innovation DAILY

BioHeaIth Innovation aims to transform Central Maryland into a commercialization hub by building an entrepreneurial ecosystem using the research, funding, networks and business development resources available in the region.

The market for Health Information Technology concepts and new products are moving at a rapid pace. Since the signing of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) by President Obama in 2009 that allocated $36 billion to aid investments in healthcare IT and spurring new initiatives like the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) the environment and funding available to test new products significantly escalated.

Fast forward four years—there remains to be enormous untapped market opportunity with many new products being brought to fruition and highly innovative new concepts under development by the private and public sectors.

Maryland, a significant center of the health care industry nationally and home to the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Johns Hopkins University, the University System of Maryland, and a robust private sector has emerging opportunities within the Health IT industry sector from telemedicine and remote monitoring to electronic medical records and mobile health.

I was a 21 year-old entrepreneur when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.  Given the unprecedented volume of dying startups, investors and other business partners became less and less inclined to partner with new companies — especially those led by young founders.

But I felt compelled to win over potential investors, customers, and team members. If I didn’t succeed, neither would my venture.

Here are some of the tactics I used to help establish my credibility as a young founder, and grow my business in spite of my age:

A handsomely designed 23-page report came by snail mail the other day: The Minneapolis Creative Vitality Index Report 2013. (a slightly revised pdf here) It's all about the economic contributions creative industries, from art-making to theater to interior design to sound engineering in recording studios, make to Minneapolis. And it's full of statistics and infographics that go into detail: which creative occupations are in growth mode, which art sectors produce the most retail sales, even which Minneapolis zip codes contain the highest concentrations of creative-sector jobs.  

Produced by the City of Minneapolis, the report was written by Gülgün Kayim, the city's recently appointed  Director of Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy, and Anna Muessig. Economic Development Consultant.

The mood was bullish Tuesday at the Michigan Growth Capital Symposium Tuesday at the Marriott at EagleCrest in Ypsilanti, and not without good reason.

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike say they are excited that, although investments and fund growth are down nationally, Michigan has continued to make strides both in the amount of deals made and capital available.

The fact is that the system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.

– W. Edwards Deming

Gardeners tend to be an interesting mix of idealism and pragmatism.

They set about to grow things – vegetables, spring flowers, long-lived trees. They believe with all their hearts that what they do in their garden will result in what they can later see in the garden.  This is their idealism at work.

“Sometimes, I think it’s a sin when I feel like I’m winning when I’m losing again.”

That memorable morning-after line was written by Canada’s great singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot, in a 1974 hit, Sundown.  It came to mind last week when I was conducting Top7 site visits in Canada and reading an article by Joel Kotkin in The Daily Beast.  The title was a real grabber: “Richard Florida Concedes the Limits of the Creative Class.”

According to Kotkin, Dr. Florida recently admitted in the pages of The Atlantic, “what his critics, including myself, have said for a decade: that the benefits of appealing to the creative class accrue largely to its members – and do little to make anyone else any better off.”  

More than half of all eligible providers nationwide have received federal incentive payments for demonstrating meaningful use of electronic health records, rates that have more than doubled since last year alone, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Wednesday.

Sebelius says HHS has met and exceeded its goal for 50 percent of doctor offices and 80 percent of eligible hospitals to have adopted EHRs by 2013's end.

We don't often think about the way we usually operate at work, whether we're performing an informal five-step process for evaluating a new proposal, or setting priorities for managing our time. But our ability to improve the ways we do things depends on defining and shaping our daily habits of mind and practice — our "standard work."

Consider the experience of my friend Lynn Kelley, who joined Union Pacific Railroad, the largest railroad network in the United States with 46,000 employees, as vice president of continuous improvement about two years ago. When she arrived, she learned that a large proportion of the workforce would retire over the next decade. So the organization started documenting standard operating procedures to capture employee know-how and wisdom. She told me, "I initially thought standard work would make people into robots. Instead we learned to use standard work to involve workers in documenting and improving their work. Managers think that they should find out what the best practice is and then roll it out. But we decided if we did that, we'd pay for it in worker engagement. Instead, we look for work groups that are willing to be involved in developing their own standard work, and implement there first."

