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.
April is National Stress Awareness Month, but chances are, you're already quite aware of your stress.
Sixty-one percent of adults surveyed by the American Psychological Society say managing stress is important, but only 35% claim to do a good job with managing their levels. Money, work, and the economy are the highest reported stressors in our lives.
Image: http://www.fastcompany.com/
During last fall’s America’s Cup, Oracle Team USA staged the greatest comeback in modern sports history. On September 18, Skipper Jimmy Spithill’s crew was behind 8-1 in the best of 17 series. In just over a week, they rattled off eight straight victories to defeat Team New Zealand, 9-8. New Zealand didn’t get slower; Oracle got that much faster.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
BVCF, a Shanghai-based life sciences investor, has closed its third fund with $188 million to back upstart biotechs on both sides of the Pacific focused on the booming Asian market. Dow Jones' VentureWire and other media outlets reported that the backers to this fund include Novartis ($NVS), BlackRock, NEA and International Finance, which is gambling $20 million on the fund at a when time drug development activities in China continue to heat up.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
For founders, taking funding is about more than adding working capital — it acts as a catalyst for things to come. It provides a third-party validation that attracts the interest of media, customers, and potential executives you want to hire.
Before taking funding, however, you have to know if you’re ready to light that fire. More importantly, founders need to have a specific plan for what to do with all that cash because too often, startups go guns blazing after a Series A just because it’s the logical next step. Here are several questions to consider before your big payday.
Image: http://www.freeimages.com/browse.phtml?f=view&id=21879
Come play the spin-out game. Lots of researchers and engineers do it these days: Starting a company based on their own research or inventions.
The prize is great. You can see your ideas become reality, saving lives or saving the planet – and you just might get rich along the way. But it’s harder than it looks. You have to work out who owns the invention, who would want to buy it, how to get it to them, how much money it’s going to cost to get going – and who, besides yourself, is going to be doing all this work. You could go broke. Or you could be wildly successful: Remember, Google was a spin-out from Stanford.
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Venture capitalists drive many successful companies, whether by assisting startups searching for funding or rejuvenating established companies seeking to expand. According to research compiled by Startups.co, about $20 billion in VC money is invested in U.S. companies each year. To find out how this money is spent and which industries receive the most funding, check out the infographic below.
Image: http://www.techstarthub.com
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Venture capital funding for U.S. start-ups hit its highest mark since 2001 during the first three months of the year and 11 companies were valued at $1 billion or more, underscoring the increasingly pricey environment for entrepreneurs, according to a report on Thursday from consultancy CB Insights.
Venture capitalists invested $9.99 billion across 880 deals in the first quarter of 2014. The dollar amount jumped by 44 percent compared with the same quarter in 2013, while the number of deals rose by 5 percent.
Image: A man uses a smartphone in New York City (Mike Segar Reuters, / November 6, 2013)
Boy, how times have changed for the venture capital market over the last decade. Here are a few of the overriding trends (according to data collected by the National Venture Capital Association over the years):
Image: http://www.forbes.com - George Deeb
A group of alumni from UC San Diego has created an early stage venture capital fund that will target startup companies created by university students, faculty and graduates.
The modest, roughly $8 million Triton Technology Fund unveiled late Wednesday expects to provide capital to entrepreneurs looking to commercialize technology developed at the university.
Image: Albert Piscao, dean of UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, said the Triton Technology Fund aims to spawns more start-up companies in San Diego. — Charlie Neuman / UT-File Photo
Don’t be surprised by any major business shifts from BlackBerry — because there will likely be many.
Under new CEO John Chen, the former smartphone giant is now keenly aware of its precarious financial position, and it seems like it will do whatever it takes to survive. Chen’s recent admission to Reuters that he’s willing to have BlackBerry exit the handset business if necessary makes this clear.
Image: The BlackBerry Q10 smartphone at the BB10 launch. Image Credit: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat
Rockville, MD, April 09, 2014 --(PR.com)-- This year has been charted with the unfolding of several White House technology initiatives that involve leveraging the groundbreaking work of the nation’s federal laboratories. In 1986, the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer (FLC) was mandated to pursue these initiatives by facilitating the movement of technologies from labs to the marketplace, strengthening research and development by streamlining technology transfer (T2) procedures, and increasing industry partnerships and collaborations. And, given the theme of this year’s FLC national meeting, “Accelerating Innovation for Economic Impact,” coupled with its nearby capital setting at the North Bethesda Marriott in Rockville, Maryland, this year is no exception.
