The University City Science Center announced the first class of its Digital Health Accelerator, which includes seven health tech startups.

The six- to eight-month program, backed in part by the state, is geared toward startups that are past their early stage and have already received investment and/or revenue. It feels like a natural second step after an early-stage accelerator like DreamIt Health. Each participating startup will get office space in the Science Center/Drexel incubator Innovation Center@3401, mentorship and $50,000. The Science Center will not take any equity in exchange for the program.

Image: University City Science Center 

The venture capital model has hardly evolved since the 13th century when Marco Polo first convinced a group of wealthy Venetians to underwrite his travels to Asia in exchange for a share of the riches he might discover. Today, a fund manager supports and cultivates an entrepreneur’s good idea by providing financing in exchange for a share in their business – with the hope for a return on their efforts. But after years of stalled performance, that model is due for a shakeup BDC Capital is among a small number of institutions leading the effort to modernize the model. We refer to this new approach as catalyst partner financing. It’s essentially a hybrid of an incubator and a traditional venture capital fund.

Link-age Ventures Inc. of Warren County has teamed with a Chicago bank to launch a $26.6 million venture capital fund that will invest in early stage companies that can provide innovative products, services or technology to meet the needs of seniors. Link-age Ventures, which is affiliated with two other Link-age companies based in Deerfield Township that focus on the aging population, formed the fund with Ziegler Cos. Inc., an investment bank whose specialties include health care and senior living. It’s a 50-50 joint venture.

Image: Bruce Crippen | Courier - Scott Collins is the CEO of Link-age. 

FundersClub democratized angel investing with its equity crowdfunding marketplace. Two years later, it wants to do the same for launching a fund or being a limited partner by licensing out its backend system for legally doing venture deals and transferring cash. Its new feature, called Partnerships, competes in some ways with AngelList’s Syndicates. Essentially it’s venture-capitalism-as-a-service. Rather than amassing an army of investors that syndicate leaders can call on to fund specific startups, FundersClub Partnerships can function more like traditional VC funds that take on LPs’ cash upfront and then pay them back a percentage of a multi-company portfolio’s profits if they succeed.

WEST LAFAYETTE, IND. — Purdue University had record-breaking numbers in commercialization activities highlighted by 24 startups based on Purdue intellectual property, Purdue Research Foundation officials announced.

The growth is reflected in other increases through Purdue's Office of Technology Commercialization including 146 U.S. and global issued patents and 120 licensing deals with startups and established companies.

We’ve all heard the stereo­type: Women like to talk. We bounce ideas off each other about every­thing from career moves to dinner plans. We hash out big deci­sions through our con­ver­sa­tions with one another and work through our emo­tions with discussion.

At least, that’s what “they” say. But is any of it actu­ally true? Can we really make such sweeping gen­er­al­iza­tions about the com­mu­ni­ca­tion pat­terns of women versus those of men? The research is sur­pris­ingly thin con­sid­ering the strength of the stereo­type: Some studies say yes, women are more talk­a­tive than men. Others say there’s no pat­tern at all. Still others say men are even bigger chatterboxes.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

If you want to look to the future in crowd financing, you might want to look to Israel. From Jerusalem, an innovative crowd-funding platform has been built up over the past 16 months led by serial entrepreneur Jon Medved.

Feeding off the strong base f Israeli tech innovation, OurCrowd has raised $30.5 million to expand its reach internationally into promising markets such as China and Australia, grow its team, and build its investor network.

DURHAM — When the traditional grant-making agencies weren’t biting, Duke University biology professor Kathleen Pryer turned to the Internet to help her reel in funding for her research.

Through a crowdfunding campaign on the website Experiment, Pryer was able to get backing from a plant-loving high school student, a science-fiction writer and other individual donors. And after she got a big offer from a Chinese company through the campaign, Pryer got what she needed to move forward with her proposal to sequence the DNA of a specific type of fern called Azolla.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Paul Thompson, director of IT innovation at Medtronic, explained how he held on for four years to bring the “hospital of the future” to life. His work is part of the company’s larger push to move from a device maker to a healthcare services provider, which he compared to IBM’s move from hardware to services.

