innovation DAILY

In these times of tight budgets and rapidly evolving science, we must consider new ways to invest biomedical research dollars to achieve maximum impact—to turn scientific discoveries into better health as swiftly as possible. We do this by thinking strategically about the areas of research that we support, as well as the process by which we fund that research.

Millions of people make a living without ever setting foot in an office. Particularly in technology, companies are moving away from just outsourcing rote tasks to remote workers and toward building entirely distributed teams. One leader is Elance-oDesk, the largest online marketplace for freelance talent. In addition to providing a platform for distributed and part-time work, the company practices what it preaches. Telecommuting in the United States increased by as much as 79% (paywall) between 2005 and 2012.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Oklahoma had a clear vision for its future when the Oklahoma Center for Science and Technology (OCAST) was formed — to create a unique agency focused exclusively on technology-based economic development. Our intention was to diversify Oklahoma’s energy and agriculture-based economy through research, technology transfer, seed capital, and support to advanced manufacturing.

I woke up to an article in Daily Camera today titled Small Business Administration trying to bring SBIC funds to Colorado.

There are so many things wrong in the article I felt compelled to write about it. This isn’t a knock on the writer (Alicia Wallace) – I like Alicia and think she does a good job. Rather, it’s an example of the difference between signal and noise in any kind of reporting around the VC industry.

Essentially, service is the most common ingredient among the largest companies in the United States, whether they are publicly or privately held employers. Thus, people who are in a dilemma of selecting between jobs that they love and a well-paying job can certainly have the best of both worlds.

The largest among a number of American employers is the United States Federal Government. They are housing over four million employees worldwide - from counting the pencils at the General Services Administration and delivering mail at the post offices to uniformed military services and negotiating various foreign heads of state.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

When considering where to startup, you might want to consider Hong Kong.

But if you'd like to stay closer to home, there's good news. The U. S. is still one of the most attractive places to start a new business.

When it comes to things like workforce education, low cost of living, and economic health, the U.S. and four other countries come out on top for the best places to launch a startup, according to research compiled by Washington State University’s College of Business.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

Everyone has to start somewhere. Even the rich and famous often come from humble beginnings. Jennifer Hudson worked at Burger King. Jon Bon Jovi made Christmas decorations. Demi Moore was a debt collector. Before they were famous, they were just trying to make a buck.

Without the credibility of success, one can't help but wonder what the best and brightest minds might have looked like to potential employers. Would you have hired them? You be the judge.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Earlier this month, MoneyTree released its quarterly venture capital report, and the news was overwhelmingly positive. VCs invested almost $13 billion in 1,114 U.S. startups during the second quarter, which is the highest level of VC funding in 13 years.

That included a strong showing by the Midwest, which isn’t known for its VC investing. Michigan had a banner quarter for VC activity, with $121 million invested in 11 deals. During the same time period, Wisconsin saw a relatively respectable (although not spectacular) $27.8 million invested in eight deals.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Everyone said this would be the most embarrassing moment in the band’s eight-year career.

Depeche Mode had decided to play the Pasadena Rose Bowl — capacity 60,000 — for the 101st show of their 1988 tour. To sell out would make it one of the largest music concerts ever played in America — highly unlikely for an English electronic band. Claiming they were popular enough to fill that stadium was an audacious act of bravado that critics were eager to see transform to humiliation as they played to a vast, near-vacant space, mocked by the each of the tens of thousands of empty seats.

Image: http://blog.asmartbear.com 

There’s little debate that an MBA is a great foundation for building a business—but is it a magic bullet for budding entrepreneurs? For us, the answer was an unequivocal “yes!” While many MBA graduates go on to work in relatively narrow fields and only use a fraction of what they learned, entrepreneurs will—at some point—tap into nearly every aspect of the curriculum. In fact, taking an entrepreneurial leap is the ultimate way to put newly acquired business school skills into real-world action.

Image: http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu 

We are launching a market research study that will provide insights into how startup founders navigate the world of accelerators, and we would really appreciate your participation, candid insight and feedback.

If you have ever founded or held a C-level position at a startup company, your opinions in particular are invaluable to us. Please take 10 minutes to complete this online survey.

You may not realize you have an image. And the image that exists for you may not be ideal. The goal of reputation management and personal branding is to intentionally and authentically put together a business image that is coherent, consistent and compelling. What distinguishes your business image from your personal brand or reputation? Your image is more diffused. It encompasses much more about you, although it plays a big role in your personal brand and reputation.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

When it comes to collaborating on something new, secrecy and tension can ruin a beautiful partnership.

In an era of increasingly complex and expensive technological development and shortened innovation cycles, Procter and Gamble’s Connect + Develop open innovation programme, is an excellent example of how external knowledge can advance innovation. Since its launch in 2001 the programme has formed more than 2,000 partnerships and been responsible for dozens of innovative products and new processes to increase the firm’s productivity.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

The business of teaching entrepreneurship is booming in Ontario and expected to surge further, but so far there’s been too little attention paid to results, according to a new study.