There are lots of myths about venture capital and biotech in particular, as noted previously on this blog.  Many of these myths are deeply held beliefs about returns, what works and what doesn’t, and the state of the industry.  Told often enough, these beliefs are presumed to be true by many observers, including practitioners in the field, Limited Partners, and pundits.

Surprisingly, data exists to address lots of these points, and I’ve attempted here to summarize (and link to) a number of prior posts aimed at debunking these myths and sharing a few observations on them.

After a slow start last year, M&A activity in 2012 picked up during the second half of 2012, bringing the total value of activity to a level just 1 percent below 2011. The continuing economic uncertainty in Europe reduced European deal volume further, although activity there showed a remarkable rebound in the fourth quarter. Deal volume in Asia declined as well. In the Americas, however, deal volume notched up, leading the global M&A market with 48 percent of volume.

Deal premiums remained high. Although global stock-market valuations recovered materially during the year, with the S&P 500 index increasing by more than 10 percent, the average premium paid by acquirers hovered around historic levels—comparable even to the average paid during the M&A boom driven by the high-tech industry at the turn of the century (Exhibit 1).

The Public Health Service Act indicates that the purpose of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is to advance translational sciences by coordinating and developing resources that leverage basic research in support of translational science; and by developing partnerships and working cooperatively to foster synergy in ways that do not create duplication, redundancy and competition with industry activities.

The Affordable Care Act, aka health care reform, aka Obamacare, is spurring a massive creation of new business opportunities.

So says Bryan Sivak, the chief technical officer and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet-level agency that regulates the $2.8 trillion U.S. health care market. Sivak joined VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today via a video conference (see photo above).

Just one of the areas that’s becoming fertile ground for entrepreneurial innovation: the health insurance exchanges mandated by the law.

Important post by Joe Bartlett on VC Experts last week: Joe's take on the future of both angel investing and venture capital fund formation.

It will be, Joe says, aggregation of capital by funds formed online, which permit investors to cherry pick what deals they want to participate in (indirectly, through an investment-specific fund).

The no-action letters secured recently by FundersClub and AngelList validate (most) of the necessary legal framework, but Joe sees the successful funds of the future as perhaps being more niche specific - "each Super Platform will aggregate investment opportunities by specific categories … e.g., medical devices; robotics; solar power; wind power; bio-pharma; clean tech; spin outs from a specific academic center's lab ...."

You probably heard that a happy employee is a productive one who can boost the bottom line. How much? Here are some numbers:

• 33% higher profitability (Gallup) 
• 43% more productivity (Hay Group) 
• 37% higher sales (Shawn Achor) 
• 300% more innovation (HBR) 
• 51% lower turnover (Gallup) 
• 50% less safety incidents (Babcock Marine Clyde) 
• 66% decrease in sick leave (Forbes) 
• 125% less burnout (HBR)

Stop for a minute and savor cocoa's accomplishments: battler of stroke, diabetes, and heart disease; booster of blood flow; and now, research suggests, calmer of the mind.

While there are many excellent qualities to chocolate, research at an Austrailian university shows that the polyphenols in chocolate can make people feel more calm and contended.

So what else can the lovely stuff do?

In an impressively short time, Kickstarter has quickly become the go-to high-impact mashup of crowdsourcing sensibility and entrepreneurial endeavor. If you've got a genuinely creative idea — or even a "me, too with a twist" — Kickstarter's "crowd funding" platform offers a genuinely innovative way to finance creativity and innovation. Since its 2009 launch, Kickstarter claims that more than 4.1 million people have pledged over $619 million to fund over 41,000 projects. It's exciting.

But Kickstarter's inspiration and effectiveness at facilitating "just-in-time creative communities" — or what has also been described as "impulse patronage" — poses a provocative challenge to the C-suites of global organizations worldwide: Where are their Kickstarters? Why aren't leaders tapping the crowdfunding capabilities of their own innovation ecosystems to stimulate their people and ideas?

On the heels of the $610,000 coffee date with Apple CEO Tim Cook, online charity auction platform CharityBuzz is offering lunches with some of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists. If you'd love to share your best ideas with or pick the brains of VCs — and have the cash to give to charity — this might be the perfect opportunity for you.

From now until June 11, you can bid on power lunches to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of the Greater Bay Area. More than 20 venture capitalists, including Tim Draper, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Shervin Pishevar, advisor for Menlo Ventures; and David Lee, co-founder and managing director of SV Angel, are offering lunches.

