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 few years ago, a landmark Stanford study came out showing that people tasked with remembering one digit made much better decisions than people charged with remembering seven digits. The two groups were each presented with a choice to eat calorie-laden cake or healthy fruit. The seven-digit crowd ate 50% more cake. The culprit: Cognitive load.
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Each year, one courageous startup takes to the podium at the Ohio Venture Association’s annual summit to pitch the business to three investors and dozens of others watching from the crowd. It’s part of a fantastic, interactive panel that’s meant to give the entrepreneurs on stage and in the audience insight into what investors are looking for during a presentation.
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Is the maker of Candy Crush Saga worth more than $7 billion? We're about to find out.
King Digital Entertainment, the company behind the hugely popular Candy Crush mobile game, said in an SEC filing Wednesday that it plans to price its IPO at between $21 to $24 a share. At the high-end of that range, King would raise $533 million and be valued at about $7.6 billion.
Image: MASHABLE, WILL FENSTERMAKER
The average tech CEO works about 300 days a year, 14 hours a day. That’s 4,200 hours a year. The stats for most other tech leaders and startup employees aren’t too far off. It sounds like a lot of time, but for most, it’s not enough. Nearly 30% of that time gets sunk into email. Another third gets spent in meetings — and studies show that half of those hours are completely wasted.
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We’ve all been there. Your boss schedules an emergency meeting on top of an already jam-packed day. A client calls with a last-minute project. And your new mattress delivery has been rescheduled for a week from Thursday (again).
Instead of letting a crummy call or series of unfortunate events set the tone for the rest of your day, try one of these tips to help you step away from the stress and move on.
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Perhaps one of the most persistent struggles when dealing with anxiety is what people get wrong about the disorder.
According to Joseph Bienvenu, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, there are many fallacies when it comes to anxiety disorders, and that can make dealing with it more difficult. These misconceptions are a common reality for those who either have the condition, know someone who is battling it or think they may be on the brink of a diagnosis. We've debunked the 10 of the most common myths about anxiety and panic disorders.
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In all of his 19 years, Tywan Wade never learned to listen to the word “no.”
Which is why, as a college freshman, he built his own iPhone app despite having no background in computer science.
Wade’s perseverance paid off in the form of Shortly, a simple weather app for iPhone that uses an algorithm to answer yes or no questions like, “Can I wear shorts today?”
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WHEN Marvin Gay, 71, a retired accountant, and his wife, Leslie, 61, decided to open a Painting With a Twist franchise in St. Petersburg, Fla., their start-up costs were close to $70,000.
To finance the business, which combines art instruction with bring-your-own wine (or soft drink) parties, the couple tapped their personal savings.
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Bitcoin, a purely digital currency, is backed by no commodity and governed by no central bank, but it exists because a small number of humans have chosen to believe in its legitimacy.
Its pseudonymous creator (or, more likely, creators) “Satoshi Nakamoto” willed it into existence in 2009, not only describing how the so-called cryptocurrency would work but shipping a full working implementation. The original software had all the hallmarks of a gag or hack: a great, metastasizing practical joke played by clever cyberlibertarian coders upon all who put their faith in fiat (that is, government-backed) currencies.
Image: http://www.technologyreview.com
Every day on my way to work, I walk past the “Deepthroat Garage,” the once-secret spot where The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward met FBI Associate Director Mark Felt to swap info that eventually brought down President Richard Nixon in The Watergate scandal. It is a spot that resonates deeply with people in Washington, marked with a historical placard for those who are passing by. There is another historical marker 100 feet from that location that is nowhere near as popular but arguably more significant. Across the intersection where Wilson and Clarendon boulevards meet marks the spot where the Internet was invented.
Image: Greg Otto A historical marker in Rosslyn marks the birthplace of ARPANET, the technology that eventually led to the creation of the World Wide Web. The Web turned 25 on March 12.
In the Washington region and across the country, the number of government-backed business incubators and accelerators has grown as public officials look for ways to support entrepreneurs, spur innovation and bolster their local economies.
