Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
LUGANO, Switzerland — Jürgen Schmidhuber may be the Rodney Dangerfield of artificial intelligence research.
In a visit with him in this idyllic Swiss city in the mountains near the Italian border, it is easy to understand why he believes that his pioneering work in the field often, as the comedian liked to say, gets no respect.
HARTWELL, ENGLAND — A new cash crop has sprung up on Nicholas Beatty’s enchanting farm near here. Rows of gray solar panels range over about 25 acres, turning sunlight into electricity, as dog-size muntjac deer hop by.
The panels themselves, trouble-free money earners that feed into the electric grid, are no longer unusual on farms in Britain or other countries. What’s new in Mr. Beatty’s field is a hulking 40-foot-long shipping container.
Over the course of his 50-year filmmaking career, director and documentarian Werner Herzog has often explored humanity’s complicated relationship with nature. His newest release, funded by an internet security company — Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World —examines the changing roles technology plays in our lives. Herzog says he rarely uses the Internet himself, and didn’t make his first phone call until the age of 17. It’s this outsider’s perspective that imbues the film with both curiosity and concern. Here Herzog muses that artificial-intelligence has the potential to enhance society, but that a consequence could be losing touch with the very things that makes us human.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Werner_Herzog_Venice_Film_Festival_2009.jpg
What do you do when you live in or run a business in a small or a midsize American city that many people have heard of, but few people ever really think about? You know that if more people knew about your city they would like it, but there’s no Associated Press bureau in town and few national reporters, and influencers haven’t caught on.
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup methodology and the author of the popular entrepreneurship blog Startup Lessons Learned. He previously co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech and in 2009 he was honoured with a TechFellow award in the category of Engineering Leadership.
Elon Musk’s vision of a unified solar power and electric car company looks set to become reality. Tesla shareholders have approved the $2.6 billion merger with SolarCity by an 85 percent majority. Musk’s plan is simple: build a one-stop-shop for consumers to buy into renewables, with stylish solar roofs, wall-mounted battery modules, and Tesla vehicles offered as a (rather expensive) package. He says the conjoined company will find large efficiency savings. Not everyone is convinced. Both companies are loss-making, and the deal could be seen as a bailout of SolarCity.
With a renewed focus on the CU Boulder campus and a host of new initiatives aimed at streamlining the path from science to commercialization, the Technology Transfer Office (TTO) is poised to provide even greater support for faculty in translating their innovations into external impact.
The TTO connects campus researchers with a variety of university and community commercialization programs while providing expertise in patents, copyrights and licensing.
So you want to work for a biotech startup. Why not? It seems like a glamour job, working on the very bleeding edge of science. And admit it—in the back of your mind, you’re thinking it’ll become the next Genentech (RHHBY) and you’ll be rich with all your stock options.
Although both of those things could happen, it’s important to understand just how risky working for a startup—in any field, but biotech in particular—actually is. Is that risk for you? Is the fast-paced, burn-the-midnight-oil, lack-of-security right for you?
Investment crowdfunding covers many different verticals. From early stage to later stage companies from debt to equity from real estate to revenue share. The internet can be a great leveler of information and opportunity. Patents can be a plus for early stage companies as investors view patented products and IP as a positive for young companies.
Image: https://www.crowdfundinsider.com
Oh, the i.r.o.n.y.
Right-wing Australian politician and climate change waffler Pauline Hanson visited the Great Barrier Reef Friday and declared everything looked fine to her.
In early 2016, sections of the immense 2,300-kilometre (1,430-mile) reef suffered through a global coral bleaching event that especially impacted its northern reaches. Scientists found that unusually warm water temperatures spurred by El Niño and climate change had a devastating effect. But what's expertise in the face of blind ignorance?
WASHINGTON, DC – House and Senate health committee leaders have released the final "21st Century Cures” bill and announced that the House of Representatives will vote Wednesday on a $6.3 Billion landmark medical innovation package that will accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of new cures and treatments and provide new funding for the National Institutes of Health and Food and Drug Administration. The leaders said the House would also vote Wednesday to include in the Cures bill legislation that updates major mental health programs for the first time in a decade. The new funding includes $1 billion in state grants to fight opioid abuse.
Speaking up is hard to do, even when you know you should. Learn how to assert yourself, navigate tricky social situations and expand your personal power with sage guidance from social psychologist Adam Galinsky.
Professor Gast said London is “buzzing” with new ideas and technological breakthroughs, but the capital has an opportunity to become an “even greater leader in innovation and entrepreneurship”.
She told the newspaper that this is “a time when we need to think about how we can position London and the UK to be a global innovation powerhouse. The elements are here: we have great universities and what we need are the right places, the right people, the right environment.”
Not knowing which road to take may be enjoyable for a spirited spontaneous road trip with friends, motoring to unexpected destinations. While this may be the makings of an exciting weekend, it is an unsettling notion when applied to innovation, product management, and business in general.
Products are created by taking steps to understand a problem customers are having, examining ways to solve the problem, determining a solution that provides great value to customers, creating a user experience customers appreciate, and more.
Raising capital continues to be an obstacle for regional entrepreneurs, and is one of the primary challenges to a genuine explosion of entrepreneurial activity and the resulting increase in innovation. According to the World Bank, only 20% of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in MENA have a loan or a line of credit, the lowest percentage of any region in the world; and the average share of SME lending on total loans is only 8% in MENA, which is the lowest ratio among all the regions.
President Michael D Higgins has called on senior officials in the public service to uphold legislation guaranteeing the right of Irish speakers to interact with the State in their own language. President Higgins made his comments during an address at Áras an Uachtaráin on Friday honouring the volunteer efforts of seven individuals who have built the Irish language edition of popular language learning app Duolingo.
Image: Over 2.3 million people have used Duolingo to learn Irish. Photograph: Éanna Ó Caollaí/The Irish Times
For every year since 1927, TIME has selected the most influential person of the year. From presidents to protesters, astronauts to activists, each selection reflects the person—or idea—who has most influenced the news and our world in the past year, for good or ill.
In the entrepreneurial field of the SME city, people grow ideas associated with the vocations of the territory. Beyond the margins of the hortus conclusus (i.e., enclosed, walled garden), there's the no man's land without any associative barriers and, therefore, a fertile land for ideas which, if entrepreneurially exploited, can change the socio-economic fabric of the city so as to transform it. For citizens, workers, local businesses and policymakers who live and work in the field of vocations, transformative start-ups appear in the resemblance of monsters that, in fact, intervene to change the shape of the city.
With the AgLaunch Accelerator holding its Demo Day Thursday, Nov. 17, the participants are still working toward bringing their products to market.
The latest cohort of the AgLaunch Accelerator including the following companies:
Enlarge THINKSTOCK
In today's technology driven world, innovation districts are growing in their importance. Some public policy leaders believe that innovation districts are only for life sciences or information technology companies, but this could not be further from the truth. Innovation districts are attractive to many types of businesses because it allows them to access talent, collaborate with higher educational institutions and partner with other private sector companies.
