Conventional wisdom too often yields conventional results. These entrepreneurs succeed where others don't because they hold some unusual beliefs that create massive results for their businesses.

Learn from their ideas below to make your own venture a success.

Estimated reading time: 2 minute(s)

St. Louis County will have a new AgTech innovation district to build on the area’s leadership position in this field and to attract startups and AgTech companies from around the world.

The new district will be called 39 North (@39NorthSTL) and was officially announced on Wednesday morning at the Danforth Plant Science Center in Creve Coeur.  The 39th parallel north is the physical location of the district. It also reflects the coordinates of the prime agricultural belt across the world.

A defining moment in modern biology occurred on July 24, 1978, when biotechnology pioneer Robert Swanson, who had recently co-founded Genentech, brought two young scientists to dinner with Thomas Perkins, the legendary venture capitalist. As they stood outside Perkins’s magnificent mansion in Marin County, with its swimming pool and garden and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, Swanson turned to his two young colleagues and said, “This is what we’re all working for.”

WASHINGTON- For many Americans the post-recession economy doesn't present the opportunity they wished came with growth. Rising stock prices and low unemployment have masked a low-growth status quo that threatens future U.S. prosperity. Drawing on proprietary Gallup data, the U.S. Council on Competitiveness and Gallup released "No Recovery," which examines the problems that persist with declining productivity growth.

The Trump administration will have an opportunity to reevaluate policies that affect innovation and technological development. How can federal policies promote broadband buildout, spur investment in intelligent infrastructure, encourage research and development, and advance a host of other actions that have the potential to improve productivity and the U.S. economy? Join ITIF and the Technology Policy Institute to discuss how the Trump administration can accelerate the pace of innovation in the U.S. economy.

When: Thursday, December 15, 2016, 8:30 a.m.–11:00 a.m.

The 2017 NASA SBIR/STTR Program Solicitation was released via the NASA SBIR/STTR public website and cross listed on www.sbir.gov . NASA is seeking proposals from small businesses and partnering research institutions for research, development, and demonstration of innovative technologies that will address NASA interests and have significant potential for successful transition of technology into NASA mission programs and other markets.

Big data’s potential just keeps growing. Taking full advantage means companies must incorporate analytics into their strategic vision and use it to make better, faster decisions.

Is big data all hype? To the contrary: earlier research may have given only a partial view of the ultimate impact. A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), The age of analytics: Competing in a data-driven world, suggests that the range of applications and opportunities has grown and will continue to expand. Given rapid technological advances, the question for companies now is how to integrate new capabilities into their operations and strategies—and position themselves in a world where analytics can upend entire industries.

The U.S. ranks second on a global manufacturing competitiveness index, according to the 2016 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index by research firm Deloitte Global and the Council on Competitiveness. The U.S. ranking has improved in each of the past studies and is poised to take over that top spot from China by 2020, the study maintains.  However, executives from across the world in responding to the study, noted that talent is the leading factor in determining manufacturing competitiveness, and finding and cultivating that talent is a topic that has received increasing attention from the manufacturing sector.

On Valentine's Day 2014 Elizabeth Droge-Young admitted herself to a hospital in Syracuse, N.Y. For more than a year, she had been struggling with depression—not eating well and losing interest in the movies, books and music that usually delighted her. She had withdrawn from her friends and was routinely missing classes at Syracuse University, where she was a fifth-year graduate student in evolutionary biology. Some days that winter she could not even make it out of bed, despite the fact that she had started taking antidepressants the previous fall. In her darkest moments, obsessive and frightening thoughts of self-harm and suicide flooded her mind. “It was horrible,” she recalls. “I felt very unsafe.” She realized she needed a serious intervention.

To be effective when pitching your start-up “you have 20 seconds to be compelling or you might as well go home”. That was the core piece of advice that Bill Reichert from Garage Technology Ventures, a Silicon Valley based VC Fund, highlighted in his presentation at the 2016 StartCon Event that ran this past weekend in Sydney.

