Graduates of the Ice House leadership program, received their certificates Friday, signifying that they are now certified to go out and teach the course to people around the Erie community.

The program gives the leaders of new businesses an opportunity to learn a different approaches to entrepreneurship. People learned how to think with an innovative mind to find new ideas and positives in the everyday work environment.

Political dysfunction limits many sources of economic promise for the U.S., and this problem far precedes the events of this year’s election cycle.  

Today, Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project released a report titled, “Problems Unsolved and a Nation Divided.” Competitiveness, according to the authors, refers to “the ability of firms operating in the U.S. to compete successfully in the global economy while supporting high and rising living standards for the average American.” In other words, the U.S. cannot sustain prosperity through corporate gains alone.

IXA valorisation centre (a collaboration between the University of Amsterdam, Academic Medical Center (AMC), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, VU University Medical Center Amsterdam and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and the research institutes AMOLF and Nikhef will be collaborating closely in the new programme ‘IXAnext, Talent for innovation’. This collaboration aims to make the knowledge institutes’ knowledge and expertise more readily available for societal and private parties. Together they dedicate themselves to increasing the use and dissemination of knowledge in the region. This will be accomplished among others in the form of Innovation Labs, which will intensify cooperation with the business community and increase the support given to start-ups and spin-offs. By developing this programme, IXA is taking the next step towards professionalising and improving services in the valorisation process.

Image: http://www.vu.nl

A new era of opportunity, inspiration and creativity is launching at the University of Oklahoma with the opening of the Innovation Hub during the week of Sept. 19. This cutting-edge facility is designed to foster the creation, refinement and implementation of innovative ideas.

The Innovation Hub features multiple zones that can be utilized by students, faculty and staff. The digital fabrication lab brings ideas to tangible reality through 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC milling machines, a woodshop and on-site experts. The data visualization zone utilizes virtual reality to immerse users in the world of informatics. The collaboration zone has customizable spaces for students to meet and work together on their projects and ideas, including initiating new technology-based business and jobs for Oklahoma’s future economy.

Image: http://www.normantranscript.com

Creativity has enabled humans to conquer every corner of this planet. Indeed our yen for innovation is one of the most salient characteristics of our kind. Yet our species is not the only one given to inventiveness. Researchers have documented the capacity in a growing number of other creatures. And some of their findings run counter to received wisdom about the origins of creativity and how to foster it in human minds.

A man completing the 22 Pushup Challenge in an unique way was surprised to see two massive humpback whales photobomb his routine.

YouTuber Erik Jones was filming his friend Mike Pelayo on day nine of the 22 Pushup Challenge in order to raise awareness for veteran suicide prevention. The challenge asks participants to complete 22 pushups for 22 days, so Pelayo was switching it up a little bit by performing his pushups on a kayak in the middle of the ocean. We're sure it seemed like a great idea at the time.

A surfing camera in San Francisco captured the moment a massive great white shark put on a splashy (and scary) show.

The clip, which was shot Wednesday morning at Ocean Beach, shows nearly a dozen surfers waiting in the water as the shark jumps clear out of the water for a pretty sweet belly flop. While many of the surfers missed seeing the shark showing off, a few surfers witnessed the action. 

Image: http://mashable.com

The only thing that’s been consistent for digital health accelerators in the past couple of years is that most of them have been tweaking their model. That’s no less true of the New York Digital Accelerator, which is run by the New York eHealth Collaborative and the Partnership Fund for New York City.

Now in its fourth year, the accelerator did away with an open call for applicants. Instead, the program relied the four investment firms and 16 healthcare organizations that serve as mentors to the accelerator to nominate companies they viewed as worthy.

Deloitte’s new family leave program for its U.S. employees includes time off for elder care, spousal care and child care beyond infancy.

Both male and female employees can take up to 16 weeks of paid family leave each year, and new mothers will be eligible for six months of paid time off, including short-term disability for childbirth. Staff must take at least three consecutive days off to qualify for the program.

Thursday night  was the 2016 Mississippi Innovator’s Hall of Fame, and I’m going to spend the next few weeks talking about some of the honorees and inductees from the event.

One of the great things about the Mississippi Innovator’s Hall of Fame is that while most inductees are companies that are household names, many of the companies honored as “Innovators to Watch” are great Mississippi companies that are mostly under the radar.