However, not every space employs the same business model, uses taxpayer dollars in the same manner or offers the same resources to its companies. And this leaves plenty of room for debate over what works and what doesn’t when the government tries to support start-ups.
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At 39, I was the CEO of a company with a few hundred employees. Depending on the day and the employee you asked, I’d rate anywhere from a zero to a seven on the unkindness scale (10 being a tyrant). I’d guess that I normally hovered around 4.5. I doubt anyone would have rated me a 10—that takes a particular kind of malevolence. I wasn’t taken to raging, other than on one occasion when the lives of the participants in our Montana AIDS Vaccine Ride (a 1,500-person, seven-day bike ride across the Rockies to fight the disease) were in jeopardy during a horrific mountain wind storm that literally blew our temporary city apart. But day to day, I was fairly consistently stern and serious.
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“Why change my leadership style? It got us to this point, where we’ve established a real beachhead in our market.”
These are the famous last words of many an entrepreneur. Failing to realize that critical transition points in the growth of an enterprise require leaders to shift emphasis, they blindly stick with what has been working up to that point. The company stalls. Confusion grows among key team members, investors, customers and suppliers. And, ultimately, the failure to understand the demands of the transition lead to the failure of the company itself.
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Governments should not be passing funding to companies – governments should be sending money to venture capital firms. There needs to be an entrepreneurial stake in investment.”
This was the message from Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman and interim CEO of Nokia, as he called for a greater push towards public-private partnering in Europe at the European Union’s Innovation Convention in Brussels this week.
Image: http://bulliten.sciencebusiness.net : Risto Siilasmaa, Chairman and interim CEO of Nokia
With $100 million in initial funding, Siemens has added a new venture capital fund to its Industry Sector and Venture Capital Unit. The fund, known as the Industry of the Future fund, was established to help back start-up technology companies early in their lifecycle. This type of targeting differentiates the Industry of the Future fund from Siemens’ other venture capital funds that focus on what Siemens refers to as “more mature start-ups.”
When offshoring entered the popular lexicon, in the 1990s, it became shorthand for efforts to arbitrage labor costs by using lower-wage workers in developing nations. But savvy manufacturing leaders saw it as more: a decisive change in globalization, made possible by a wave of liberalization in countries such as China and India, a steady improvement in the capabilities of emerging-market suppliers and workers, a growing ability to transfer proven management processes to new locales, and increasingly favorable transportation and communications economics.
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An inspiring historical story is once again making the rounds at least partially because of its inclusion in Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, David and Goliath. In it, Gladwell tells the story of the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which became a safe haven for Jews in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. Led by minister André Trocmé, the residents of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon saved between 3,000 and 3,500 Jews (in addition to others seeking refuge) from 1940 until the end of the war, bringing them into the community and hiding them from French and Nazi officials. By any measure, their actions were courageous and inspiring. They were also an example of the power of community in leadership.
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IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR NEW JOB OPPORTUNITIES, YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW IMPORTANT IT IS TO HAVE EYES ON YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE. NOW THE NETWORKING SITE'S NEW REDESIGN GIVES YOU THE TOOLS TO ATTRACT EVEN MORE.
If you look at the right side of your LinkedIn profile, you'll see an intriguing text box: Who's Viewed Your Profile, the networking equivalent of catching someone checking you out on the subway. And if you know how to use the feature right, it can land you business or a job.
“Imagine you’re sitting across from a reporter at lunch. You’re telling them what you do, your story, why they should care about your product. You have to convince this reporter to not only write about you, but that what you’re doing matters. That you’re going to be successful.”
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If you haven’t yet bought Ben Horowitz’s book The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, go get it right now. It’s one of the best books you’ll ever read on entrepreneurship and being a CEO.
If you are a CEO, read this book.
If you aspire to be a CEO read this book.
If you are on a management team and want to understand what a CEO goes through, read this book.
If you are interested in entrepreneurship and want to understand it better, read this book.
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