Measuring and optimizing for the right engagement metrics is the key to attaining and keeping users. 

Whether your business model is driven by in-app advertising, purchases, or paid subscriptions, driving your revenue is fundamentally dependent on personalization and engagement. The metrics are available, but identifying which are the most important for tracking engagement and are the most actionable can be tricky. 

Image: http://go.localytics.com/ 

The urge to pack up and start a new life in another city is a dream most everyone has entertained at one time or another. There’s a certain impulsive appeal in just leaving behind your established routine and starting fresh somewhere else. There’s an aura of adventure and renewal to the idea that calls to us.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

Vacations are for unplugging: we all need to escape the daily grind from time to time, after all. But that doesn’t have to mean unplugging from the entire internet. In fact, you may have a more enjoyable and meaningful vacation by staying connected–as long as you’re staying connected to fun, friends, and family, rather than to work.

President Amy Gutmann announced the launch of the Penn Center for Innovation,a new initiative that will provide the infrastructure, leadership and resources needed to transfer promising Penn inventions, know-how and related assets into the marketplace for the public good.    “The Penn Center for Innovation will maximize our mission as a research university of putting knowledge into practice for the good of our community and society,” said Penn President Amy Gutmann. “Pennovation—our ability to advance both basic discovery and the society-improving applications those discoveries enable—makes Penn a leader in this vitally important field. The Penn Center for Innovation also will transform our region’s capacity to support an ecosystem of innovative entrepreneurs, companies and workers all making essential contributions to our collective economic future.”

If you’re tired of reading self help books and seemingly never getting anywhere, you may be interested in a study that found a single factor — self-control — to be one of the primary keys to success. John Tierney and Roy Baumeister, co-authors of the book Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, recently hosted a discussion about the importance of self control.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

The belief that innovators, i.e. first movers, usually win is a highly cherished belief in American entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. And it is not true.

In a previous blog, I had suggested that entrepreneurs should imitate rather than innovate. Here, I want to offer some suggestions on when and how to imitate. One of the key issues from innovation is who gets the rewards from the innovation

Launching an innovation program is challenging for a number of reasons. Most of the time, champions of innovation face two main problems: 1) the general challenge of coordinating the various aspects of the innovation department, but also 2) educating the rest of the community about the value of innovation and how it will impact them. Addressing some of the main questions or challenges right off the bat paves the way for innovation success later.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

It’s been a particularly thoughtful week in VC-land with a trio of high-profile investors touching on subjects in and around investor ethics.

The first example of this newer, softer VC perspective was Spark Capital partner Bijan Sabet who addressed some of the more predatory practices in the venture industry during a PandoMonthly fireside chat last week. Sabet took particular exception with the practice of VCs passing through their firm’s legal bills to their cash-strapped startups and forcing founders and their employees to sign non-competes.

Image: http://pando.com 

SACRAMENTO, July 15 (UPI) --A California high-tech venture capitalist is pushing a plan to divide the most populous U.S. state six ways. Tim Draper is set to hold a news conference Tuesday in Sacramento, the state capital, where he is expected to announce that enough people have signed petitions to put the question on the ballot in November 2016. At least 807,615 valid signatures -- more than the entire population of Alaska -- are needed.

Meaning may perhaps be the most important part of your entrepreneurship journey. It will shape why you got into business and how you structure your approach to business all together.

Meaning is more than money and bigger than your company culture. It’s the answer to the big question of why you and your business are here. What do you do that changes the world? How does what you do change lives? What is your definition of meaning and how do you serve it daily?

Image: http://www.entrepreneur.com 

Well, this is interesting.

RockThePost, a site that connects startups and investors, just announced that it has merged with CoFoundersLab, a site that helps entrepreneurs find cofounders.

RockThePost, which launched in 2011, sought to form a new kind of social network that brought together money-hungry startups with equity-hungry investors. Although the site never became a household name, its model proved somewhat successful: CoFoundersLab actually raised a portion of its initial $750,000 seed round on RockThePost.