There are lots of problems with brainstorms, but the main one is they don’t go on for long enough. They usually stop when people have run out of ideas and you get those embarrassing silences. But those embarrassing silences are when your unconscious starts engaging on the problem and is a vital part to coming up with great ideas.

The IBM World of Watson 2016 conference kicks off in Las Vegas on October 24. IBM

THE FUTURE OF MEETINGS & EVENTS

The Convention Industry Council hosted its annual Conclave educational conference at the Hilton Baltimore last week. I was invited to moderate a panel on Millennial trends reshaping the meetings industry, based on my collaboration with Meetings Mean Business last year to produce the Skift Trends Report: What Millennials Want in Meetings.

Image: https://skift.com

U.S. research and development (R&D) performance rose to $477.7 billion in 2014 – an increase of $21.1 billion over 2013, according to a recent National Science Foundation (NSF) InfoBrief. When adjusted for inflation, growth in U.S. total R&D performance (1.2 percent annually between 2008 and 2014) matched the average pace of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). Of the $477.7 billion in R&D funding, approximately 63 percent ($300.1 billion) went to experimental development with the remaining 37 percent supporting basic research ($84 billion) and applied research ($93.6 billion).

For the founders of Trace Genomics, strawberries are the low-hanging fruit.

The company's cofounders, Diane Wu and Poornima Parameswaran, are borrowing 23andMe's model and applying it to agriculture. For $199, growers—and the suppliers that sell fertilizers and seeds to them—can collect a sample of soil from their crops' roots using a special kit and send it back to Trace's lab for analysis. The company will then share the results of its pathogen panel, which tests the sample for tiny organisms like bacteria, viruses, and fungi that are associated with plant blight. For now, the offering is limited to some 30 diseases affecting strawberries and lettuce.

Image: Flickr user U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Jennifer Aldridge

Today Upfront Ventures is announcing that we’ve backed Rebecca Kantar’s startup Imbellus, a company designed to assess human potential and ultimately change the way we teach children. We led a $4 million investment along with Thrive Capital, GLG and Sound Ventures. The news blogs will cover the what, how and how much but I want to focus on the “why” and try to be instructive of what I think makes for a great A-round startup.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said on Wednesday China would promote economic development by opening up its economy more widely as experience showed closed door policies only brought stagnation.

"We will promote development through expanding, opening up," Li said in a speech to the annual United Nations General Assembly.

"China's experience in the past decades has proven that a closed-door policy only leads to stagnation and backwardness ... China will open its door even wider to the outside world."

Image: Chinese Premier Li Keqiang speaks during a High Level Leaders meeting on Refugees on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters in New York, U.S. September 20, 2016. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Dundee Venture Capital, an investment firm based in Omaha, Nebraska, has raised $20 million for its third fund and is looking at St. Louis for potential deals.

The fund is expected to grow to $30 million, according to Dundee officials.

Enlarge The fund, according to a Dundee release, will be deployed into seed and early-stage investments targeting e-commerce, business-to-business Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and consumer-network focused startups in the Midwest region, including St. Louis, Denver, Omaha, Lincoln, Nebraska, Kansas City, Madison, Wisconsin, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Chicago.

If there was an overriding message at last week’s Mayo Clinic Transform 2016 conference and what was arguably its highlight – the Think Big Challenge – it was that Mayo leaders are firmly committed to their recent entrepreneurial direction. For them, it’s now all about the transformation of medical innovations into market action.  

That ethos was on full display at Think Big Challenge held at the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, where five startup CEOs were competing for a $50,000 seed investment from Mayo Clinic Ventures. The Challenge’s aim is to help match new health care technologies developed by clinicians with the right business partners. Mayo has a long list of potential health care innovations that are currently sitting on the shelf waiting for entrepreneurs to take them to market.

When a company starts up, a retirement plan is usually the last item on the laundry list.

Many employers want to offer one, but uncertainty over costs and a time-consuming setup process deter many.

That could explain why only about 14 percent of small businesses have employer-provided plans, according to data from the Government Accountability Office.

Image: Michael Nemeroff, president of a T-shirt printing business based in Philadelphia, says offering a 401(k) plan has been a great tool for recruiting and retaining employees. Credit Charles Mostoller for The New York Times

Two billion individuals and 200 million micro, small, and midsize businesses in emerging economies today lack access to savings and credit. Even those with access must often pay high fees for a limited range of products. Economic growth suffers. But a solution is right in people’s hands: a mobile phone. Digital finance—payments and financial services delivered via mobile phones and the Internet—could transform the lives and economic prospects of individuals, businesses, and governments across the developing world, boosting GDP and making the aspiration of financial inclusion a reality.

