Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a 25 million-year-old ecosystem and home to 1,625 species of fish, is on life support. Reports suggest about 93 percent of the reef has succumbed to bleaching, largely the result of climate change.

Spanning 1,400 miles, larger than the United Kingdom, the reef could soon become extinct. Bleaching is the result of increased acidity due to CO2 entering the oceans from the environment

Image: http://knowledge.insead.edu

My friend Tony just lost three toes. Two more may be amputated soon. The cause of this tragedy was type 2 diabetes, even though it is a manageable and often preventable disease.

Tony is not alone: According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 29 million Americans suffer from diabetes; worldwide, the number is more than 400 million, reports the World Health Organization. All are at risk for amputated limbs, heart disease, stroke, blindness, and other serious complications.

Accelerator guru group Techstars announced Wednesday that it’s launching a new program in Kansas City after leading the Sprint Accelerator for three years with Sprint.

Lesa Mitchell, a former vice president of innovation and networks for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, will serve as the managing director of the Kansas City accelerator.

TORONTO, Oct. 19, 2016 /CNW/ - Canada ranks as the fourth largest innovation hub in the world for cybersecurity with Ontario leading the country, concludes a report released today. Commissioned by Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) and the Toronto Financial Services Alliance (TFSA), the report states that Ontario has the potential to assume a more dominant leadership role in cybersecurity, given its current strengths in financial services and technology, if it takes immediate steps to seize the opportunity. The ranking is based on venture capital deals in the cybersecurity sector.

Strengthening Australia’s innovation systems is essential to the nation’s future economic growth and prosperity, according to Innovation and Science Australia Chair Bill Ferris.

During a speech at the NZVCA 2016 Private Equity and Venture Capital Conference, Ferris said innovation will be the linchpin of the digital economy.

Image: http://www.technologydecisions.com.au

Let’s let go of the idea of the lone wolf, once and for all.

We have this idea of the entrepreneur as a solo figure -- an ambitious, solitary adventurer willing to stand apart from the crowd and risk it all on the strength of a really great idea. That description does have some truth to it. Entrepreneurs do tend to break off from the pack and they do shoulder a lot of risk when they do so. But they shouldn’t be doing it alone.

A few months ago, Hillary Clinton floated a plan to help young entrepreneurs by relieving some of their student loan debt or by allowing them to defer payments for several years.

As an entrepreneur who’s a year out of college and about $30,000 in debt to the federal government, that sounded great to me. But the reaction I saw while scrolling through my Twitter feed was very different.

Image: Photo by OTA Photos from Flickr. Modified by Samantha Harrington.

The U.S. Department of Commerce, through the Economic Development Administration (EDA), will invest approximately $500,000 over the next three years in support of entrepreneurship and high wage job creation in the region. U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Jay Williams made the announcement at a grand opening ceremony for Delaware Technology Park’s new laboratory incubator on Friday at the University of Delaware’s Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus.

With a budget that is many millions of dollars in the red, the New York City Housing Authority—North America’s largest low-income landlord—doesn’t have a lot of cash to spare. So it’s not ideal that the electricity and heating bills for its more than 2,000 buildings are much higher than they should be. The agency, abbreviated NYCHA, estimates its spends more than 40% more on energy than a typical apartment building in the city. But tackling such a large and sprawling problem and encouraging energy conservation—especially when, in many NYCHA buildings, residents don’t pay their own electric bills—isn’t straightforward.

Startups that have graduated from St. Louis’ seven business accelerators have gone on to raise approximately $370 million in follow-on capital, according to Business Journal research.

That follows a trend nationwide.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com

We are one week away from the 2016 Galien Forum and Prix Galien USA Awards Ceremony and very pleased to announce our esteemed presenters for this year's awards below.

Deloitte has rolled out a new initiative to help its business clients adopt disruptive technologies.

The company announced Monday (Oct. 17) the launch of Deloitte Catalyst, a group of startups that explores how technologies, like blockchain and Internet of Things, can be used for business applications.

Those use cases include document review automation, language processing and generation, data management, machine intelligence, distributed ledger and other technologies for the enterprise.

As cybersecurity becomes more of an imperative for individuals and organizations, several regions in the US are investing money and efforts in security innovation.

Silicon Valley may be the most famous hotspot for tech innovation in the country, but it's far from the only place driving cybersecurity advancement. Areas such as the Washington, DC region and the Boston metro area are home to a growing number of security startups and incubators.

The crowd is a diverse group of capable individuals who can make a significant contribution to your non-profit organization. Crowdsourcing is community engagement at a much larger scale, and for non-profits it goes far beyond raising money. From pooling knowledge to micro-volunteering, consider taking advantage of the specific ways you can use crowdsourcing effectively. This white paper about crowdsourcing and nonprofits can help.

Image: https://ideascale.com

HOUSTON, Oct. 18, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Johnson & Johnson Innovation LLC (JJI) today announced the creation of the Center for Device Innovation at Texas Medical Center (CDI @ TMC), a broad, new collaboration between JJI and TMC that aims to accelerate end-to-end development of breakthrough medical devices. This expands on JJI's collaboration with TMC established earlier this year with the opening of JLABS @ TMC, combining the resources of the world's largest medical complex with the capabilities of the Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies*, to advance the health and well-being of people around the globe.

There is a lot of hype and hoopla about the cloud but few reliable facts and benchmarks about the adoption of this technology. CIOs, CTOs, and heads of infrastructure at large enterprises have shared with us their frustrations about adopting cloud-based platforms and migrating processing workloads to virtual environments. To address those frustrations, between 2014 and 2016 we surveyed senior business and technology leaders in more than 50 large organizations in Europe and North America to find out about their adoption of cloud and next-generation infrastructure.1 1. Most companies in our sample are Fortune 100 companies with large infrastructure budgets. They have been among the earliest adopters of cloud technologies. They come from a range of industries, regulatory environments, and geographies. The survey process started in 2014 and ended in the first half of 2016.

A globe, a mountain, and creative people. What do they have in common? They’re what came to mind when I first heard about the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES). In June, I traversed to the West Coast to be one of nine University Innovation Fellows to co-facilitate the “Hack Your Creative Culture with Stanford d.school and Google” workshop, which was a partner event of GES. There, as students, we had the opportunity to share the steps we took to ignite change on our university campuses. The workshop was important because the process that my peers and I practiced to activate change on campus would be shared with entrepreneurs from all over the world.

Image: http://universityinnovationfellows.org

The human brain is, by some accounts, the most complex and powerful object in the known universe. The product of billions of years of evolution, it is an advanced network of neurons, neurotransmitters, and other biological matter. It enables us to understand the universe and perform the complex tasks through which humanity has come to dominate the planet.

Image: TEJ3478 Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0

Contrary to popular thinking in various companies, the circular economy isn’t the latest sustainability fad and shouldn’t be thought of as a recycling or green program. It requires top-down management and change across a company, including reevaluating product design, business models, and the supply chain. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey partner Eric Hannon and senior partner Clarisse Magnin explain what the circular economy is and how companies create loops throughout to recapture value that would otherwise be lost.

Say you have an awesome idea and you need some money to get things started. Have you considered crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding is a popular and increasingly accessible way to put your prospective product or business in front of millions of people. And, thanks to the visibility of massive success stories, there's a public perception that most crowdfunding campaigns end up being successful.