Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
The “valley of death” is a common term in the startup world, referring to the difficulty of covering the negative cash flow in the early stages of a startup, before their new product or service is bringing in revenue from real customers. I often get asked about the real alternatives to bridge this valley, and there are some good ones I will outline here.
One of the largest international surveys of the competitiveness of regions and cities finds that Silicon Valley in California remains the world’s leading economic hotspot.
According to the Global Competitiveness of Regions study, which analyses more than 500 regions and cities, Brussels is the most competitive European region, ranked 2nd overall, with Tokyo taking the honours in Asia, and ranked 3rd overall. Also ranked in the top five are Washington DC (4th) and the Korean industrial powerhouse region of Ulsan.
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'When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!' This time-tested soliloquy is not without merit. In fact, it is more popular then ever these days as life seems to be distributing more lemons than anything else. As a result, this simple, positive affirmation is often utilized to remind ourselves (or others) that it is indeed possible to make the best of a bad situation. Unfortunately, like all of these old adages, the lemon to lemonade analogy is far too simplistic to be taken at face value. Yes, it is possible to make lemonade from lemons but you'll need water and sugar in order to actually do it right. Much in the same vein, you need the proper ingredients in today's economic world in order to digest the news properly. Discovering and appreciating the fundamental that is surplus productivity, consequently, is the sugar and water to the economic lemons that get tossed your way. Here are a few guidelines to help see what we mean.
I've been interviewing candidates for years. Some were great people who underperformed when taking jobs ill-suited for them. Others became stars by finding situations that allowed them to excel. When it comes to hiring there are four types of people ranging from people you should hire to those you shouldn't. However, the types described are not fixed!
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When the leaders of a major retail pharmacy chain set out to enhance customer satisfaction, market research told them that the number one determinant would be friendly and courteous service. This meant changing the organizational culture in hundreds of locations—creating an open, welcoming atmosphere where regular customers and employees knew one another’s names, and any question was quickly and cheerfully answered.
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The sun was streaming through the window to suggest that negotiation and a willingness to consider a new perspective applies to both personal and business life. Your personal life provides insights for how to conduct business better and experience in business provides realization of how to negotiate better on the personal side, too.
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Way back in 1906, the English polymath Francis Galton visited a country fair in which 800 people took part in a contest to guess the weight of a slaughtered ox. After the fair, he collected the guesses and calculated their average which turned out to be 1208 pounds. To Galton’s surprise, this was within 1 per cent of the true weight of 1198 pounds.
Image: http://www.technologyreview.com
Q. Who do you turn to first for advice and why?
The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
To many, the concept Summer Fridays--a half day or day off every week during vacation season--seems more myth than reality.
Instead of leaving work early on a Friday, we often spend more time chained to our desks, struggling to come up with new ways to keep our productivity up, turning the so-called summer slow-down into a time just as busy as any other.
In 1963, Nancy Andreasen was the first female tenure-tracked English professor at the University of Iowa. Soon after, her first book about the poet John Donne was accepted by a publisher. Her career was off to a smashing start, but she had a nagging feeling.
"Who would this book help?" she couldn't stop herself from thinking. "What if I channeled the effort and energy I’d invested in it into a career that might save people’s lives?"
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Michael Heyward is scouring the web for military secrets, though not of the Julian Assange variety. Over black tea at a dark hotel bar in downtown Los Angeles, Heyward and I sit next to each other, noses to a laptop as he searches on Whisper, the mobile service he created that lets anyone share their innermost secrets anonymously. He's using an internal company tool called Predict to dig up Whispers on specific topics--in this instance, about soldiers who are agonizing over their sexual preferences. Heyward zeroes in on locations like Kandahar and Bagram Airfield, in Afghanistan, soon landing on a Whisper from a bisexual Marine near Kabul who is afraid to come out to his platoon. "This guy thinks he's the only person on the planet with this emotion, but there's no reason he should feel alone--tons of people are like him," says Heyward. "We created this place so you can connect with people. It's like a Wikipedia of human emotion."
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Chances are, you’ve been engaged in “fake talk” at one point or another. Maybe you had a meeting or conference call that left you slightly more confused than before. Perhaps you had a conversation with your co-worker and either sensed he had no intention of helping you with your request or blew up at you. If you’ve ever communicated with someone and not gotten the results, clarity, or respect you want, you know how frustrating it can be.
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We all know procrastination is bad for productivity.
A 2011 study published in the European Journal of Economics, Finance and Administrative Sciences showed procrastination was one of the leading factors affecting work-related stress. Procrastination has been linked to poor performance, and even poor health.
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The range of modern writing on laughter is truly daunting. My own university library holds around 150 books with "laughter" somewhere in the title, all published in English in the first decade of the 21st century. Leaving aside assorted memoirs, novels, and collections of poetry that managed to squeeze the word into the subtitle (Love, Laughter and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School and the like), these books range from popular psychology and self-help manuals, through the philosophy of humor and the anatomy of the joke, to the history of the chuckle, the chortle, the snigger, and the giggle in almost any period or place you can imagine, right back to the origins of laughter in the caves of primitive humans.
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The growing Creative Economy and the democratization of production is fostering a large generation of lone wolf professionals, competing fiercely for a place in the sun and their fifteen minutes of fame.
Being a creative professional has always been hard work and long hours often play a big part in this role. However, wearing one's heart on one's sleeve and having to create original ideas can and does take its toll.
Image: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
The first half of 2014 has seen less job-cutting by biopharma companies than a year earlier, at least according to one recent report. The latest monthly job report by Challenger Gray & Christmas, released July 3, showed that biopharmas announced plans to eliminate 4,215 jobs between January and June of this year, down more than one-third (37%) from the 6,709 jobs announced as being jettisoned in the first half of 2013.
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Founder salaries
Q.: Is it okay to pay yourself (and other founders) a salary when you’ve only raised money from friends and family? If so, how much is reasonable? What’s an acceptable salary to pay yourself once a non-family seed round is raised?
In biotech’s early days, telling a story to a wide audience used to be part of the path to success. Founders would share a compelling early narrative to potential investors, reporters, and just about anyone else who would listen. Nature papers were the coin of the realm.
Image: http://www.xconomy.com/
What’s Wrong with Millennial Employment, in Three Charts Fortune
Sometimes the U.S. government’s exhaustively and exhaustingly dry reports yield startling results, as Fortune discovered. A Department of Education study of college graduates shows, for example, that the wage gap starts early: Four years out of college, male graduates were already making much more than their female counterparts, even if you control for field of study and other factors. A male engineer, for instance, earned $68,000, on average, while his female peer earned $65,817.
There seems to be an endless fascination with Millennials at work. There are studies, books, articles, blog posts, and white papers — all about what makes them so different from the generations that came before. And as they continue to enter and occupy the workforce, more and more is written about how they behave (or misbehave) at the office.
But are these cries actually true? Is managing them all that different from managing Gen Xers or Baby Boomers? Let’s look at some of the most common claims about Millennials.
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