wouldn’t take an army of civil servants to come up with.
If British businesses want to continue to have access to the EU Single Market, why not spend 100 Euros and get an Estonian e-residency? But then entrepreneurial solutions and civil servants were never easy bedfellows!
