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.
A tidal wave of valuable data is surging from the Internet and connected devices today, and the volume is growing exponentially each year. It’s enough to drown any business which tries to fight it or ignore it, and it’s an opportunity to ride higher and faster than even the successes of Google and Facebook, for those startups that use it as their driving force.
As pessimistic as views of the future can get, the striking truth is that philanthropy is growing. Meanwhile, more than a billion people have risen out of extreme poverty, and the lines between for-profit enterprise and non-profits for social good are blurring as micro-lending organisations and fair-trade certified products enter the mainstream.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
For the South African government to achieve its goal of creating five million jobs over ten years, the SME sector would need to grow by a staggering 40%. Pravin Gordhan, the Minister of Finance, emphasised the importance of SMEs in achieving this goal by stating that “about 70% of private employment is in firms with fewer than 50 workers”. This supports what we have always known about the SME sector: it has a critical role in supporting economic and social development.
Image: http://ventureburn.com
As an investor in enterprise mobile startups, I meet with hundreds of entrepreneurs every year whose business plans include the “mobile” buzzword.
Many of them are app companies that target consumers or ad networks and platforms that help reach them.
While these are interesting and will certainly yield some unicorns, I think there are even bigger opportunities for startups that leverage mobile technology to solve the most pressing problems for enterprises.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
There have been some reports that there are now more corporate VCs in the market than traditional venture firms. Using CB Insights data, we tested this by scanning active U.S. VC and corporate venture arms over the past four years.
The reality is that there are, in fact, significantly more pure-play VCs than corporate venture arms. In fact, even if you included corporations making investments in startups who don’t have a separately delineated corporate venture unit, financial VCs still greatly outnumber corporate investors.
Image: http://www.cbinsights.com
Education technology (ed tech) hit a record high in Q1 2014 as investors poured more than $559 million across 103 deals. Yes over half a billion dollars and over 100 deals in just the last three months. Of note, Ed Tech funding in Q1 2014 represented nearly 45% of total funding to the sector in all of 2013.
The record quarter comes after Ed Tech investments hit $1.25B across 378 deals in in 2013, the second-straight year of over $1B invested across the Ed Tech sector. With everything from MOOCs to tutoring marketplaces to standardized APIs for K-12 schools getting funding, investors are clearly bullish on the education industry.
Image: http://www.cbinsights.com/
I was finally getting to my giant pile of reading this week when I saw an article in Health Care Information Week that included the following sentence:
As consumer satisfaction begins to have a bigger impact on the bottom line, more hospitals are hiring a chief patient experience officer (CXO) to treat patients like valued customers.
Maybe it’s me, as a born and bred marketing person, but that seems like the weirdest concept in the world. In layman’s terms it basically means this: Hospitals are waking up to the fact that patients are actually their customers (go figure) and failure to notice this fact will reduce their revenue. Another fact: it wasn’t until CMS decided to penalize hospitals for poor patient satisfaction by docking their reimbursement by up to 2 percent that hospitals started to get religion on this topic.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Daphne Zohar, the founder of PureTech Ventures, isn’t afraid to take big technical risks when it comes to funding new innovations. Nor is she necessarily put off by technologies that demonstrate clinical proof-of-concept without a clear explanation of why.
In fact, those are the kind of potential breakthrough technologies that the firm finds most intriguing.
Image: http://medcitynews.com
After seeing how the federal agencies intend to implement the recommendations from The White House Lab to Market Summit the difference between product and process oriented people really hit home.
Product people burn with a passion to get the job done. Process people focus on rules and procedures to minimize risk. Thus, product people are like the accelerator and process people are the brakes. You need both in your car, but if the brakes run the show you’ll never get out of the driveway. Similarly, whenever deal makers are subservient in a system to process people, frustration is sure to follow.
The digital revolution has given birth to a new generation of networked consumers with big imaginations and even bigger appetites for innovation. It’s not surprising, then, that 90 percent of global executives and 88 percent of U.S. executives believe that innovation is a strategic priority and more than a third see product/service innovation as a key growth pathway in 2014 .