Joe Verrengia is the architect of Arrow’s corporate social responsibility program (CSR), combining targeted charitable investing, sustainability and government relations into a strategic initiative that uniquely establishes Arrow as an innovation catalyst. He also co-directs the Arrow SAM Project, which brings technology concepts to demonstration for humanitarian purposes. Arrow is the 2015 Fortune Most Admired Company in its category, including #1 in CSR. Previously, Verrengia held senior positions at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. For two decades he was an international science journalist. He graduated from Columbia University and has held fellowships at MIT, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Kellogg K +0.39% Foundation.

Image: Arrow Electronic’s SAM car, a Chevrolet Corvette, that can be driven by a quadriplegic. Photo by Ellen Jaskol.

You can’t walk around any college campus, school district or company without hearing the word “innovation.” Organizations of all sorts display front and center the innovative ideas and innovative ways they build and sell products to change teaching and learning, from Netflix-like adaptive algorithms to augmented reality experiences.

Is there a limit or consensus to what innovation actually means? Does one have to be among the first in a field or community to push the idea or product, or does reinventing (and improving) the wheel count too?

IP has never been more important to the evolution of our increasingly knowledge-based economy. Not more than a few decades ago, a company’s most valuable assets were tangible. Now, through online e-commerce, anyone can take an idea, a process, designs, algorithms, or brand, and expand into global markets and even create new industries. That’s why it is critical that we enforce our IP rights and protect American innovations, which are protected by intellectual property rights.

At Microsoft’s research labs around the world, computer scientists, programmers, engineers and other experts are trying to crack some of the computer industry’s toughest problems, from system design and security to quantum computing and data visualization.

A subset of those scientists, engineers and programmers have a different goal: They’re trying to use computer science to solve one of the most complex and deadly challenges humans face: Cancer.

A few years ago, my oldest daughter was part of a highly ranked high school marching band program. They were invited to compete in the first national marching band competition on the ellipse lawn at the White House. Like most early stage entrepreneurs, I was up to my eyeballs in alligators. I convinced myself that I was too busy to chaperone the trip and had to stay home and work.

AMES, Iowa – The third round of funding from an Iowa State University presidential initiative will build four research teams that will use big data to benefit human and animal health, improve cities and build new tools for researchers.

Iowa State President Steven Leath launched the Presidential Initiative for Interdisciplinary Research in 2012. The program provides seed funding to establish research teams from across campus to tackle emerging societal challenges. The goal is to help the teams grow into well-funded, cross-disciplinary research groups.

Image: This image shows flu virus as seen by an electron microscope. The Presidential Initiative for Interdisciplinary Research is supporting a team that will use big data tools for real-time tracking of flu in swine. -- Image courtesy of Phillip Gauger.

Twenty-odd years ago, most big companies would run just a handful of experiments each year. Today, the most innovative businesses run thousands—Intuit: 1,300, P&G: 7,000–10,000, Google: 7,000, Amazon: 1,976, and Netflix: 1,000—thanks to a combination of new technologies and "lean" business approaches. And it isn't just quantity that's rising but the quality and pace of experimentation, too. These days, the true test of how innovative a company can be is how well it experiments.

Paul Critchlow had earned his retirement. It was May of 2015, and he'd worked very hard over a long life, and as a young man, he had even fought in Vietnam. He went on to report for the Philadelphia Inquirer and served as spokesman for Pennsylvania’s governor. Finally, he’d spent the last 30 years at Merrill Lynch, half of those as its head of communications. Now that he was turning 69, it seemed like time for a rest.

Image: Photos: Celine Grouard for Fast Company

It would raise the stakes even higher, but that didn't stop Jay Flatley, Illumina's then chief executive, from sending in vials of his own saliva and blood to the company's newly opened lab. It was January 2009, and Illumina's scientists were about to embark on their first mission to sequence a whole human genome.

The project, internally dubbed "Jaynome," required a prescription from Flatley's doctor in case the scientists discovered something medically relevant. It took several weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars for the lab to deduce the sequence of the genome.

Image: Noel Spirandelli for Fast Company

European car producers intend to relocate their research centers to Eastern Europe following the UK vote in favor of Brexit, to decrease their costs and to preserve free access to the European market, reports The Guardian.

Human resources companies are looking for trained personnel and executives to lead research & development teams in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. The car producers are also looking to relocate trained specialists from the UK to Eastern Europe.