Forterra Systems Inc., a California startup focused on virtual reality, was in need of money and its products didn’t have much commercial appeal. Then funds came in from a source based far from Silicon Valley: In-Q-Tel Inc., a venture-capital firm in Virginia funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been a boon to startups and business owners looking to raise money, and interest, for new products. Kickstarter alone has raised over $2.5 billion for more than 110,000 projects from over 11.3 million backers – and Indiegogo isn’t far behind.

But as anyone who has tried crowdfunding will tell you, for every successful campaign there are many that miss the mark.

As China moves quickly towards becoming the biggest economy in the world, its private and public investment in innovation is heading the same way. China’s Next Strategic Advantage not only documents the history of Chinese economic development, but also points to the rise of Chinese innovation capability and its implications outside China’s borders.

No disrespect to higher education. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in getting a University degree and I do have my degree in business and economics. But, who exactly said that you have to go to business school to start a business? I started my first business before I went to University and kept it going all through my University career - difficult and crazy, yes, but there have been thousands of businesses started by entrepreneurs who launched a business without ever earning a diploma.

In every office, I've often felt, there are just a few people who do three times the work of everyone else, yet their reward is only marginally higher. As an entrepreneur, I've been managing my own productivity time—not on-the-clock-time—pretty effectively for over 15 years, and I've largely been able to work fewer hours than my friends in the corporate world. So when I started Tower, my company that sells stand-up paddle boards, I figured (or at least hoped) that I could hire just these types and give them a better deal in the process.

Image: Flickr user Hairi

The Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children’s National Health System in Washington, DC, is pursuing the goal of making pediatric surgery more precise, less invasive, and pain free. By combining research and clinical work in the areas of imaging, bioengineering, pain medicine, immunology and personalized medicine, the Institute’s physicians and scientists are developing knowledge, tools, and procedures that will benefit children globally. The Institute also offers multiple funding opportunities to pediatric device innovators annually, both independently and as an FDA-funded Pediatric Device Innovation Consortium, and helps them pave the road to market/bedside by forging relationships with its network of prospective investors as well as experts in business, regulatory, engineering, and clinical fields. The Institute was founded in 2010 thanks to a historic and transformational gift of $150 million from the government of Abu Dhabi – the largest gift ever made to any children’s hospital.

The last year has seen a much-needed focus in Australian politics and public discourse on disruption and innovation. Finally, we began moving away from talking about digging things out of the ground, and started taking a good look at the intelligence and innovation economy. Tax credits for early stage startups, a focus on surviving from failure, and other measures (along with much of the general chatter) focused heavily on small businesses. Would-be pundits were conjuring up images in the public’s eye of a few hackers around a laptop striving to be the next Zuckerberg or Jobs.

BOSTON >> A major business association gave Senate President Stan Rosenberg its lowest score this election cycle, and criticized the Senate's work in the current legislative session.

"While the House of Representatives and Speaker Robert DeLeo successfully forged consensus on important measures such as wage equity and energy, the Senate hewed to a more progressive, ideological approach that produced a steady stream of bills with the potential to harm the Massachusetts economy," the Associated Industries of Massachusetts wrote in a scorecard released Monday that was based on a dozen recorded votes.

When you’re managing managers, your responsibilities are two-fold: you need to make sure they’re producing good work (as with any employee) and that they’re effectively supporting their teams. You might know how to do the former, but how do you do the latter? Do you need to provide training? Coaching? And how do you serve as a good role model?

Most of the time, the best decisions respect or reinforce the norms and values of your organization. That gets you buy-in and commitment. But how do you raise the odds of doing this? One approach is to run through a simple mental exercise – before you actually make a decision that will affect many parts of your organization. It’s basically testing your options for resonance.

GOAT just announced it raised $5 million in venture capital led by our friends at Matrix Partners. On the surface that sounds unremarkable — fundings happen daily. But this isn’t just any funding. GOAT (“Greatest of All Time) is a sneakerhead marketplace that is en fuego, but we led the company’s last financing round in 2012 (yes, four years ago) when they were an application for letting people join group dinners.

Image: https://bothsidesofthetable.com

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed a new rule Friday that would allow international entrepreneurs additional years of U.S. residency to start and build their businesses.

“Today marks an important step in attracting the world’s best and brightest entrepreneurs to start the next generation of great companies and create jobs here in the United States,” White House technology directors Tom Kalil and Doug Rand wrote in a blog post.

Image: http://www.bizjournals.com

More than 40 percent of U.S-based Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, according to a 2011 report from the Partnership for a New American Economy. Yet too often, entrepreneurs are forced to leave the United States before a business can get off the ground—or, worse, they're forced to leave while they're running it.

Massachusetts biotechnology startups have experienced a surge in seed-stage funding in 2016, a Massachusetts Biotechnology Council (MassBIO) report said.

Massachusetts biotechnology startups received $300 million in seed funding through the second quarter, compared to $150 million for all of 2015, the report said. Seed-stage funding is the initial funding sought by a biotech venture engaged in research and development.

By almost all accounts, the capital available to tech startups in Silicon Valley is slowing. The VC’s I talk with are telling me they are slowing their investments and taking fewer risks, and predictions are that investments will continue this way for some time. At the same time, there are more tech companies than ever before fighting for funding.

According to a recent study published in Science, plastic debris in the marine environment are widely documented, but the quantity of plastic entering the ocean from waste generated on land is unknown. By linking worldwide data on solid waste, population density, and economic status, the authors of the study calculated that 275 million metric tons (MT) of plastic waste were generated in 192 coastal countries in 2010, with 4.8 to 12.7 million MT entering the ocean. Other researchers estimate that approximately 8.8 million MT of plastic find their way into the world's oceans every year. While the amount of plastic in waterways can only be speculated, the island of Manhattan, a part of New York City, is already surrounded by its own mini version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Most of the plastic particles are Styrofoam-based, according to the New York Times; other categories include fishing line, clothing fiber, pellets, and film.

Our oceans are not only home to large pieces of plastic, but also to minute plastic particles, called microplastics. Researchers now know that microplastic particles can be found in all sea regions, even in arctic sea ice.

Once in the ocean, all plastic trash eventually breaks down into tiny pieces. Many of these are lighter than water and float on the sea's surface. Over time, exposure to sunlight and wave movements create miniscule plastic pieces, which sometimes end up inside the stomachs of fish.

Let’s set the clock a few months back. The time: March 2016. The place: London. There we find the team behind Filisia Interfaces, The Accelerator 2014 finalist and a Metavallon Network Startup, aiming to transform assistive technologies, as it is about to launch its first ever equity crowdfunding campaign. Why? The team needs to raise £150,000 in order to produce the first batch of their product Monoma, that supports the access and training of people with disabilities via interactive music making and gamified rehabilitation software modules. By the end of the campaign, the results are rather lukewarm with Filisia making just half of its goal.

Eli Lilly ($LLY) has been doubling down on its efforts to invent new animal vaccines--opening a 48,000-square-foot research facility near its Indianapolis headquarters, for example, that its animal health division, Elanco, will use for R&D. On the production-animal side of the business, Elanco’s bread and butter until now has been cattle and swine products, but the company is looking to expand into a rapidly growing corner of food production where it has had virtually no presence: aquaculture.

Image: http://www.fiercepharma.com

Pharmaceutical pricing got thrown onto the front page again last week, causing the expected anaphylactic reactions among politicians, practitioners and parents. The root of this crisis: EpiPen’s 600% price increase over the past eight years. The biannual upticks underlying that number finally caused a blowback as back-to-school buyers were faced with big out-of-pocket expenses this year that their insurers passed on to them.