OTTAWA, Ontario, Oct. 18, 2016 (Canada NewsWire via COMTEX) -- GTEC Explores How Regional Clusters and Ecosystem Cooperation Can Propel Canada's Innovation Performance and Productivity

As our country strives to realize its potential as an 'innovation nation', the need to boost Canada's global competitiveness and innovation performance increasingly dominates the public and private sector agenda. Canada places 22(nd) in a global ranking on private sector innovation capacity, and 15(th) in the Global Innovation Index recently co-published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Last-mile delivery, especially of parcels, has recently received lots of attention in the media and from investors. The cost of global parcel delivery, excluding pickup, line-haul, and sorting, amounts to about €70 billion, with China, Germany, and the United States accounting for more than 40 percent of the market. And not only is the market large, but it’s also highly dynamic, with growth rates in 2015 of between 7 and 10 percent in mature markets (such as Germany and the United States) and more than 100 percent in developing markets. The biggest driver of this growth, not surprisingly, is e-commerce, which has shifted market share from the B2B to the B2C segment.

Business schools spend a great deal of time teaching would-be entrepreneurs and managers about the differences between features and benefits and their importance. Differentiate your product by tinkering with it to make it better or cheaper. Get to know your customer so you can understand how to sell to them.

Not exactly, says Harvard Business School professor and innovation expert Clayton M. Christensen. In his new book, Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, he and coauthors Karen Dillon, Taddy Hall, and David S. Duncan says that customers don’t buy products and services as such. Instead, they’re hiring them to do a job.

The Kauffman Foundation gave feedback today on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s proposed International Entrepreneur Rule. The rule would allow certain immigrant entrepreneurs to remain in the United States for the purpose of operating and growing their startup.

Here’s a quick summary of our comments.

The internet is presently one of the most reliable sources of income for lots of individuals, including businesses and organizations. It is therefore very important for them to have an online presence in our digital world.

However, even if you know how to make your own website, that is not enough. Having a website for your business does not automatically guarantee immediate turnover and financial success. There are issues such as ranking and traffic to address.

Declines in venture funding often paralyze the technology community. Talk of bubbles, dying unicorns, and austerity can surge for weeks following a negative report. In response, many entrepreneurs hit pause on their dreams, believing they should wait for more favorable conditions. That approach is often misguided. 

Image: Yoav Leitersdorf and Ofer Schreiber 

Scientific American editor Mark Fischetti explains how the leaves of deciduous trees perform their annual chameleon act, changing from various shades of green to hues of bronze, orange and brilliant red.

The main hall of the GE Power plant in Greenville, South Carolina, has 65-foot-tall ceilings and is the length of several football fields. Here workers assemble heavy-duty gas turbines that are over 10 feet wide and 30 feet long, and which weigh up to 560,000 pounds. The largest of these turbines installed in a typical power plant can generate enough electricity for 500,000 U.S. homes. The complex job of assembling one turbine can take six weeks.

If a time traveler from the late 1800s were to visit the present, the one place that she would recognize and, in many cases, feel right at home in, would be academia. Today’s universities and other science institutions are often the sole exception to the percussive pace of change we are now seeing in society and nature. They are, in a word, slow.

The School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) has launched a new entrepreneurship accelerator, DesignX, to cultivate and assist students and faculty developing products, systems, and companies that focus on design and the built environment. “Design is the art and science of improving the interface between human beings and their environment,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “DesignX will support entrepreneurs who work in this arena and help them speed their innovations to the marketplace.”

Image: http://news.mit.edu

NOE ARRIVED IN the United States after a treacherous two-month journey to flee El Salvador. He hiked through the jungle, rode on top of trains, slept on the streets of Mexico City, and trekked through the desert. Eventually he made it to San Francisco.

When Noe enrolled in high school, he discovered a passion—and a valuable talent—for chemistry and calculus. I met Noe at College Track, an organization that supports underserved youth through high school and college, where I’m a coun selor and mentor.

Image: Laurene Powell Jobs (center right) is cofounder of College Track. Mayra, Darwin, and Noe (left to right) are just three of the students she has mentored there.JOE PUGLIESE

They can get you help at the push of a button

My wife needed help. At least, that’s what the text message said. The ‘critical alert’ arrived from an unfamiliar number. It had a link to a webpage that brought me to an audio recording from her phone. And when I pressed play, I could hear that that she was in a car, listening to music.

Thankfully, she didn’t really need my help at all. She was fine, only a few miles away, helping me test the Wearsafe Tag, a small, Web-connected panic button that makes your smartphone send an SOS in case of an emergency.

Image: WearSafe

Permjot Valia and Trevor Adey began three-month contracts Oct. 10. This marks the first time the centre has brought EIRs into Newfoundland and Labrador to provide additional support and advice to portfolio companies.

Wealth of experience Mr. Valia, originally from London, England, but now living in Halifax, N.S., is no stranger to the Genesis Centre.

Image: Permjot Valia PHOTO: SUBMITTED

The Vermeer Applied Technology Hub officially opened its doors on Thursday, hosting a "Premiere" grand opening event that showcased to the public some of the features and initiatives the new building looks to bring to the Research Park.

The event featured speeches from Vermeer's Chair of the Board Mary Andringa and President and CEO Jason Andringa; Debi Durham, director of the Iowa Department of Economic Development; ISU President Steven Leath; and Michael Crum, ISU vice president of economic development and business engagement. 

Image: Vermeer CEO Jason Andringa gives a speech at the Vermeer Applied Technology Hub Premiere event on Thursday. Travis Charlson/Iowa State Daily

Liquidity tends to be of paramount importance when it comes to both entrepreneurs and venture capitalists making money. However, only a small subset of the startup universe will ever get to the acquisition or IPO stage. Today, I take a look at the exit rate of portfolio companies for a number of New York-based venture capital firms using some data from our friends at Crunchbase.

Image: http://www.alleywatch.com

On Jan. 20, 2015, about 30 minutes into his State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama said the words that would set in motion a health research initiative that could exceed the scope of any that has come before it.

Obama told listeners that he was green-lighting the launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative, a program two decades in the making that would begin where the groundbreaking Human Genome Project left off.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

Organizational change comes at a cost. It requires people to sacrifice something they value, whether it’s time, money, responsibilities, control, status, comfort, or relationships. The more your change effort disrupts those things, the more people will resist or even rage against it.

That helps explain why failure is so common, but there’s more to it. In a PWC survey of more than 2,000 global executives, managers, and employees, only 54% of respondents said their change initiatives succeeded — and the most frequently cited problem (by 65% of those surveyed) was change fatigue.

You worked hard on your investor pitch, convinced a group of outsiders to believe in your vision and management team, and they’re about to sign a check. So what now?

Attracting venture capital dollars isn’t easy, and closing an investment round is one of the most newsworthy things a growing company can do. Unfortunately, too many young companies don’t know how to maximize the public relations and social media value of a funding round announcement.

Is there value in participating in a startup accelerator program?

There’s reason to believe that the answer is yes. To date, startups that have participated in one of the 200 such programs have raised a combined $20 billion in funding since 2005, according to data published on Friday by Jed Christiansen, a product manager at startup accelerator Techstars and who also runs an online database about accelerators.

AdvaMed today released a report cautioning about a “future at risk” in medtech, warning that a lack of startups and shrinking venture capital funds could compromise the industry as a whole.

The medtech advocacy group also included a number of solutions and was optimistic about the future, noting shortened time-to-approval for new devices through the FDA and policy wins, such as the suspension of the medical device tax.