An Open Letter to Daphne Koller Co-Founder and Co-President of Coursera and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University

Dear Professor Koller,

Because I share your vision of creating a world in which all have access to an excellent and empowering education, I would like to propose a new online course for you to make freely available through the Coursera platform. Its title is “The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education.”

The innovators who shake up industries the most do so by reimagining how things should look from the ground up. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs imagined a world where everyone owned a computer, not just the corporations that could afford an IBM mainframe. Twitter cofounder Evan Williams imagined a world where everyone could publish content on the Internet, not just the media companies who could afford expensive Web publishing programs.

Incremental innovations occur everywhere, but breakthrough innovations—the kind that leverage new technologies and business models to drive down costs, increase accessibility, and improve services—have tended to remain the province of the private sector. Returnseeking investors and entrepreneurs reap the financial rewards of changing the world by tearing down the structures of old industries.

From tar­geted drug delivery mech­a­nisms to super­sen­si­tive imaging tech­niques, nan­otech­nology holds many promises for med­i­cine. But advances taking place in the research lab will help few patients without suc­cessful trans­la­tion into clin­ical and com­mer­cial envi­ron­ments, said Srinivas Sridhar, Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Physics and director the Nanomed­i­cine IGERT Center, an Inte­gra­tive Grad­uate Edu­ca­tion and Research Trainee­ship jointly funded by the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion and the National Cancer Institute.

Since its incep­tion in 2005, the center has sought to estab­lish edu­ca­tional and research lead­er­ship in the fields of nanomed­i­cine and nanobi­ology, according to Sridhar, but only recently has it begun to expand into the final fron­tier: trans­la­tion. National funding agen­cies have sounded the call for keeping the research eye on com­mer­cial­iza­tion, he said, but being suc­cessful, he explained, “requires an inno­va­tion ecosystem. It’s not just sci­en­tists and engi­neers; you’ve got to have many others, like reg­u­la­tors, CEOs, entre­pre­neurs, gov­ern­ment offi­cials, and ven­ture capitalists.”

The business world has been watching this emerging generation with trepidation, and a lot of people haven’t been sure who would be the winners, and who would be the losers. Can Gen-Y, much less the new Generation Z (1995-2010), survive as entrepreneurs, and do they have the passion and commitment it takes to run a startup and attract investors?

My own perspective is that the recession was good for Gen-Y (Millennials), because it forced them to face reality, often for the first time in their life. In the last few years, even college grads with advanced degrees don’t have job opportunities waiting for them. But I’m happy to report that I see more and more of them impressively stepping up to the entrepreneurial plate.

Innovation is key to kick-starting growth and helping economic recovery, delegates were told at the Open Innovation 2.0 Conference in Dublin Castle yesterday.

The two-day programme brings together academics, business figures and politicians, recognises leading innovators and features a free technology showcase at the Mansion House.

A VC whose name escapes me once said, "There are entrepreneurs and there are Entrepreneurs!"

I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that, but I'll tell you what I think. I think the term "entrepreneur" has become more than a little overused, watered down, diluted.

That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. This is supposed to be the era of the entrepreneur. Practically everyone has a business, a brand, a blog. Everybody's a CEO of one. And yet, relatively few actually embody the true meaning of the word "entrepreneur." So what does it mean?

Think entrepreneurs are only in it for the money? Think again.  New research has found that entrepreneurs have a number of reasons besides making money for starting their own business.

Entrepreneurs say the freedom to pursue new opportunities is the biggest reason for starting their own business. Additionally, entrepreneurs also say they start their own businesses to follow a personal passion while others say they do so to be their own boss. Making money was a lower priority than all those reasons among entrepreneurs in their decision to start a business.

Harvard University announced on Tuesday that Hansjörg Wyss had doubled down on a contribution to his namesake Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at the university with a $125-million gift.

The institute was founded in 2009 with a previous $125-million gift from the Swiss-born medical-equipment mogul, who earned an M.B.A. from the university in 1965. The initial gift was reportedly the largest individual donation that Harvard had yet received. In 2004, Mr. Wyss gave $25-million to Harvard’s business school for its graduate program.

