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.
Feb 4 (Reuters) - Ten big rival drug companies have formed a pact to cooperate on a government-backed effort to accelerate the discovery of new drugs, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The companies and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will share scientists, tissue and blood samples, and data, to identify targets for new drugs for diseases such as Alzheimer's, Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, the Journal said.
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NOBODY likes forking over taxpayer dollars to companies to prop them up. Nor do they like seeing headlines about factories closing or regional towns decimated by loss of an industry. But companies and industries can only survive or thrive by being competitive and governments can best assist them do so with policies that stimulate innovation.
When Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched thefacebook.com in Feb. 2004, even he could not imagine the forces it would unleash. His intent was to connect college students. Facebook, which is what this Web site rapidly evolved into, ended up connecting the world.
Image: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
The New York Times writes this weekend that batteries, “long the poor cousin to computer chips in research-obsessed Silicon Valley, are now the rage.” It’s true that the battery has long been an obstacle for increasingly power-hungry gadgets and is now being looked at much more closely for the emerging markets of wearables, as well as electric cars. But Silicon Valley, startups and entrepreneurs haven’t made all that much progress creating battery innovations.
Image: http://gigaom.com
If technology, innovation and ideas hold the future of a country, the Muslim world is in dire need of them, warned Professor Ata-ur-Rahman in Jeddah on Friday evening.
Backing his premises Prof. Rahman, UNESCO laureate and world’s noted Pakistani scientist, presented some jaw-dropping facts about the bleak future awaiting us.
Image: VISION TALK: UNESCO laureate Prof. Ata-ur-Rahman, center, with EWF President Dr. Alim Khan, 3rd from left, and Mansoor Elahi, 3rd from right. (AN photo)
These are the 10 regions of the country with the highest premiums for people buying insurance on the health law’s new marketplaces. The ranking is based on the lowest price “silver” plan, which is the mid-level plan that the majority of consumers are selecting. The listed monthly premiums are for a 40-year-old person and are based on rates listed on the federal and state insurance marketplaces and data collected by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (KHN is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
Image: http://medcitynews.com
If you've spent any time wondering at what makes people successful, you've probably come across 'the 10,000 Rule,' popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. Put roughly, the rule posits that after 10,000 hours of working at a skill--coding, tweeting, dancing--you'll become an expert. But research suggests that the rule has a major misconception: to become awesome at a skill, it's not about quantity of time spent, it's about quality.
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From shortcuts and life hacks to proven productivity methods, we’re all looking to save time and get more done. If you want to be even more successful, it’s time to tap into your super powers: your habits.
A Duke University study found that 40% of the decisions we make each day are habits. While bad habits can derail you, good habits can put minutes back on the clock because they put you in a proactive mode and help eliminate wasted time.
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I have been having this discussion with a few people whose analysis of the venture capital industry I respect. The exercise is not just to assess who are the top investors, but more, to assess where the industry is going, and where the next generation of venture scale companies are going to come from. In this post, I will provide a framework for the discussion. Please weigh in with your thoughts.
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As a small business owner wearing many hats, it’s important to take a step back, look at the big picture and continuously work on your business rather than in you business. Working in your business means performing the core functions that your business is built upon. Working on your business means ensuring you have systems, strategies and goals in place so that you can effectively analyze the results you are getting and gather the necessary information to change and improve your performance.
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The future of American innovation is in the hands of our next generation of entrepreneurs and relies on their ability to solve problems and connect multiple technologies in creative ways.
Over the weekend, I saw some of this happening right in front of my eyes. I was a judge at the first collegiate wearable tech hackathon in the country. The event brought together students from varying disciplines across the U.S. to build prototypes that combine fashion and technology. They then pitched their concepts to business leaders convened by Kent State University’s Blackstone LaunchPad.
Switzerland does a good job managing the environment and protecting human health. The United States does it middlingly well. And Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan--as you might expect--not so great. They are some of the worst performers in a new ranking of environmental performance.
The law of inertia tells us a body in motion stays in motion. And the same goes for projects, creative ideas, daily tasks, half-written emails, and that thing you stopped working on to read this article. When you interrupt a task, it can be difficult to pick it up again.
And we are interrupted nearly every three minutes, according to Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at University of California, Irvine. What's telling is that roughly half those interruptions are self-imposed.
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While most marketers, rightly, look to build on the once-a-year mass audience opportunity afforded by the Super Bowl, fewer of them actually end up creating something that stands on its own as worthwhile content or warrants the extended play.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A majority of colleges attribute little or no importance to students’ race and ethnicity or first-generation status when reviewing applications, according to survey findings released on Thursday by the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
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We hear a lot about importance of embracing failure and learning from our mistakes. But just try making a typo that ships 1,100 units to your customer instead of 100 or hitting Reply All on a mass email with sensitive info meant only for your boss. Then, all of those lofty concepts seem to go out the window.
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When it comes to helping you out with social media, we often like to categorize things. For example, we’d write about the optimal timing of your posts, or how to come up with the best headlines, and the like.
What happened over the last few weeks though is that we collected a number of awesome tips to post on social media, that didn’t quite all fit together. So we thought, why not creating a list of unique tips, that might not have that much in common, but are hopefully still very useful for you!
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This blog represents two true stories of what happens, or can happen, to an organization when its key relied-upon key, single number (CSAT, CES, NPS, etc.) performance metrics flatline and, for all intents and purposes, have little or no granular actionability.
The first, a B2C example, involves a major player in the cable television industry. Two years ago, they adopted, system-wide, one of the popular single number performance metrics. As they have moved from a customer acquisition focus to a more balanced approach between acquisition and retention, they’ve observed that, in endeavoring to leverage their key performance metric, there have been two major hurdles: a) the metric has flatlined across major customer segments, i.e. generated the same or similar results year over year, making interpretation and experience improvement a challenge, and b) the metric isn’t helping them improve the overall value proposition, especially in the area of price/value.
People can argue all day about whether Illumina has, at last, given us the $1,000 genome. The answer does matter, because the cheaper it gets to sequence a whole human genome, the easier it will be to gather lots of them. That will help us understand what makes people different, and shed light on what causes disease. Or so scientists hope.
It may be a surprise to some that San Francisco, New York and Washington are on the same list as cities in the Midwest for being the most difficult places to recruit technology talent.
That’s according to the latest issue of the Dice Report, which identifies the top 12 U.S. cities where skilled tech talent is difficult to find and recruit. Dice listed New York City as the number one toughest city for tech recruiting, citing former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “Made in New York” map that showed nearly 1,500 New York City tech companies hiring, as well as the more than 8,000 job postings advertised on Dice in the city on any given day.
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