For-credit courses, business incubators and extracurricular activities in entrepreneurship are proliferating at the province’s 44 colleges and universities, notably in the past six years, according to the study for the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO), a government advisory agency.

Image: http://www.theglobeandmail.com 

Every day I meet people who dream about starting their own business, but wonder if they have what it takes. Some have been in corporate jobs for years and have great skills but not a great idea for a business. Or they may not be a big risk taker. But they still have the desire to do their own thing.

That's the benefit of franchising. I like to think of franchisees as being calculated entrepreneurs. That's because franchises are owned by business people who want to buy an idea and system that is already tested and proven. Here are some franchise basics.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

As an entrepreneur, your personal integrity is critical for getting and keeping the support of investors and team members, and your company’s integrity is critical for getting and keeping customers and vendors. But in a practical sense, what does that really mean?

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 

"Entrepreneurs often unwittingly limit their future growth potential by creating Me-Too companies that can be put out of business over night by their larger competitors. We show you why Disruptive Innovation and a blank piece of paper can be the Entrepreneurs greatest asset."

At our Venture Capital days our we see pitch after pitch from aspiring Entrepreneurs but with so much Me-Too competition our teams need to quickly establish whether or not they believe a brand is clearly differentiated enough to be able to get a foothold in its chosen market.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ditching handshakes in favor of more informal fist bumps could help cut down on the spread of bacteria and illnesses, according to a study released on Monday.

The study in the American Journal of Infection Control found that fist bumps, where two people briefly press the top of their closed fists together, transferred about 90 percent less bacteria than handshakes.

We all struggle for a moment of insight. Whether you’ve been banging your head against the wall for days or just woke up to a problem this morning, the desire for a creative boost is a powerful one. It’s the same feeling that plagues writers facing a blank page or advertisers developing a brand’s next campaign—and learning how to achieve it can have a profound impact. Here are some tips to avoid your next headache or create something the world has never seen before:

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

If you’re a mid- or late-career marketer, chances are your job today is mostly unrecognizable from what you signed on for. Perhaps no other business function has changed as dramatically over the past decade.

Why? Following a silent coup, the coronation is complete: the customer is king. With an abundance of information and choice, customers now guide their own self-directed decision journey as they traverse connected experiences that blur the lines between physical and virtual and scramble marketers’ signals for targeting.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Over the past year I've been running the Startup Next Pre-accelerator in SF, which is a 5-week program by UP Global and Google for Entrepreneurs that helps early startups prepare for an accelerator (or simply crash) by validating their ideas and building prototypes to test with real customers.

Startup Next is run in many cities around the world and our graduates have not only been accepted into accelerators such as Techstars, 500 Startups, AngelPad, Plug and Play Startup Camp and more, but they've also raised funding from big-name investors.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Entrepreneurs don't need venture capital, Sageworks chairman and co-founder Brian Hamilton tells Adrienne Mitchell.

Call it the time paradox: Empirically, people are working less, but feeling more overworked. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the average work week at 34.5 hours. The number of hours Americans work yearly has fallen from about 1,900 in the 1950s to about 1,700 now.

And yet people are always talking about how overworked they feel. A recent poll by PGi (a maker of meeting and collaboration technology) found that 88% of respondents claimed to work more than 40 hours a week. A recent poll by Seamless (the online food delivery company) found that 48% of respondents claimed to work nights and weekends some or all of the time.

For a seventh-grade science project, 12-year-old Lauren Rojas reached for the stars—literally. Lauren sent a silver rocket bearing Hello Kitty and a pink breast cancer awareness ribbon high up into the Earth's atmosphere. After the mission's successful completion, she analyzed the effects of altitude on air pressure and temperature and will present her findings on Feb. 12 at her school's science fair.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Rick L. Weddle: Considerable change is under way in the research and science park industry. To be sure, some legacy parks continue to enjoy success with their original business model of large, single-user corporate research and development facilities. However, a good many of these older or mature parks are finding it tough to compete with newer, mixed-use and more urban-oriented development models. Moreover, a newer model is rapidly evolving across the world. This new model is less focused on a single piece of real estate and more focused on the overall innovation ecosystem. These new models are being referred to as “areas of innovation.” Such models will typically include one or more research or science parks, a range of business incubation and co-working facilities, a research university, community colleges and technical training facilities and one or more innovation-oriented economic development organizations. These new areas of innovation are less characterized by real estate and geography and more by the range of innovation resources and the people in an area that combine to create a fully integrated organic knowledge and innovation ecosystem.

Image: http://www.siteselection.com - Kilometro Rosso Science Park, Bergamo, Italy

How happy is your city? Study says Richmond is America’s most

contented area – with New York its unhappiest (but they say people

come for the money anyway)

New York is America’s most unhappy region, a new study has found – while Richmond tops the table as American’s most contented place.

The study from the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research relies on a large survey that asks respondents about their satisfaction with life.

Researchers say that despite this, areas such as New York still attract people because of its job prospects.