Today, I am launching a new book.  I want to explain why I’m doing this.  And how you can participate.

For decades, people have asked a deceptively simple question: can you replicate the magic of Silicon Valley?  Can you do this in businesses, organizations, and communities to unleash innovation, anywhere in the world?

This is more than an academic mystery.  The answer affects real lives.  Every day, countless opportunities are passed by to invent better solutions, create new jobs, improve quality of life.  There is an invisible cost that we pay for medicines that never make it to market, communication tools that might have saved a struggling business, or alternative fuels that might have prevented a war.  This mystery has a price tag.

Optimistic and confident in their abilities, a diverse and growing percentage of U.S. citizens engage in entrepreneurship, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)

(Babson Park, MA) May 22, 2013…Entrepreneurship in the United States climbed to its highest level in more than a decade according to the 2012 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) U.S. Report issued today by Babson College and Baruch College. In 2012, the average Total Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity rate (TEA) increased to nearly 13 percent, an all-time high since GEM first began tracking entrepreneurship rates in 1999.

“Despite a sluggish economy, 2012 was marked by U.S. entrepreneurs reporting greater optimism and confidence in their abilities to start new businesses,” commented the GEM Report’s lead author, Donna J. Kelley, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Babson College. “In fact, nearly 13 percent of the U.S. adult population was engaged in entrepreneurship with the vast majority starting businesses to pursue an opportunity rather than out of necessity. On the downside, Americans closing businesses were twice as likely as those in other innovation-driven economies to cite difficulties financing their ventures.”

“We found that entrepreneurs in the U.S. exhibited a type of closeness,” commented Abdul Ali, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at Babson and one of the Report authors. “More than two-thirds start at home, over 80 percent fund their efforts from personal, family, and friend sources and many employ family, nonpaid workers, and part-timers. Further, little more than one-tenth make a significant portion of their sales from foreign customers. While this may demonstrate an ease of getting started in the United States, entrepreneurs with expansive ambitions are required in order to make a contribution to job growth and global competitiveness.”

New research led by Michigan State University’s Zach Hambrick finds that a copious amount of practice is not enough to explain why people differ in level of skill in two widely studied activities, chess and music.

In other words, it takes more than hard work to become an expert. Hambrick, writing in the research journal Intelligence, said natural talent and other factors likely play a role in mastering a complicated activity.

“Practice is indeed important to reach an elite level of performance, but this paper makes an overwhelming case that it isn’t enough,” said Hambrick, associate professor of psychology.

So you’re busy running a company or you haven’t read enough Under30CEO to figure out how to break away from your 9 to 5 job….

You wish you had time to for excitement and adventure but bills and responsibility always seem to bring you back to reality.  Your brain is caught in a rut, and on your way to work everyday you think the same thoughts… You want to travel, but your excuses are too big to overcome…

A third of London’s Tech City business leaders say their company is hindered by a lack of capital, whether sourced from institutional or private investors. The finding is revealed in the most extensive survey of TechCity senior executives to date, carried out by GfK in conjunction with business advisers Grant Thornton UK LLP.

The Tech Futures Report found that nearly one third (29%) of respondents believe their company is missing significant business opportunities because they cannot secure funding in time. Worryingly, 19% said they had to make people redundant because they couldn’t secure the necessary funding.

Forget about your job title or profession – everyone is looking for ways to be more productive at work. It’s time to set down your gallon-sized container of coffee, toss out your three-page to-do list, and put an end to those ridiculously long emails you’ve been sending.

Experiencing a highly productive workday can feel euphoric. But contrary to popular belief, simply checking tasks off your to-do list isn’t really an indication of productivity. Truly productive people aren’t focused on doing more things; this is actually the opposite of productivity. If you really want to be productive, you’ve got to make a point to do fewer things.

If you suspect that your 20-something employee is sneering at you from behind the stack of copies you asked him to collate, research suggests you might be right. Three-quarters of professionals under age 30 think their skills exceed those of an entry-level job, a survey released today by LinkedIn shows.

But workers over 30 were wary of this attitude, saying they doubted the younger generation’s work ethic. Perhaps more shockingly, 64 percent of all adults — young adults included — are nervous about millennials leading the workforce.

