Today’s companies need to be able to roll out digital products and services quickly to address customers’ ever-evolving needs. They need flexible technology systems and business processes to do that and to create lasting competitive advantage. For the past several years, many companies have been experimenting with two-speed enterprise architectures to achieve these goals. Under a two-speed model, the processes, software, and other differentiating functions or capabilities that support the customer experience are refreshed quickly and frequently. The capabilities that support transactional back-end functions, meanwhile, are updated more methodically to ensure system stability and reliability.1

The GRE Regional Economic Gardening Program is designed to provide sophisticated, tailor-made technical assistance to local companies poised for growth in the Greater Rochester, NY region. GRE partners with the Edward Lowe Foundation, a national nonprofit organization that supports entrepreneurship, to provide this unique program to Rochester area companies.

Image: http://www.rochesterbiz.com

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — At first glance, Moderna Therapeutics looks like the most enviable biotech startup in the world. It has smashed fundraising records and teamed up with pharmaceutical giants as it pursues a radical plan to revolutionize medicine by transforming human cells into drug factories.

But the reality is more complicated.

A STAT investigation found that the company’s caustic work environment has for years driven away top talent and that behind its obsession with secrecy, there are signs Moderna has run into roadblocks with its most ambitious projects.

Image: ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR STATStéphane Bancel spent most of his career in sales and operations before becoming CEO of biotech startup Moderna Therapeutics. 

WASHINGTON — The Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) today announced $37 million in funding for 16 innovative new projects as part of a new ARPA-E program: Integration and Optimization of Novel Ion-Conducting Solids (IONICS). IONICS project teams are paving the way for technologies that overcome the limitations of current battery and fuel cell products.

Soft skills have garnered increasing attention in the workplace over the last 20 years. In fact, emotional intelligence is one of the fastest growing job skills, according to a report by the World Economic Forum.

Ironically, those are the very skills hiring managers say the latest crop of college graduates lacks as they’ve focused on honing their technological prowess. Yet managing our emotions effectively in the workplace is a major component of success for all of us.

David Petr, who has been hired to guide economic development in Montgomery County, said the county has what it needs to compete against rival Fairfax County: a quality work force.

“The true benefit of doing business here is the quality of talent,” Petr said Tuesday after a meeting with the Montgomery County Council.

Image: New Montgomery County Economic Development Council CEO David Petr answers a question at a lunchtime meeting with the County Council. DOUGLAS TALLMAN

In business writing, there’s one rule you just can’t break: It has to be about the reader, not about you.

Most people understand this already, at least intellectually. They’re sophisticated buyers of products and services, and they use a similar lens to decide whether to read something: They calculate whether it will provide value to them. Yet when the roles are reversed and they’re the writers, they often forget this lesson — they’re smart buyers but irrational sellers. That’s because they see their writing, on some level, as a piece of themselves. They think it will confirm and validate their ideas.

A decade ago, clean-energy companies were the hot trend that venture capitalists were chasing. Oil and natural-gas prices were on the rise and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” had just made its premiere.

But high hopes that the clean-energy sector would replicate the big returns of biomedical and software startups quickly faded. Instead, monumental losses piled up: Venture-capital investors lost more than half of the $25 billion they pumped into clean-energy technology startups from 2006 to 2011.

Men are 60% more likely to get funding than women, according to a recent study published by MIT, Harvard and Wharton universities.

And while some entrepreneurs openly chastise education — Guy Kawasaki once quipped that the value of an MBA to an entrepreneur is “probably about a negative $250,000” — there are signs that business school is increasingly powerful for female founders.

Women MBAs have raised about $9 billion in venture capital over a decade, according to new data published by PitchBook, for about 700 ventures.

Image: http://www.businessbecause.com

Verily, Alphabet's life sciences group, is investing big in developing technologies for the millions of people worldwide with diabetes.

Verily announced today that it is teaming up with pharmaceutical giant Sanofi to fund and spin out a new venture, Cambridge, Mass.-based Onduo, which is focused on helping clinicians and their patients manage the disease. The companies have tapped a new CEO to lead the startup, trained emergency-medicine physician Joshua Riff, from United Healthcare-owned Optum.

Image: Flickr user Seattle Municipal Archives

Canada’s future lies in the innovation-powered knowledge economy. Indeed, the nation’s leaders are well aware of the need for new ideas and approaches to meet the nation’s looming innovation, productivity and prosperity challenges.