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Leaders are accountable to assemble teams and lead them to optimal performance outcomes. An effective leader recognizes the importance of embracing differences in people and knows how to connect the dots amongst those differences to get the best outcomes from the team. This is what cultivates a workplace environment of continuous improvements, innovation and initiative. Leaders must foster a commitment from the team to embrace an innovation mindset where each employee learns to apply the differences that exist in one another for their own success and that of the organization.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is kicking off National Distracted Driving Awareness Month with a 30-second ad illustrating how even one thoughtless time texting while driving can be deadly.
The ad, from The Tombras Group, draws you in with a slice-of-life scene featuring a few teens laughing and chatting in a car. The driver receives a text, looks at her phone and blows past a stop sign — then, a truck broadsides her car. The action plays out in excruciatingly slow motion.
Image: http://mashable.com
You pored over your resume, ensuring it’s typo-free, grammatically correct, and highlights your best skills.
You even edited it down to one page. But, still, it may be riddled with the very things that can make hiring managers’ eyes roll or glaze over in boredom: buzzwords.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Not every community needs a fiber-to-the-home network. Not every home needs a gig to their doorstep. In our gigabit crazy era this statement might seem like a step backward, but take note that there’s more than one option for delivering the speed consumers and businesses need. Even Google is hinting that some form of wireless might become part of its goodie bag of services.
Image: http://gigaom.com
As our computing requirements change, the nature of the underlying electronics needs to change too. We’re moving into an era of wearable gadgets that require flexibility and new user interfaces – and there are many advances required to make that happen.
Some of those advances were on show last week at IDTechex’s Printed Electronics Europe show in Berlin, which as usual also took in events dedicated to other narrow fields such as graphene and energy harvesting (on which I reported last year). The stuff on show this year was particularly mind-blowing.
Image: : David Meyer
A blood sample could one day be enough to diagnose many types of solid cancers, or to monitor the amount of cancer in a patient’s body and responses to treatment. Previous versions of the approach, which relies on monitoring levels of tumor DNA circulating in the blood, have required cumbersome and time-consuming steps to customize it to each patient or have not been sufficiently sensitive.
Image: http://scienceblog.com
Here's the ironic truth about innovation: It gets copied a lot.
A year ago, I visited a startup in San Francisco and asked about a replica of the iconic British red telephone booth sitting in the middle of the office.
"Oh that?" the office manager said. "I saw that on Craigslist and thought it would look great."
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Elissa Shevinsky can pinpoint the moment when she felt that she no longer belonged.
She was at a friend’s house last Sept. 8, watching the live stream of the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon on her laptop and iPhone. Entrepreneurs were showing off their products, and two young Australian men, David Boulton and Jethro Batts, stood behind the podium to give their presentation. “Titstare is an app where you take photos of yourself staring at tits,” Mr. Boulton began, as photographs of women’s chests on a cellphone flashed on the screen behind him.
Image: Pax Dickinson, left, and Elissa Shevinsky ended their working partnership after he tweeted in defense of an app called Titstare. The two reconciled after Mr. Dickinson wrote a public apology. Credit Elizabeth D. Herman for The New York Times
More and more in Silicon Valley, we’re seeing less and less of an interest in pursuing MBA programs. It seems every week a new story highlights the opportunity costs of these programs, the unemployment rates for its graduates (though less than 5 percent of Harvard's class of 2012 was unemployed three months after graduating) and the celebrated entrepreneurs who didn’t finish college let alone a graduate program (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg).
Image: Celestine Chua via Flickr
If you are an entrepreneur who has launched a startup, you know the feeling of pouring your heart and soul into a business. At some point along the way, it’s possible that you’ve also been told that you shouldn’t take your business matters personally -- after all, “it’s just business.” Easier said than done.
Often, founders have a difficult time finding a balance between focusing on the x's and o's of building a business while still letting their passion and emotional investment guide them.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