The season for commencement speeches — the annual ritual designed to bridge this ever-widening gap — is underway. Typically an admired leader, often with decades of work experience under her belt, imparts wisdom to a crowd of hopeful youth in polyester robes on the day of their college graduation.

Associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of Nine Things Successful People Do Differently.

There will be obstacles, setbacks, challenges. Many things will be more difficult than you thought they'd be. The key to success (scientifically speaking) is perseverance. You've just got to hang in there — there's no other way to win. But how do you do it? A great way to be more resilient is to stop comparing yourself to other people, and compare yourself to your own past performance — last week, last month, last year. Are you improving? That's the only question that matters.

David Cohen’s had a hypothesis. He raised some money and did an experiment. He tweaked the experiment and proved the concept could be a company. He raised more money. And then it grew.

The difference between Cohen and any other tech entrepreneur is that his company was built for them. TechStars would, in seven years time, impact thousands of entrepreneurs and investors around the world. It would spark innovation in cities struggling to overcome mass layoffs, plant closures and other economic struggles post-recession. It would celebrate entrepreneurship as a viable career, all while training more people how to do it with the greatest probability of success. It’d give venture capitalists a new way to invest their money and vet deals.

$1.1 billion. That's how much your company is worth if it's long on users and short on paying customers. Just ask Tumblr. Or Instagram. Each yanked down billion-dollar acquisitions despite making virtually no revenue. 

Is this a big deal?

Acquihires And Billion-Dollar Payouts

Some seem to think so. At least, for acquihires, the kissing cousin to the revenue-free-massive acquisition. For example, Pando Daily's Sarah Lacy slams the acquihire, arguing that

Lazy profit-seekers love these periods in the Valley. Why not? They can make money without having to actually build a company. It’s like a get-out-of-actual-entrepreneurship-free card.

As creatives, we might imagine investors to be souless suits behind Excel spreadsheets who do little more than sign checks — but that's far from true. Increasingly, VCs are people who used to be entrepreneurs (Kevin Rose, Mark Suster, Josh Kopelman). Many startup founders actually prefer to take money from someone who has been in the trenches. You might spend most of your time competing for funding — trying to stand out from the multitude of startups hoping to raise a round — but don't forget that for VCs, they must compete for the best startups as well. One way they do that is through value-add, or offering additional services to their portfolio companies. Atlas Ventures VC Dustin Dolginow says these services are no longer "above and beyond" — they're crucial.

Entrepreneurship is like a computer game in which you have to master every level before achieving success. Startups repeatedly stumble and have to go back to the drawing board. The best way to skip some levels and to increase the odds of survival is to learn from others who have already played the game. That is the value that mentors provide and the reason why you need to start building relationships with people who can help you when you are stuck.

You will never find a mentor who can guide you through every level of your game. That’s because technology is changing ever more rapidly and continually altering the landscape. No one has built your exact company before. The good news is, however, that the basics of building a business haven’t changed. You start with a great idea and test it with customers to figure out what they want and need. Then you build your product, and market, sell, and support it. The skills required for each of these steps is different. An understanding of the challenges that lie ahead can dramatically change your product, distribution plans, and growth strategy.

It’s a rich moment for women in big-ticket philanthropy.

Sara Blakely, founder of the privately held Spanx, just became the first self-made female billionaire to sign onto The Giving Pledge, an effort spearheaded by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett that has had dozens of the world’s billionaires sign on to give away more than half of their wealth, either during their lifetime or after their death.

Another member of the still tiny circle of female billionaires, Steve Jobs’ widow, is stepping out publicly for the first time as a philanthropist. Steve Jobs was criticized for not giving much money away, at least publicly, during his lifetime. But Laurene Powell Jobs is now speaking to issues as diverse as education and gun control.

Successful startups are all about turning ideas into action quickly and efficiently. These actions must be the hard part, since entrepreneurs always seem to come to me with ideas, and ask me for help on the actions. That has always seemed strange to me, since the magic is supposed to be in the ideas, and the actions are the same for every business.

In fact, the actions required to start and run a business are well documented, the subject of many books, and taught in college courses across the land. As confirmed to me by John Spence in his book on this subject, Awesomely Simple, turning business ideas into action consists of six essential strategies:

In October 2007, professor Randy Pausch, a devoted husband and father who was fighting pancreatic cancer, shared his famous last lecture on The Oprah Show.