A star in Ontario’s business startup scene, Volta Labs CEO Jesse Rodgers now calls Nova Scotia home, thanks to the economic potential of the province.

“In the next 10 to 25 years, the downtown of Halifax will be a vibrant hive of innovative jobs and global industries that radiate outward opportunities for all of Atlantic Canada,” says the head of the downtown Halifax business incubator.

The founding director of Waterloo-based Velocity and Toronto-based Creative Destruction Lab moved to Halifax earlier this year, after accepting the job as CEO of Volta Labs.

Image: http://thechronicleherald.ca

Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, and his wife, the pediatrician Priscilla Chan, announced plans last month to spend $3 billion over the next decade fighting diseases. Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan said they hoped their project — including a $600-million investment in the Biohub, a new physical lab space for universities in the Bay Area — would help scientists and engineers cure, prevent, or manage all diseases by the end of the century.

Image: Tyler Mallory - Joseph DeRisi, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the U. of California at San Francisco, is one of two leaders of the Biohub, a new research lab funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.

Do you dream of starting your own business but fear giving up a stable paycheck? Rather than focusing on that fear, consider how your life will change when you are doing something that you truly enjoy. No matter what you choose to do in life, there will be pros and cons. When you focus on the risks of losing your regular source of income, you distract yourself from the benefits of pursuing your dream.

Immigration is one of the most divisive and polarizing topics today. Do immigrants take American jobs, or help our economy grow? Do immigrants drain our welfare funds, or can they help refill public coffers as our baby boomers retire?

One argument you tend to hear in the immigration debate in the U.S. is that there is a fixed number of jobs in the economy — and immigrants just compete for a slice of the pie rather than helping the pie grow. This perspective is less prevalent when talking about startups, however, because the rate of entrepreneurship has declined significantly in the U.S. over the last 30 years, and fewer startups are being generated today.

Corporate venture capital can offer a strategic boost to firms that maintain pipelines of innovative products.

Pharmaceutical companies are engaged in an uphill struggle for growth. The challenge of the creation and maintenance of a promising drug pipeline is compounded by the pressure of expiring patents on existing products, where they lose their markets to cheaper generics. When the pipeline of successor drugs is not enough to maintain their past level of sales, this then results in what is known as a “patent cliff”.

Pharma companies take on big risks when developing new drugs. In a paper for INSEAD GEMBA, we found that 40 percent of the pharma industry’s R&D spending occurs in the activity through phase one of clinical development. The chance of an investigational drug – one that is under study but not legally available – making it as far as phase one has a less than one in 10 chance of ultimately becoming an approved medication

Image: http://knowledge.insead.edu

Simple Habit is a meditation app that launched in June, and I couldn’t have asked for a more incredible internship experience. I ended up loving the company and San Francisco so much that I decided to take time off school to work there full time during this fall.

I took the risk of accepting this internship because I believed in the company’s vision to make meditation accessible to everyone. At Penn, I was the co-founder of Be Here Yoga, which teaches yoga, meditation, and mindfulness workshops all over campus. Meditation and mindfulness have always been meaningful to me, and it was actually through a personal growth workshop I co-led for a group called Wharton Mindfulness that I was connected to an MBA student who, seeing that I was interested in the wellness industry, put me in touch with Yunha, the founder & CEO of Simple Habit.

Virtual-reality headsets are likely to be at the top of many kids' wish lists this holiday season, but with many VR devices coming with age restrictions, is the technology safe for youngsters? The Oculus Rift and Samsung's Gear VR headsets are recommended for ages 13+, while Sony's recommendation for its PlayStation VR is ages 12 and up. HTC's Vive is not designed for children, according to the company, and HTC said young children shouldn't be allowed to use the headset at all. And Google said its relatively low-tech Cardboard headset should be used by kids only under adult supervision.

Image: Virtual reality headsets such as this one, the Vive from HTC, are exploding in popularity among adults. But what happens when young children use them? Credit: MAURIZIO PESCE Flickr

Aside from the abundant human and natural resources, these countries have carved another niche for themselves. They now have inventors blazing the trail in science and technology. 

Let's take a look at the ten most technologically advanced countries in Africa.

1. South Africa

On the top of our list is South Africa. With the best universities in Africa as well as many mind blowing infrastructure at its beck and call, the country ranks as the most technologically developed country on the continent in the current Global Innovation Index (GII).

Image: https://www.africanexponent.com

For telecoms, making smart use of digital technologies calls for a wholesale digital transformation. Five steps are needed to make it happen.

Telecom companies face increasingly tough times as digitization reshapes the industry landscape. In fact, telecoms come second only to media in the ranks of sectors expecting moderate or massive digital disruption over the next 12 months, according to a 2015 cross-industry survey of senior industry leaders.1

Image: Clayton Christensen. Photo: Evgenia Eliseeva

Look closely at your city, and vestiges of a former life start to come into focus. You might notice bricked-over doors and windows, the remnants of walls and staircases, or the faint traces of advertising once emblazoned on pre-billboard era buildings.