Image: http://1clicknews.com

In 1957, eight entrepreneurs decided to do something that seemed crazy. They launched a new tech company called Fairchild Semiconductor in a small town south of San Francisco. The entrepreneurs had a difficult start, but Fairchild eventually became the first major computer chip company in the region.

Image: http://techcrunch.com

There’s a famous Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times” which certainly applies now. It seems that every cornerstone we’ve relied on has slipped, creating instability in all aspects of modern life. As humorist Ogden Nash remarked: “Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”

We live in a world where seemingly everyone has a cell phone —and a rifle. Every day we learn of breathtaking scientific discoveries and atrocities straight from the Dark Ages. Thanks to technology images of beheadings travel instantly around the world.

The New York Venture Summit I attended earlier this week, now in its 14th year, was packed with over 200 attendees from life sciences/healthcare, tech and education. Of the nearly 90 companies presenting, about 5% of the presenters were women. Only half of the 5% women were actually CEOs. Many of the women who pitched were in bus dev type roles. There is more Venture and Angel money being invested than ever – in 2013 alone $29B in Venture and $25B in Angel. Why are so few women entrepreneurs pursuing Venture Capital and when they do, why is their success rate so low? In the U.S. women founders own 30% of all businesses but receive only 13% of the Venture Capital “rocket fuel” that flow into companies each year. I spoke with women and men at New York Venture Summit to get a first hand insights about this gap and see if they think the number of VC-funded women-led companies will get into the double digits anytime soon.

Image: http://www.forbes.com/ 

Everyone seems to like the aspect of being an entrepreneur that goes with “being your own boss” and “able to do things my way.” But sometimes they forget that this kind of freedom comes with a price of personal accountability. Accountability means “the buck stops here,” and “all the failures are mine.”

Too many people seem to do whatever it takes to avoid accountability, both before and after the fact. I suspect that this is largely caused by a fear of the unknown, and a lack of confidence in their own abilities. People with confidence problems and fear problems should avoid the entrepreneur role, since success without accountability is rare.

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Founders Fund already stands out for backing startups with radical ideas, including Counsyl, Hampton Creek, Planet Labs, and SpaceX. Now the venture firm is making a formal commitment to funding startups in aeronautics, life sciences, nanotechnology, and other geeky realms.

Founders Fund has dedicated a small percentage of its new $1 billion fund to a new initiative called FF Science, through which the firm will make seed-stage deals.

Image:: Founders Fund co-founder Peter Thiel. Image Credit: Heisenberg Media/Flickr

It wasn’t so many years ago that starting a new e-commerce business on the Internet was a complex custom development project, usually costing a million dollars or more. Now you can do it for free, or a few hundred dollars, with one of the many web building tools available, like Shopify or Weebly Store. A programmer can build a new smartphone app for a few thousand dollars.

Winning the first time, every time and all the time is unrealistic and harmful to your continued success. Entrepreneurial delusion is a real thing. If it isn’t an official thing, it really should be. We (the entrepreneurs) believe that we will succeed no matter. We’re different, we’re unique, we’re in the top percentile of companies that actually make it beyond the first 18 months. We convince ourselves so intensely that this is the case that failure becomes the enemy. But it isn’t.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

“If you’re in business today, you’re running for office every day.” So says Alan Webber, co-founder of Fast Company magazine and a progressive Democrat who recently conceded his bid for governor of New Mexico.

Webber promoted an education-focused, pro-jobs campaign platform that leveraged his background in social business. The only candidate in the race not formerly involved in the state’s government, his supporters valued his outsider perspective and resistance to local political cynicism.

Image: http://itssaulconnected.com

Over the last two years, much has been written about patent trolls, firms that make their money asserting patents against other companies, but do not make a useful product of their own. Both the White House and Congressional leaders have called for patent reform to fix the underlying problems that give rise to patent troll lawsuits. Not so fast, say Stephen Haber and Ross Levine in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed (“The Myth of the Wicked Patent Troll”). We shouldn’t reform the patent system, they say, because there is no evidence that trolls are hindering innovation; these calls are being driven just by a few large companies who don’t want to pay inventors.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

I’ve been running a startup accelerator program since 2012. The program has had six cohorts come through the three-month program at the University of Sydney and across our partner universities. To date, I’ve seen more than 200 startup applications of varying quality and sat through countless interviews.   While each accelerator program is different (for example, we don’t take equity in their businesses) the same issues arise for program managers in other seed accelerators in Australia, Europe and in the USA.

It helps to have a friend. And for several pharma giants scrambling to cut R&D costs, those friends are venture capital firms that co-invest in startups whose new drugs and platform technologies appear attractive. In some cases, these pharma-venture “alliances” launch the startups, using the expertise of VC firm partners and company executives.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

There's a lot being said out there about the state of women in this country. The gender gap is alive and well when it comes to salary, confidence, happiness, and the number of women in the C-suite and science. Women aren't as happy as they were in the 1970s, research has shown, and their happiness relative to that of men has taken a nosedive.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

With just having received a job offer as of April 15, the paid internship is more important than ever before. According to a recent study conducted by InternMatch, students with paid internships are three times more likely to have job offers than students with unpaid internships.