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.
Innovation is one of the most bandied about terms in global business today, but exactly what it means can be nebulous. Since this is a blog about innovation, I thought it important for the first post to define how I think firms and entrepreneurs should view innovation. Innovation can be described in different ways, through…
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AUSTIN, Texas — Imagine a world in which everyone is empowered to take charge of their own health care by discovering their personal genetic risk factors. That's the vision of Anne Wojcicki, founder and CEO of the personalized gene-testing company 23andMe.
Image: 23andMe founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki talks about the benefits of personalized genetic testing, at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas. Credit: Tanya Lewis
The Rowan University Foundation announced on March 11 it will give $5 million to a new venture capital fund catered to the Glassboro, N.J., school’s faculty, students and alumni. Its goal: to promote more researchers and entrepreneurs. With an endowment of about $175 million, the Rowan Foundation can make a “meaningful investment,” Rowan Foundation chair Paul Tully said in a statement.
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State officials are pouring a lot more cash into Scale Up Milwaukee, the entrepreneurship program that tests a college professor’s theories by helping existing businesses push for more rapid growth.
For its second year, Scale Up is getting $350,000 from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., officials told Xconomy. That represents a big increase in support from the state’s lead economic development agency, which contributed just $50,000 in Scale Up’s first year.
Chances are that you have said something you wish you could take back at least once in your life. While suffering from a sudden case of foot-in-mouth disease can be merely embarrassing in most instances, it can all but ruin your chances of getting a job when it happens during an interview.
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We all have lists of things we'd like to do more of, if only we had the time: exercising, reading, mentoring others. But even the busiest of people can make space in their lives for what really matters. And mentoring should be on that list.
Take Laurie Glimcher, an immunologist and dean of the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. “Frankly, I have always thought that my most important job . . . was mentoring the next generation of physicians and scientists,” she says. Glimcher stood by this even when she had three young kids at home and was building a research lab at Harvard.
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I’ve noticed that the way I spend my lunch break affects how productive I am for the rest of the day: how quickly I get started once I get back to my desk, how effective I am in the first hour after lunch, and how I feel throughout the afternoon.
Luckily, we’ve been writing about ways to improve your day for a while now: from tips on making your environment more conducive to creativity to pushing through writer’s block.
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As a newbie investor contemplating on making the best use of your savings by making an investment through opening up a brokerage account on pouring it on stocks, it is imperative to introspect and ponder carefully before taking plunge. For like every investor you are human and this means committing mistakes is something very commonly witnessed even in pro investors. Investment comes with uncertainty and hence there is no specific formula or computerized program that can give you the right idea of whether the money you pour in will provide you with valuable returns. Often emotional behaviors on investors’ part leave them making mistakes in their investment decisions. So before you invest and trigger circumstances where you relent later, here are 5 common mistakes you should avoid as an investor.
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You might have thought the Oscars selfie was dead. After all, there's not much more you can do when it's been both Simpsons-ized and made out of Lego bricks. But it hasn't been drawn — until now.
Artist Heather Rooney gave the famed selfie one of her excellent drawn renditions, as she's known for on YouTube. In this time-lapse video, watch Rooney reproduce the picture in astonishing detail using colored pencils.
“Inequality is bad.” “Inequality is dangerous.” “Our system is at risk due to increasing inequality.”
Wealth inequality is on everyone’s minds these days: citizens, political leaders, economists, policymakers and yes, business leaders. Unfortunately, simpleminded thinking and insensitivity are often clouding the conversation. Deservedly vaunted venture capitalist Tom Perkins’ callous, arrogant and elitist recent comments should not serve as an expedient excuse to overlook an important “dirty little secret” about entrepreneurship, the acknowledged engine of economic growth: successful entrepreneurship always exacerbates local inequality, at least in the short run.
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During a recent “Creating Strategic Impact” workshop, I had the attendees (who were all from one company) form smaller groups to identify potential disruptive competitive threats in their technology industry.
Talking in advance with the client organization’s president, he said his people might struggle with this strategic thinking exercise since they hadn’t previously addressed competitive threats this way.
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Jennifer Fonstad and Theresia Gouw believe there’s money to be made in bringing diversity to Silicon Valley. That’s why they left their respective venture capital firms last month to start Aspect Ventures, a fund that aims not only to invest in early-stage mobile startups but to infuse these fledgling companies with some added gender and cultural diversity.
Image: Theresia Gouw and Jennifer Fonstad discuss a possible investment with Silicon Valley startup UrbanSitter. Photo: Talia Herman/WIRED
Good managers study time management techniques. They analyze their calendars and prioritize their to-do lists in an effort to eke out a few percentage points of extra personal productivity — which is all to the good. Great managers, by contrast, realize a fundamental fact: their time, not budget or staffing levels, is their scarcest resource and their team must be staffed and organized in a way that will maximize their own, personal impact.
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Mouse, cookie, spam — all of these words are double agents.
The common terms take on a second meaning when it comes to the tech world. Everyday words are lifted from the dictionary and crafted to have entirely different meanings to represent their computer counterparts.
Image Courtesy of Grant Cochrane / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Franz Helm’s illustrated manual on pyrotechnic weapons was around for more than four centuries before it went viral.
When the German artillery expert wrote the manual, in the mid-1500s, he unwittingly created a piece of media ideally suited to the tastes of 21st-century Internet culture: Cats that appeared to be wearing jet packs.
Image: Courtesy of U. of Pennsylvania
AUSTIN, Tex. — Health technology startups shone this year at South by Southwest Interactive.
Pedicab bikers raved about TumorPaint (the inventor of the “molecular flashlight” delivered a rousing talk), and Misfit Wearables piqued excitement by giving out 100 of its free fitness devices to attendees. And a mental health startup called ThriveOn beat out social networking apps to win Best of Show at the accelerator competition.
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Here’s a testament to how 3D printing is making rapid prototyping more accessible to startups and entrepreneurs. Pictured here is a smartphone case designed and 3D printed by 15-year-old Suman Mulumudi, a student at Lakeside School in Seattle (where Bill Gates attended).
Mulumundi is also the CEO of Stratoscientific, a company he co-founded with his father, a cardiologist, to commercialize the case and another cardiology device he developed.
Image: http://medcitynews.com
You may not need a degree to start a great company, but many founders have degrees — advanced degrees — from top business schools. One such school producing tech startup founders is Harvard Business School — some of the most successful startups that came out of it include Gilt Groupe, Rent the Runway and Birchbox.
Image: FLICKR, PATRICIADRURY
A sophisticated pill bottle that harnesses the internet of things by glowing when medication is required, failing which an audible alarm is activated, before finally sending a text message to a designated person to ensure that chronic medication is never missed; A unit to process sewerage in a way that harvests methane, water, biomass and nutrition for growing food; A shopping cart that automatically calculates the cost of items through sensors as goods are placed in the cart; Public sleep cubicles that address the rampant levels of sleep deprivation affecting society; An unsnoozable ankle alarm bracelet that only turns off once sensing consistent foot movement; Imagining a new battery system that allows phones and other electronic devices to be charged using energy from other devices transferred via Bluetooth; and so the ideas keep rolling in.
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A few years ago I started calling the local tech ecosystem down here #LATech. I had an agenda. We graduate more engineers in our greater region than anywhere else in the US. We have top 25 engineering schools than anywhere else, too.
I never wanted to be a derivative of Silicon Valley. I have the utmost respect for the tech produced by our northern colleagues and acknowledge it is the tech capital of the world and that won’t change. In fact, many people know I grew up in NorCal and still have a 650 area code on my mobile phone.
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