My friend, the late Ron Morris (founder of The American Entrepreneur radio show) often told me that when he was considering whether to invest in a start-up, he would look at three things: the business model, the quality of the entrepreneur himself, and the external market.

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The only possible line of compromise would be if the government accepted something like the Scottish model, where teachers use a bank of external tests, which they set when they think pupils are ready and which they mark themselves.

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Crucially, the European social model also enjoyed an amazingly low degree of external competition.

ECONOMIST: European politics

While the agency model has given CMOs extensive experience in working with external partners, a much broader, more complex ecosystem is now required that demands much more than a basic client-vendor relationship.

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ClearStory Data, a startup that has not revealed its capabilities, has declared that it will be in the business of providing a platform and user model that makes it easy and intuitive to find high value external data from numerous trusted sources and cross-pollinate this data with private and corporate data for fast, richer analysis.

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