The Trudeau government has made a clear commitment to shifting Canada from its resource-dependent past to a more knowledge-driven future by setting an innovation agenda dedicated to increased infrastructure funding. Ontario has even created a blue-ribbon commission, headed by former TD Bank CEO Ed Clark, to spark the development of its knowledge economy. Across all levels of government, there is a virtually unprecedented degree of alignment at a crucial time for economic policy-making.

Image: A McMaster University student handles electrical connections as a team of students worked to modifying a regular-engine Camaro into a hybrid for the EcoCar 3 Advanced Vehicle Technology competition, earlier this year. The most effective strategy to bolster our knowledge economy, write Richard Florida and Greg Spencer, "is to deepen the innovation and knowledge component of all industries, from engineering and technology to agriculture, service, and manufacturing." (PETER POWER / FOR THE TORONTO STAR)  

If you’ve acquired some wealth in your life, you may have heard the buzz around angel investing and considered the idea of being an angel investor.  Not only is it a blast to help innovative entrepreneurs, it also offers a chance to make superior financial returns.  Even so, perhaps directly investing in and mentoring startups still sounds scary.  You may wonder: How do people really get started as angels?  And how do you know it is right for you?

Does the potential for a 40 per cent plus returns over three-and-a-half years or so offer sufficient incentive for a 40 per cent failure rate? Those are the numbers that jump out of the report published today by Seedrs, one of the UK’s big three equity crowdfunding platforms, into the performance of companies that have raised money with it.

It’s no secret that entrepreneurship is full of uncertainty. It requires taking risks. Furthermore, when you own a business, you are solely responsible for its success and failure.

The upside is that your income is more proportionate to the effort you put into your business—which might not be the case if you work for someone else.

The downside is that future business profits are difficult to predict—which means your income is less stable. Unstable income is the single biggest reason why most people never take the entrepreneurial plunge.

There’s something special about sharing a meal with someone. We all know this applies in business as well as with friends and family. But did you ever really think about the benefits of breaking bread with a business prospect? Sitting across the desk from someone for an hour, or even facing each other on a comfortable couch discussing business does not develop the same relationship as spending the same hour having the discussion over lunch.

Same topic, same amount of time, same discussion. Different result. There’s just something about combining speaking and sharing ideas and stories with dining that leads to a better understanding of each other.

Oregon RAIN, a nonprofit program to help turn homegrown innovation into companies and jobs, is hiring a candidate to work with entrepreneurs on the coast, between Florence and Lincoln City.

RAIN, which stands for Regional Accelerator and Innovation Network, is a consortium of government, higher education and business communities in Lane, Linn, Benton and Lincoln counties.

The consortium recently posted an opening for a “Coastal Venture Catalyst,” which is a one-year contracted position, made possible through a $50,000 grant from the Ford Family Foundation and financial support from the city of Florence and Lincoln County.

Sometimes you need a quick bout of inspiration before you get to work or during your lunch break. That's why we asked 14 members from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) what startup newsletters they would recommend subscribing to. Here's what they had to say:

1. Traffic Generation Cafe

Ana Hoffman's blog at TrafficGenerationCafe.com is much like my favorite cocktails: it cuts to the chase. It's all about SEO and traffic generation and getting click-throughs in the simplest and most informative ways. I love seeing what tips she has in store every time I get an email from her. Plus, it's personalized. It doesn't feel like a robot is talking to me, but a human. – Rob Fulton, Exponential Black

ETTRICK — If Virginia's Gateway Region were receiving a performance review, its rating for the past five years would have to be “exceeds expectations.” And if that track record is any indication, Central Virginia can look forward to thousands of new jobs and close to $1 billion in investments in the next five years.

The state's oldest regional economic development organization rolled out its new five-year plan on Monday in a presentation at Virginia State University to local business and community leaders. The plan, called “Driving Economic Growth and Embracing a Global Future 3.0,” or Global 3.0 for short, sets specific and aggressive goals for the next five years:

Image: http://www.progress-index.com

Apple is facing accusations that it copied Chinese innovations in the iPhone 7. Indeed, China’s smartphone manufacturers released dual-camera systems and handsets without headphone jacks long before Apple did. And the stickers and animations that Apple is adding to iMessage look like a direct knockoff from China’s WeChat. This is quite a twist from the days when Apple accused the Chinese of copying its inventions. The reality is that America’s most innovative company is no longer the world’s most innovative company. Entrepreneurs all over the world are producing innovations that rival what you see in Silicon Valley.