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.
Startups Studios are a new kind of accelerators for innovation: instead of accelerating startups previously settled, like traditional incubators and accelerators do, they participate to the set-up of the start-up. A start-up studio is a company that starts companies:
Immigrants are essential to economic growth in America. That is the conclusion of a recent report on The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration released by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
What are the three reasons why immigrants are important to economic growth? Labor force growth, entrepreneurship and human capital.
In today’s rapidly changing digital landscape, companies that understand their talent needs and know how to meet them have a competitive edge. Here’s how they do it.
While few would debate the importance of technology talent, its importance in successfully executing a digital transformation is often underappreciated. Over the next five years, large companies will invest, on average, hundreds of millions of dollars—and some more than a billion dollars—to transform their business to digital.
B.C.’s economy has always relied on an abundance of natural resources to produce prosperity. But a combination of accelerating forces including demographic change and the wider adoption of new technology is driving a rapid shift in our economy toward new ways of generating wealth.
Now, more than ever, B.C. needs innovation to develop new products, new processes and new jobs to build the economy of the future.
With just an afternoon to take their ideas from paper to prototype, there was a steady flow of people running back and forth from a Union Station conference room to the 3-D printers and laser cutters outside.
The scene was reminiscent of a Startup Weekend or GlobalHack tech startup event, where participants scramble to create a business plan for a new app or software program on deadline.
Newswise — The University of North Dakota, in partnership with Iowa State University, Kansas State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is leading a multi-institution Digital Agriculture Spoke grant of about $1 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The NSF describes the UND-led project as follows: Digital Agriculture - Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Plant Sciences and Education.
“This is unequivocal testimony from the federal government that UND can lead Big Data efforts,” said Grant McGimpsey (pronounced mah-JIM-sey), vice president for research & economic development and co-PI on the NSF award. McGimpsey also is dean of the UND School of Graduate Studies.
When Deona Duke woke up from a medically-induced coma to begin recovering from burns that covered almost a third of her body, one of her treatments was hurling snowballs at penguins. The 13-year-old was set on fire when a bonfire exploded on her and her friend. To prevent infection, burn victims need their bandages changed and dead skin scraped away. Sometimes, even morphine isn’t enough to make that tolerable. At the Shriners Hospital for Children in Galveston, Duke’s doctors gave her a virtual reality headset. Slipping it on, she was immersed in “SnowWorld,” an icy landscape where she got to lob snow at snowmen and igloos. The Texas hospital is one of the few trying out virtual reality to relieve pain.
Not everyone is born for the traditional 9-to-5 job. And not everyone is a born entrepreneur. While many Americans prefer the security of working for others, others prefer the risk of starting their own businesses and positioning themselves for substantial rewards.
But is entrepreneurship a smart choice? It can be, but only for the right kind of person.
Here are some reasons you might be better suited to be a business-builder than a rank-and-file employee.
After being an entrepreneur for 16 years, Anu Acharya is no stranger to challenges. But from 2011, with Mapmygenome’s Genomepatri, Anu has been slowly and yet steadily transforming the way we look at treatment and preventive healthcare.
At the seventh edition of ‘TechSparks 2016’, Anu Acharya decided to decipher if genetics can determine entrepreneurship, with the eternal nurture versus nature. Talking about her own example, Anu says;
Image: https://yourstory.com
More than one billion was raised by startups based out of the Netherlands over the last 12-month period. The number cements the Netherlands as a formidable hub for startup activity in Europe. To be precise, Amsterdam has officially reached number six on the list of the best European startup ecosystems.
The Netherlands’ startups, which cover the range from incubator stage to seed to growth stage and later, have seen healthy capital from a number of investors over the past few years, and one VC has decided to cover the community in more depth.
Let go of 'inbox zero'
In today’s digital world, we’re often expected to be on email at all times. Recent studies show that office workers spend almost a third of their total workday reading and responding to messages. This constant connectivity can be harmful: scientists have established a clear link between spending time on email and feeling stress.
The lights dimmed inside the Shenzhen Bay Sports Stadium as the countdown to the match began. "Wu, si, san, er, yi!" A chime sounded and two teams of robots sprang into action across an intricately constructed battlefield. In the stands, thousands of fans cheered, and groups of small children beat red and blue balloons together, producing a percussive roar.
