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.
Talk about living life on the edge.
Scott Young is going above and beyond, and upside down, to prove his daredevil ways. The English 25-year-old is gaining viral fame for doing handstands on the edge of tall buildings' rooftops.
No safety nets, no ropes, no spotters — just a guy with fantastic upper-body strength and a camera in his shoe. The footage provides a dizzying shot of what lies below.
Image: http://mashable.com
Technology has altered human physiology. It makes us think differently, feel differently, even dream differently. It affects our memory, attention spans and sleep cycles. This is attributed to a scientific phenomenon known as neuroplasticity, or the brain's ability to alter its behavior based on new experiences. In this case, that's the wealth of information offered by the Internet and interactive technologies.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Companies are looking for your ideas. Smart businessmen understand and respect that great ideas can come from anywhere -- and anyone. Open innovation makes sense!
By seeking out and being willing to accept product ideas submitted from outside their own walls, companies up their chances of finding the next great idea. At the same time, they lower their research and development costs. Entrepreneurs can capitalize on open innovation by learning how to license their ideas, cheap. If that sounds too difficult, you’re psyching yourself out.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Kiowa Kavovit will become the youngest inventor ever to pitch her bright idea to the "sharks."
Image: http://abcnews.go.com
I am getting sick to death of college dropouts becoming billionaires.
It’s not that I really begrudge Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his brethren their riches, but the rare overnight success stories of Instagram, WhatsApp, and others are creating the impression that there’s only one path to entrepreneurship.
Based on how they are portrayed in movies and other forms of popular culture, the “origin” story of todays’ innovators has become almost rote: be “rebellious” by ditching school, starting a company in your garage and proving to the world your long-shot idea will change it for the better.
Image: http://www.techvibes.com
The venture capital market worldwide has just gotten more competitive as investors try to outdo each other in backing high-potential startups, particularly those outside the US, VentureBeat reported.
Figures from financial services company Ernst & Young showed that last year, venture capital investment worldwide went up 2% to $48.5 billion when seen side by side to the previous year's figures. There was also an improvement in the economic conditions in many markets around the world as liquidity levels and investor confidence increased, the report said.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and one of its biggest philanthropist. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Gates was critical of what he sees as a double standard when it comes to development. + Giving people access to something as basic as a working toilet can materially change their lives. Doing that kind of work on a large scale is very possible, but people still criticize development efforts for not doing enough. That needs to change, Gates says:
Image: http://qz.com
Australian venture capital firms missed opportunities to invest in fast growing software, gaming and ecommerce businesses that have since attracted later-stage investment from US firms, says Sydney-based venture capitalist Rick Baker, a managing director at Blackbird Ventures.
“We’re trying to bring US VC firms earlier than before to the seed capital stage or just after that,” Mr Baker told Data Room in an interview. “These US firms offer advice on how to grow the company and team very quickly as well as processes to manage such growth.”
2014 will continue to be a year of transformation as the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the changes it represents ripple through the healthcare industry. From conversations with healthcare providers across the country, Vree Health has identified four key issues providers face in the coming year–and beyond.
Image: http://medcitynews.com
If you wanted to take the home office deduction on your taxes in years past, you’d need a measuring tape, calculator, and then a year’s worth of bills for all your home expenses. With the 2013 tax return, the IRS has introduced a new “no-doc” simplified version of the home office deduction.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
There’s a generation gap living inside your workplace and it may be wreaking havoc on your productivity. The fundamental differences in how various age groups approach work are becoming more pronounced, creating workplace rifts, according to research led by David Maxfield and Joseph Grenny, co-authors of the book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High (McGraw-Hill, 2011).
Image Courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The U.S. Department of Commerce is apparently seeking alternative bids for control of the domain name system registry that acts as the address book for the entire web. Inside the Department of Commerce is the National Telecommunication Industry Association (NTIA), which happens to have purview over some spectrum assets, a few agencies spending federal money on broadband and the contract for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
Image: Flickr/dantc
Welcome back to Smart Bear Live … the show were Jason speaks with entrepreneurs looking to improve their businesses. In this episode, Jason talks to Edwin from MeetingKing.
Listen to this episode if you want to hear about a founder who has a product and users and paying customers … and is trying to figure out how to take his company to the next level and grow faster.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Of the nearly 4,000 delegates from 153 nations signed up for the Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC) next week in Moscow, a large number are traveling from Latin America. The region’s startup ecosystems are now firmly part of the global entrepreneurship grid and with such strong delegations expected from cities like Medellín, Santiago and Buenos Aires, it is clear they don’t want there to be any doubt around the world about it.
Image: http://entrepreneurship.org
A short-term study found that oral glucosamine supplementation is not associated with a lessening of knee cartilage deterioration among individuals with chronic knee pain.
Findings published in Arthritis & Rheumatology, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) journal, indicate that glucosamine does not decrease pain or improve knee bone marrow lesions—more commonly known as bone bruises and thought to be a source of pain in those with osteoarthritis (OA).
I recently came across four articles, none of which make explicit reference to each other but each of which seems to have been written with at least some ambiguous notion of what at least one of the others is focusing on. I am going to treat the four articles in an order that allows me to bring some coherence to the discussion, but I want to emphasize that I am imposing that coherence on the discussion. The fact that it didn’t exist otherwise is really the main point of this post. It seems illustrative of the way in which many of the discussions of the more central issues in higher education frequently dissolve into passionate assertions of opinion that are worse than useless—that are more damaging than silence—because they are not actually about the same things, because no one is stipulating a starting point, what is actually at issue.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
It’s been almost 30 years since the computer scientist Jaron Lanier formed VPL Research, the first company to sell the high-tech goggles and gloves that once defined humanity’s concept of where technology might soon take our species. In the late 1980s, a person could pull on a $100,000 head-mounted display and electronic gauntlet and fool their brain into thinking he’d stepped inside the simulated space rendered on the screen.
Image: Future gazing: VPL Research demonstrated its EyePhone virtual reality system at the Texpo Telecommunications Show, in San Francisco, in 1989.
In the three years since the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Japan has tried to replace nuclear energy with fossil fuels. But the costs have proved prohibitive, and now the government is convinced it must turn its reactors back on.
Image: Three years later: An aerial photo taken on March 11, 2014, shows what remains of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station on the third anniversary of an earthquake and tsunami that led to a major crisis at the plant.
Fleur Pellerin, la ministre en charge de l'Innovation, a présenté le 14 février le nouveau cadre juridique du financement participatif, dont la France veut être l'un des "pionniers."
Donner au financement participatif les moyens de se développer, tout en protégeant les particuliers-investisseurs ou prêteurs. C'est là tout l'enjeu de la réglementation du "crowdfunding", présentée le 14 février par Fleur Pellerin, la ministre en charge des PME, de l'Innovation et de l'Economie numérique, et destinée à faire de "la France un pionnier du financement participatif".
Image: Le financement participatif a permis de collecter plus de 3 milliards de dollars dans le monde, en 2013, selon Fleur Pellerin.
You can't celebrate your success without admiring your failure. Similarly, we as a civilization cannot recognize our monumental achievements in technology without remembering our more questionable ideas.
Below we've collected some of the wackier designs to cross the U.S. Patent Office in the 19th century. Ranging from an animatronic creeping baby to a diving dress that transforms you into a deep-sea bullet, these patents will make you wonder what their creators were thinking.
Image: FLICKR, THE U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES
