Digitisation brings enormous benefits. Industrial companies expect to generate 3.6% p.a. in cost reductions over the next five years, driven by internal improvements and by working more closely across value chains. They’re also expecting to generate 2.9% p.a. in increased revenues by digitising products and services and developing new digital service offerings, all the way through to hosting platforms for industrial ecosystems.

Building Batteries That Stop Themselves Burning

Lithium-ion batteries are small, light, efficient—and can burst into flames. But a new fire-extinguishing design could make them safer. When a short circuit occurs in a li-on battery, flammable liquids inside can vaporize and burst into flames. Just ask Samsung. Last year, its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone was found to regularly catch fire, and new reports seem to confirm that it was the fault of the battery, rather than any other hardware problem. But researchers from Stanford University have devised a new way to solve the problem.

Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies is proud to announce Start Here: a podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. With support from the Vermont Technology Council and FairPoint Communications, Start Here is co-hosted by VCET’s David Bradbury and Sam Roach-Gerber, and produced by VCET Associate Ryan Bahan.

Featuring a wide range of Vermont’s most innovative business leaders and start ups, Start Here bridges the gap between entertainment and inspiration by presenting the unfiltered stories of today’s top innovators and entrepreneurs, with topics ranging from bootstrapping and team building to scaling and product development.

Abhishek Lodha is managing director of the privately held Lodha Group, one of India’s largest real-estate developers. It is currently building Palava, a 4,500-acre greenfield city near Mumbai. Construction started in 2010, and the first residents arrived in 2014. In an interview with Subbu Narayanswamy, a Mumbai-based McKinsey senior partner who leads the firm’s work in real estate globally, Lodha spoke about India’s rapidly evolving real-estate sector and what it takes to build a city of the future.

Exercise is one of the best ways to avoid chronic diseases like diabetes and cancer, as well as an early death. But it can be tough to squeeze into a schedule: Health experts recommend about 150 minutes of moderate activity, or 75 minutes of vigorous, breath-sapping exercise, each week.

While St. Louis has been becoming more known around the country as an emerging hub for tech startups, there is one place in St. Louis where a focus on entrepreneurship isn’t a new trend. In fact, at Saint Louis University, entrepreneurship has been a celebrated staple for more than 40 years, making it one of the first 20 schools in the world to begin teaching classes in entrepreneurship at SLU’s John Cook School of Business. This place of entrepreneurship education has even been ranked in the top 25 of all universities for entrepreneurship education for 25 straight years.

Executives love dashboards, and why wouldn’t they? Single-screen “snapshots” of operational processes, marketing metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) can be visually elegant and intuitive. They show just-in-time views of what’s working and what isn’t — no need to wait for weekly or monthly reports from a centralized data center. A quick scan of a dashboard gives frontline managers transparency and, ideally, the opportunity to make rapid adjustments.

This question comes up every time I speak at a college.  There is a romanticized version of venture capital out there that VCs are super wealthy and all you have to do is pick winners.  Everyone thinks it’s pretty simple.  Kind of like ordering at a restaurant.  You see the menu of companies and you choose.  Of course, since VC’s are so smart, most companies VCs pick are winners.

On the last day Congress was in session in 2016, Democrats and Republicans agreed on a bill that increased innovation and research for the country. For me, seeing Congress pass this bill, the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, was personally satisfying. It made the program I helped start, the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) a permanent part of the nation’s science ecosystem. I-Corps uses Lean Startup methods to teach scientists how to turn their discoveries into entrepreneurial, job-producing businesses.

REPORTS TO: Managing Directors, Inova Personalized Health Accelerator (IPHA) This is an exempt position under the Fair Labor Standards Act which determines whether an employee is paid overtime.

OVERVIEW

The Accelerator Director serves as a principal member of the IPHA evaluation, selection and mentoring team responsible for the identification and development of new personalized health companies with the potential to produce disruptive technology solutions and achieve a high rate of growth.

The Accelerator Director is responsible for sourcing and conducting due diligence on IPHA applicants, evaluating and supporting new company formation strategies, mentoring entrepreneurs in personalized health product development, facilitating IPHA member network relationship development, maintaining board-level relationships and mentoring entrepreneurs in securing equity based capital for growth.

Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, Moneyball -- later made into a movie starring Brad Pitt -- tells the story of how predictive analytics transformed the Oakland Athletics baseball team and, eventually, baseball itself. Data-based modeling has since transcended sport. It’s used in hiring investment bankers, for example. But is academe really ready for its own “moneyball moment” in terms of personnel decisions?

Today at the University of Delaware, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker announced the latest addition to the Manufacturing USA network: the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals (NIIMBL). This is the first U.S. Department of Commerce-led institute to join the network and the first awarded under the 2014 bipartisan Revitalize American Manufacturing Innovation (RAMI) Act using an “open topic” competition. Commerce-led institutes focus on taking technologies from lab to market where there is the greatest potential, and the addition of NIIMBL will add another 150 members to the existing 1,300 partners within the Manufacturing USA network.

Image: Penny Pritzker

College is over. Not today, and not next week, but it’s time has come. The evidence is simple and easy to decipher. Consider this:

 The U.K. offices of Ernst & Young have announced they will stop requiring degrees, but instead will offer online testing and search out talented individuals regardless of background. Why? They say there is no correlation between success at university and success in careers.

Elon Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. He got his first computer at the age of 8 and learned to program. At 17 he went to University in Canada and subsequently settled in the USA where he founded a company, Zip2, which provided online travel guides. Zip2 was an early internet success and in 1999 he sold it to Compaq Computer Corporation for $330m. Straight away Musk started another internet company X.com to provide online payments. It became PayPal and he held 11% of the stock when it was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5B.

There are several big ones that I talk about throughout my book, but here are 3 to get you started:

Become an MVP: Startups build an MVP or Minimum Viable Product that delivers only the essential features. They keep it simple and lean. And you can become your own personal MVP by stripping away the unnecessary layers that bog you down - all the “shoulds” and “nice to haves” that cloud your judgement, and reconnect with the things that really matter. What’s your personal mantra? What is at the core of everything you do? Let it guide you and give yourself permission to let go of the stuff that isn’t in line with it. (You’re never too old to become an MVP)

magine a drug that can intoxicate us, can infuse us with energy and can be taken by mouth. It doesn’t have to be injected, smoked, or snorted for us to experience its sublime and soothing effects. Imagine that it mixes well with virtually every food and particularly liquids, and that when given to infants it provokes a feeling of pleasure so profound and intense that its pursuit becomes a driving force throughout their lives.

For many of us, our “office job” doesn’t have us in the office very often. Salespeople, entrepreneurs, account reps, and countless other positions have you running around from place to place, only stopping into the office between offsite meetings or on the rare occasion that you don’t have something scheduled.  Without that critical office time to sit down and focus on your work, how can you stay productive?  

I’m going to have to break some people’s hearts, and clear up a major misconception by dropping a bomb-shell about one of the world’s most beloved animals; the Cheetah’s top speed. It is “well-known” that cheetahs are the world’s fastest running animal, at 70 mph. In fact, I have quoted this universal number myself. But what is not well-known is that this number is an extrapolated assumption of the wild cheetah’s top speed. The actual recorded fastest speed of any cheetah does not approach 70 mph.

Pondering an important decision? Chances are that you will consider drawing up a list of pros and cons of the options. The pros-and-cons list enjoys a long and storied history, going back at least as far as 1772, when Benjamin Franklin advised his friend and fellow scientist Joseph Priestley to “divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con.” But how useful is a pros-and-cons list, really? It’s only fitting to consider the pros and cons of this popular decision-making tool:

With just a few weeks to the presidential inauguration, the White House offered recommendations for the Trump administration to keep the U.S. edge in science, technology and innovation.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy’s cabinet exit memo, written by U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith and OSTP Director John Holdren, contains both a history of the Obama administration’s innovation legacy and 10 actions the next administration should undertake to “address challenges across science and technology frontiers in the coming decades.”

Image: White House CTO Megan Smith // Flickr user Internet Education Foundation