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.
As a mentor for aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs, I talk to a fair number who may have a great vision and a strong engineering background, but have a negative interest in the role of public speaking in business. In fact, they often claim to be part of the survey group that fears public speaking more than death, but I’m not sure how anyone could validate that survey.
Silicon Valley's tech firms, venture capital, cleantech companies, and private developers are leading vigorous economic development and growth in the region and giving its lodging market a robust outlook.
Roughly covering the southwestern region of the San Francisco Bay Area, Silicon Valley is home to approximately 2.9 million residents, hundreds of blue-chip technology companies, and thousands of start-ups.1 The Valley is a leading global hub for high-tech R&D and entrepreneurship, and accounts for 1/3 of all venture capital investment in the United States.
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Entrepreneurs and their new companies are often seen as the best way to drive a country's economic growth and create new jobs.
In fact, there are nearly 9,000 start-up companies in Europe which employ more than 750,000 people.
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The world economy should snap a three-year stretch of slowing growth in 2014, although the upturn over the next 12 months looks likely to be incremental rather than a leap forward.
With stock markets rallying in the twilight days of this year and recent indicators for major economies looking brighter, confidence among investors and analysts is high going into 2014.
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If you go by the headlines, the iPhone 5S and Google Glass were the big technology stories of 2013, and Twitter’s IPO was the event of the year. The coverage of Glass focused mostly on its privacy implications — not its ability to change the world. And iPhone and Twitter were just more of the same. So we could end the year really disappointed because nothing dramatic seems to have happened on the technology front.
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My personal experience, confirmed by numerous studies, is:
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The IT industry and its data centers are going through change today at a breakneck pace. Changes are underway to the very fundamentals of how we create IT, how we leverage IT, and how we innovate in IT. Information Technology has always been about making changes that stretch the limits of creativity, but when so many core components change at the same time, it becomes both exciting and challenging even for the most astute of us IT professionals.
Image: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com
No matter which country you live in, planning for retirement is essential. When you live in the US, that means making plans for your 401k. However, the following guidelines are helpful no matter where you live (with a few adjustments, of course). So, when should you start making contributions to your retirement fund?
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We’ve been publishing blogs on strategy-business.com for just six months, but in that time they have become one of our most popular features and helped to transform s+b into a daily, or at least frequent, destination for a great many of our readers around the globe.
Of course, we recognize it can be hard to keep up with all the wonderful ideas and meaningful advice we’ve been running here. Allow me, then, to point out a handful of my favorite s+b posts of 2013. Although it’s a shame to miss out on any of our contributors’ fabulous work, please make sure you don’t overlook this baker’s dozen, which rate among my favorite posts of the year.
The perfect employee can be an elusive breed of job seeker; they are that rare, perfect mix of dedication, passion, talent and friendliness that every employer is hoping to find. The perfect employee surpasses our expectations, invigorates the whole team and does it with a smile, so how do you go about finding them? Recruitment is a tricky, often tedious process which involves a lot of hard work and a lot of assessment. GradWeb are leaders when it comes to finding the perfect fit for any team. As recruitment software specialists with over 10 years of experience helping businesses streamline the process of finding talent, they have some tried and tested wisdom to impart to anyone struggling to find the best fit for their team.
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Before 2013, the most funded film or video project on Kickstarter was a film adaptation of zombie graphic novel The Goon that raised over $440,000. By the end of the year, ten other projects have surpassed that figure, with several crowdfunded budgets stretching into the millions and raising the question of who Kickstarter is for, one of the year’s most contentious topics.
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The Harvard Business Review has just published a cool-looking “Taxonomy of Innovation” interactive. Unfortunately, I haven’t a clue what it means or how to use it. Let me know if you have better luck — perhaps my mind is just not working the day after Christmas.
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Many of us view January 1st as the next chapter. We reflect upon the year that was, contrast that to where we would like to be, and set goals to close the gap between the two. And as any entrepreneur knows, goal setting is essential to progress. New Year’s resolutions (albeit a bit arbitrary) serve as an excellent opportunity to construct such goals.
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The right workspace can greatly increase employee peace of mind and productivity. But before you panic and install a Google-style indoor go-cart track in your accounting firm's headquarters, relax. All you really need to do to boost your employees productivity is make a few small design tweaks.
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Hiring is one of the most important things an entrepreneur will do to grow her company. For a small business, each new hire has a tremendous impact and influences the company's culture far more than a new hire at a 200- or 500-person company. The stakes are high, so you need to ensure that each of your new hires is a passionate, engaged and committed team player.
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Throughout my career in small companies and large, I’ve always been appalled by the number of people who seem to complain all of the time. These people don’t seem to realize that they are hurting themselves, as well as other people’s productivity, and the company they are working for.
We recently stumbled upon a Quora answer from David S. Rose made in July of last year. One of the topics relevant to crowdfunding is IP protection. Crowdfunding is a very public endeavor, and exposing early-stage ideas to the crowd carries some risk of garnering copycats.
I’d suggest that today innovation is caught up in the survival race, where the bolder ones are more innovation fit and pulling further ahead. We need many more organizations to get out of this survival trap and exploiting innovation in bolder ways, become fitter in their innovating purpose.
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The tech boom is transforming every business it touches, but it doesn’t seem to be helping a core part of the industry: Public relations for tech companies. By and large, PR hasn’t adjusted to the rapid shifts of the digital era, and as their top clients in tech succeed (or at least enjoy the bubble), they themselves strain to stay relevant. Worse, this is hurting the thousands of startups desperate to get traction for their product and brand amid a market oversaturated with competition. The problem is so dramatic, top venture firms have even tried to replace traditional PR with their own PR platforms. In my view, however, that’s only a temporary bandage on top a much deeper wound: When it comes to tech in particular, traditional PR is fundamentally broken, beyond repair, and losing its relevance in real time. The sooner struggling startups realize this, the better.
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