Each team had four rovers, nimble infantry units that quickly spread over the terrain. The rovers were shaped like small cars, but could also slide side to side, strafing like water bugs over the surface of a lake. They fired small plastic marbles from cannons mounted on top of their frames. Lumbering alongside the nimble rovers was each team’s hero, a larger tank-like robot that could fire the small plastic marbles as well as more powerful golf balls.
Image: http://www.theverge.com
The way to make money in technology,” a young Bill Gates told me in the summer of 1990, “is by setting de facto standards.” It worked, too. For years, Microsoft enjoyed more than 90 percent of the market for several categories of PC software.
The IBM PC may have defined a hardware standard, but IBM contracted the work of supplying an operating system to Microsoft and, in haste or a corporate fit of unconsciousness, permitted Microsoft to sell its software to other hardware manufacturers. The first microcomputers could do nothing without Microsoft’s version of the BASIC programming language.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F077948-0006,_Jugend-Computerschule_mit_IBM-PC.jpg
SOUTH BURLINGTON — While thinking about space exploration might be associated with Cape Canaveral, Florida, or Houston, Texas, a startup company in Vermont could change some people’s thinking about space and place.
GreenScale Technologies, a University of Vermont spinoff, was recently recognized at the 2016 University Startups Demo Day on Sept. 20 in the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C. The event was organized by the National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer. GreenScale was recognized as one of 36 “university startups to watch,” or “best university startups” in 2016.
IT WAS DECEMBER 2012, and Doug Burger was standing in front of Steve Ballmer, trying to predict the future.
Ballmer, the big, bald, boisterous CEO of Microsoft, sat in the lecture room on the ground floor of Building 99, home base for the company’s blue-sky R&D lab just outside Seattle. The tables curved around the outside of the room in a U-shape, and Ballmer was surrounded by his top lieutenants, his laptop open. Burger, a computer chip researcher who had joined the company four years earlier, was pitching a new idea to the execs. He called it Project Catapult.
Image: Doug Burger. CLAYTON COTTERELL FOR WIRED
We’re surrounded by intangible information. Every second of the day, radio waves resonate encrypted messages through our walls, furniture, and skulls. And to translate this omnipresent flood, we pick up our phones or open our laptops, pressing endless buttons while staring into screens. It’s one of the great problems with interfaces today—and one not necessarily solved by something like the Apple Watch, which really just shrinks the screen for your wrist.
Last week researchers released the first results from the UK Biobank Imaging Study, a massive effort that ultimately aims to scan the brains of 100,000 people and use the data in conjunction with detailed health information to investigate disease progression during aging. The findings from their first 5,000 subjects offer an early peek at an enormous data set that includes a treasure trove of health information from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and other measures. The study is one of several projects worldwide taking a population-level approach to better understand diseases, and is part of an ongoing movement in neuroscience toward global, collaborative brain research.
Image: MRI scans and other measures from thousands of individuals paint a picture of the brain across a population. Credit: UK Biobank Imaging Study
Scott Stanford, Sherpa Capital co-founder, and David Trujillo, TPG partner, discuss the changing trends in tech investing with Bloomberg's Emily Chang on "Bloomberg West." (Source: Bloomberg)
When you hear the phrase “healthcare innovation,” what naturally comes to mind is technology. Genomics, analytics, telemedicine and remote monitoring, mobile apps and a dozen other technological advances are improving care in all kinds of ways. But there is another area of innovation that could have an even bigger impact on the health of U.S. residents: new ways of paying for chronic care management.
Historically, U.S. physicians – and especially primary care physicians – have been paid far more for what they do with their hands than what they do with their minds. For a variety of reasons, Medicare and private health plans paid for office visits and procedures, but paid little for medical management, essentially prioritizing procedures and doing things to the patient over care to prevent the illness in the first place. The result of this short-sighted payment environment has been skyrocketing costs, inefficient use of resources and poor health outcomes. As a nation, more than 75% of our healthcare spending is on people with chronic conditions, and seven out of 10 deaths each year are from chronic diseases.
MADISON, Wis.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--BioForward, Inc., the voice for biohealth in Wisconsin, unveiled a united effort to make Wisconsin a world leader in biomanufacturing during its lunch panel at the BioForward Summit in Madison. Moving out of the shadow of bioscience hubs in Boston on California, Wisconsin boasts a powerful biomanufacturing and medtech footprint – with almost $27 Billion in economic output.