CHEVY CHASE, Md., April 10, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA), a leading global venture capital firm, today announced the kickoff of a second installment of its design mentorship program, In the Studio. Building on NEA's successful 2013 program, In the Studio will be an intensive, two-week program for up to six design teams, developed and produced in collaboration with New York City-based product studio All Tomorrows, led by Albert Lee, and with Liz Danzico, founding chairperson of the Interaction Design program at New York City's School of Visual Arts. Applications are now being accepted for the program, which will take place June 2nd through 17th, 2014.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Fully equipped with a kitchen, bathroom, and a flexible living space, the SCADPad could be the way to creatively reuse the parking lot--one of a city's most wasteful uses of space.
If you live in a city, your future apartment may be inside a parking garage. Yesterday, a team of designers from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) unveiled prototypes of new studio apartments called SCADpads--tiny units that each fit inside a single parking space.
Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com
1. AIRBNB
For making the most of its hosts. By this summer, Airbnb will usurp the InterContinental Hotels Group and Hilton Worldwide as the world's largest hotel chain--without owning a single hotel. The startup, which allows users to rent out their spare rooms or vacant homes to strangers, surpassed 10 million stays on its platform last year, doubled its listings to 550,000 (in 192 countries), and, according to a source familiar with the company's business, tripled revenue to an estimated $250 million. Befitting its growing might, last fall CEO Brian Chesky poached boutique-hotel pioneer Chip Conley to be its head of global hospitality. Already, Conley has created a baseline nine standards of care for Airbnb hosts to follow as part of a bigger revamp of its mobile tools. Up next, the company is doing a massive rethink on every aspect of the trip experience. "Our goal," Chesky says, "is to teach a million people hospitality."
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Riding on the success of a couple of high-profile exits in the last few months, Jafco Ventures has raised an oversubscribed fifth fund at $260 million, its largest fund yet.
To go along with the new fund, the 10-year-old firm is undergoing some changes. For the first time it has added new limited partners, expanding beyond what until now has been a single LP—the Japanese venture firm Jafco Co. Ltd.—to include more than 20 institutional investors, endowments, foundations and family offices.
Image: From left) Jafco’s Jeb Miller, Tom Mawhinney and Joe Horowitz Jafco Ventures
Radical expansion must be in Aditya Agarwal’s genes. When he started as an engineer at Facebook, the company had fewer than 15 people. Within 6 years, he had risen to Director of Product Engineering, leading 2,000 employees to reach 700 million users. In 2012, when Dropbox acquired his startup Cove, the cloud storage incumbent staffed 30 engineers building for 50 million users. Now Agarwal directs an engineering arsenal of 200+ to protect the data of over 200 million people — and he just worked on yesterday's big launch of Carousel.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Innovation can come from anywhere, and there might be some advantages for Wisconsin being located in what is sometimes derisively called flyover country.
Those are two thoughts shared with me recently by Boston-area entrepreneur Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and author of a top-selling book published last year called Disciplined Entrepreneurship. He will visit the Badger State on April 17 for two separate roundtable discussions about entrepreneurship hosted by Xconomy.
Image: http://www.xconomy.com
Venture capitalists saw the public markets awaken in the first quarter, and they’re betting the trend will continue.
A new report from New York-based venture capital research firm CB Insights counts 35 venture-backed IPOs through the end of March, more than any single quarter since the fall of 2000. Mergers and acquisitions were also strong, with 174 deals tallied in the first quarter.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Maintaining stability in the face of rapid change and growth, and proactively partaking in cooperative global ties in science and technology fields will be key in helping China become an innovation-based economy, according to Denis Simon, vice provost for International Strategic Initiatives at Arizona State University.
One of the world’s leading experts on science, technology and innovation in China, Simon recently hosted an ASU conference that focused on the evolving role of science and technology in China’s international relations.
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Governor Deval Patrick will unveil new legislation this morning that addresses two issues with big potential to shape the future of the state’s innovation economy: employee noncompete agreements, which limit worker mobility and the pace of company creation here, and visas for foreign-born entrepreneurs and the key early employees who can help grow startups into industry heavyweights. The Globe has a front page story this morning on the proposals.
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