Image: Special to The Clarion-Ledger

“Bipartisan approval by the Ways and Means Committee of this important bill is welcome news for the entrepreneurial ecosystem and startup employees across the country who are unfairly penalized with tax liabilities on vested stock but no liquid market to sell those shares to meet their tax obligations,” said Bobby Franklin, President and CEO of NVCA.  “Allowing for an additional period of time for employees to defer taxes on exercised stock options is a common sense solution to this challenge that will encourage more talented individuals to help build the next generation of great American companies.  We thank Congressmen Paulsen and Crowley for their leadership and commitment to avoiding a startup brain drain by preserving the value of stock options for employees, and look forward to working with them to pass this bill into law.”

As an entrepreneur, I see the world a bit differently. Since I have never had a full-time job or received much training at my part-time work, I have always gone with my gut on how certain tasks should be approached.

While experience has its benefits, in my experience, inexperience can lead to innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. That is how I approached my idea for Valuation App, a mobile app for financial analysis. I did not have the money or the marketing resources to get an app built and promoted, so I used crowdfunding as a means to finance it. Using just a deck, I raised money from 57 people to crowdfund the app’s expenses. I requested $11 from each person and raised close to $4,000. It worked — the app is now available on Android and iOS, and even led to my next venture.

Image: http://www.alleywatch.com

In business school, you’re taught to write a plan, raise capital and then execute on your vision. This process isn’t really the way things work out in the real world, though. startups can quickly find that angel investors or venture capital firms aren’t willing to invest in a company that hasn’t bootstrapped themselves for a substantial portion of the time. This situation isn’t always the case, but it is something entrepreneurs should consider.

According to BlackRock, the average investor in America is doing a miserable job. Bad investing habits are eating away at our portfolios, delaying retirement and costing us money. In particular, the data shows that we like to:

Pay people to beat the stock market. Despite the growth of index funds, people still continue to pay fund managers for a promise that is almost statistically impossible to keep. Sell in a down market to “avoid losses,” which actually costs more money in the long run.

Rob Cross, professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, explains how work became an exhausting marathon of group projects. He’s the coauthor of the HBR article “Collaborative Overload.”

Once upon a time, there was an enlightened organizational leader who spoke candidly about his upcoming retirement. “I am afraid about the next phase of my life” he would say, continuing “I’m not sure what my life is or will be without my job, without my career. How will I spend my time? How will I face the fact that I am replaceable, that the world can and will go on without me? How will I derive a sense of identity, power, agency and meaning once I am retired?” He would even add, “I married my spouse for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, but not for lunch. How are we going to spend all that time together?”

I’ve worked on my fair share of products that didn’t quite make it. The process for coming up with ideas for them was always the same: Sit at home, think of things people might willingly pay for, choose one, and run with it. Unsurprisingly, this formula didn’t work, and even though I learned something new with each attempt, I can hardly say it was worth my time or money.

Then something surprising happened: I built a successful product without planning to—through a side project I'd taken on a little reluctantly. In retrospect, it's clear to me why my intentional, sit-down-and-brainstorm approach was less successful than this accidental one.

Daydreaming. Horsing around. Aimless wandering. A sudden, traumatic loss. So many things that seem to conjure an automatic, negative connotation can actually have an interesting—indeed, often positive—impact on our creativity. In fact, the further you dig into the inner workings of the creative side of our minds, the more surprises you’re likely to uncover.

Paging through Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire, the pattern is hard to miss. While much about the mechanics of human creativity is obvious—meditation, for instance, has long been known to boost a number of cognitive functions—much of it is downright counterintuitive.

The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and U2 aren’t the only ones who can fill up the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. If every person that Beth Steinberg has helped hire took a seat at the venue, about 500 people would be left standing. They’d hail everywhere from fashion retailer Nordstrom to gaming giant Electronic Arts, from solar provider Sunrun to social network Facebook. Any talent leader knows how astoundingly hard hiring can be — until they execute a layoff, which Steinberg has had to do at least once at nearly every company she’s worked. If you think hiring 10,000 people over a career sounds daunting, try laying off 2,000 of them.

Despite a dip in the number of start-ups founded last year, San Diego remains a good place for innovation, powered by diverse technology clusters and a continued healthy flow of federal research dollars.

That’s the gist of the 2015 San Diego Innovation Report released Thursday by local start-up accelerator Connect. It takes the pulse of the region’s innovation economy, including funding, new startups founded and jobs created.