Stress can be detrimental to your health, contributing to everything from higher blood pressure to nausea. Now, a new study zeroes in one of the the biggest sources of stress—our jobs—and suggests that exercise may be an effective way to ease the health problems sometimes caused by work stress.

It’s hard to get excited about a biotech shared-space in 2016.

Four years ago, it was an exciting and rapidly diversifying field. Now incubators are par for the course, with most Big Pharma and many institutions operating their own version.

Mass Innovation Labs was late to the game, opening in May 2015. But it is clearly doing something different.

According to CEO Amrit Chaudhuri, graduates of Mass Innovation Lab’s program have collectively licensed and raised over $4 billion. The overall valuation of those companies now exceeds $40 billion.

The skillset necessary for entrepreneurial success is changing rapidly.

There’s an irony to being a start-up founder these days. As the next generation of entrepreneurs emerges with disruptive designs on their respective industries, they’re entering a business world that has already been disrupted by start-ups that have gone before. The certainties of even five or ten years ago no longer apply. Because the rulebook is being extensively rewritten, we should expect start-up failure rates to remain high, even as the opportunities for the successful few have never been greater.

Leading an organisation’s digital transformation requires simultaneously tackling three questions.

With digital disruption no longer a question of “if” but “when”, CEOs are increasingly focused on transforming their organisations to reap the benefits, and meet the challenges brought by the successive waves of technological innovations.

FITCHBURG – There’s probably no “secret sauce” for what makes some communities successful and others not, although the recipe usually includes a homegrown mix of economic vibrancy, civic leadership and a dash of urgency.

Such is the case these days in a number of Wisconsin communities that have charted competitive paths forward, often banking on indigenous strengths and local “champions” from both the private and public sectors.

Madison is one story that sometimes catches national attention because of its growing base of startup and emerging companies, but there are other examples, as well. 

Stephen Hawking made a bold headline last week: “This is the most dangerous time for our planet.”

In an essay in the Guardian, the renowned theoretical physicist wrote: “Whatever we might think about the decision by the British electorate to reject membership of the European Union and by the American public to embrace Donald Trump as their next president, there is no doubt in the minds of commentators that this was a cry of anger by people who felt they had been abandoned by their leaders.”

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stephen_Hawking.StarChild.jpg

Minebea, a Japanese automotive industry supplier, will invest EUR 60 million in a new factory in the city of Kosice, Eastern Slovakia. The investment may increase to EUR 100 million and may also include a research & development center, if all goes well.

The company also considered Romania for opening the new plant, according to the Slovak newspaper Slovak Spectator. Although labor costs are lower in Romania, Minebea chose Slovakia for its higher availability of well-trained engineers and technicians.

Partnerships with industry and the promotion of technology transfer and commercialization are increasingly important for ensuring the widespread dissemination and deployment of national laboratory innovations. Argonne National Laboratory contracted with Innovation Associates to identify exemplars from national laboratories that could serve as models for enhancing industry partnerships, technology transfer, and commercialization for Argonne and other national laboratories in a recent report, Enhancing National Laboratory Partnership and Commercialization Opportunities.

CEDAR RAPIDS, IA—DECEMBER 7, 2016—Curt Nelson, President and CEO of Cedar Rapids-based business accelerator Entrepreneurial Development Center (EDC), Manager of Iowa Seed Funds I & II, has been named President of the Iowa Venture Capital Association (IVCA). The IVCA was formed in late 2015 as a non-profit organization with 30 member companies that influence and contribute to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the State of Iowa. The member organizations range from seed-stage to later-stage venture capital funds, providing critical capital to Iowa-based businesses; from start-ups to later-stage growth entities.

Ascension Ventures (AV) has finalized its latest strategic venture capital fund at $255 million. This fourth fund for AV, CHV IV, L.P., brings the firm’s total assets under management to more than $800 million. The new fund is backed by 13 health system partners, which enable AV to continue to add value to its portfolio companies while simultaneously delivering financial and strategic returns to the partners.