The latter is somewhat of an obsession for Portland-based experience designer Craig Winslow and London-based writer and urban explorer Sam Roberts. The two have independently sleuthed "ghostsigns" in their respective corners of the world. For the London Design Festival last month, they banded together to uncover a fleet in the Bankside district of the British capital.

Image: https://www.fastcodesign.com

Are you a patient person? Are you sure?

Most of think we're pretty good at waiting for the things we want. But in reality, you're probably more impatient than you'd like to admit. It's hard not to get what you want right now—that's just how humans are built.

The good news is that there are a few things you can do to improve your patience. The bad news is that before you can implement them, you first need to understand where your impatience comes from. Here's how.

When it comes to theft, one social network’s rap sheet is a mile long. There’s the cloudy origin story, involving who allegedly stole what from those charming Winklevoss twins. Then there's the fact that the network's Like button was featured earlier on a site called FriendFeed. Later, when one-on-one messaging apps started taking off, Facebook conveniently rolled out Messenger as a smartphone app. And just as YouTube video exploded, the the company ramped up its own native video platform, which now gets well over 8 billion views a day. Facebook's latest heist, if you choose to see it that way, is its property Instagram's imitation of Snapchat’s Stories, which lets users share photos and short videos that expire after 24 hours.

For as long as I can remember venture capital has been promoted as the Holy Grail of economic growth by a good number of business people and almost all politicians. It has been mentioned in practically every budget speech in the last several years because of the warm feeling it brings to those who believe that they can indeed become rich by shifting their business risk onto others. Venture capital is financing that investors provide to start-up companies and small businesses that are believed to have long-term potential. While there are different forms of venture capital financing, the venture capital industry was at its best in the nineties. It is now hardly ever promoted as the solution to every shortage of risk capital that people with exciting new business ideas often encounter.

Venture capitalists (VCs) don’t value companies, they price them! Before you explode, implode or respond with righteous indignation, this is not a critique of what venture capitalists do, but a recognition of reality. In fact, not only is pricing exactly what you should expect from VCs but it lies at the heart of what separates the elite from the average venture capitalist. I was reminded of this when I read a response from Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz, to a Wall Street Journal article about Andreessen, that suggested that the returns earned by the firm on its funds were not as good as those earned at other elite funds.

Image: http://www.valuewalk.com

Although they presumably have access to cutting-edge security tools and first-rate professional advice, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey still use a surprisingly low-tech piece of security equipment.

Both reportedly place a piece of sticky tape over their computers’ webcams to make sure that even if hackers get access to the machines, they still can’t spy through their cameras.

Image: Flickr user Thomas Galvez

When we read about the latest in physics, we’re so excited by some strange new particle that we may take for granted the high-tech device that allowed physicists to make their discovery. We know vaguely what the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), for example, is — a particle accelerator — and we know where it is — beneath the France/Switzerland border near Geneva — and we know it smashes atoms after spinning them around a 27-kilometer ring. But how do they get those atoms moving? Do they just pour them into one end and shout, “go?”

Image: Particle accelerator designer Suzy Sheehy (RI CHANNEL)

The restoration of an angel tax credit in Michigan looks doubtful before the present legislative term expires at the end of the year.

The bills sponsored by Republican Rep. Jeff Farrington of Utica cleared committee last month on narrow votes and continue to sit in the Republican-controlled state House. Leadership in the House has told Farrington “that given the limited time left in session this term, the bills are not a priority, especially with the less than overwhelming support they received coming out of committee,” he wrote in an email to MiBiz.

Early-stage startups require a host of things in order and securing capital is one of them. While access to seed fund was not easy till 2013, it has undergone a significant change in the last three years it has undergone a significant change. As a result, we see no dearth of seed capital to startups that achieved product-market fit. Early-stage investment has matured immensely in the past five years.  said Sanjay Nath, Founder of Blume Venture:

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The research capabilities of our universities are essential to the vitality of our innovation ecosystem and ability to continue to compete effectively

New Jersey is the cradle of American innovation in such transformative fields as telecommunications, life sciences, and chemicals, and is home to many iconic companies. These industries have produced countless advances that have benefitted society enormously while driving our state’s economy for well over a century.

Image: Dean J. Paranoiacs - http://www.njspotlight.com

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Seattle and Vancouver are like fraternal twins separated at birth. Both are bustling Pacific Northwest coastal cities with eco-conscious populations that have accepted the bargain of dispiriting weather for much of the year in exchange for nearby ski slopes and kayaking and glorious summers.

Yet 140 miles of traffic-choked roads and an international border divide the two cities, keeping them farther apart than their geographic and cultural identities would suggest.