Greg Coticchia is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ENTRA, a consulting company providing business development, product management, and marketing expertise in the manufacturing industry. He also happens to be President of Sopheon, bringing decades of his award-winning experience to oversee the mission of achieving best practices for exceptional long-term revenue growth and profitability. Greg created and launched Carnegie Mellon University's Master program in Product Management – the world's first product management degree and was its founding Executive Director. He’s actively participated in over 17 mergers and acquisitions, involved in or responsible for the launch of over 100 products and solutions. Greg is also the author of Start Your Startup Right: Business Posts from a Journeyman Entrepreneur. Greg joins me today to discuss his journey from a young industrial Engineer Graduate, to an Innovation Master, in business and the realm of product management education. He shares his first love affair with robotic technology innovation, and working with machine vision at the beginning of the 'PC Revolution.' He reveals how a discussion about the future of software in the 1980s led Greg to investigate the inner workings of Data Center automation and use his experience with factory automation to tackle innovative product development. Greg also discusses the new digital companies such as Amazon and Netflix that in 2021 are software controlled and are run on software methodologies in terms of how they build and grow.
"Amazon is a software company in many ways, right? Netflix is a software company. These are all digital companies, you know, even though they're dealing with mixed media physical product" – Greg Coticchia
"The impact of software cannot be underestimated. A lot of it has to do with it's a product that you can build once; it has high margins, it's highly scalable, highly repeatable. So it's a very attractive business to be in." – Greg Coticchia
"You can learn a lot by getting out of your business." – Greg Coticchia
"Look outside your business for how other segments are changing and how they've interpreted the impact of Innovation. And you can use that as a competitive advantage and build that into your Innovation." – Greg Coticchia
"Software companies can learn a lot from how physical companies build products and build supply chains and market products. There's a lot to be learned there that software companies are ignorant about." – Greg Coticchia
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