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innovation DAILY

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.

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Do you spend a lot of your time worrying about money? When you work for yourself, it’s common to have a lot of fears, worry and stress around money, but these negative feelings will ultimately backfire on you. Coming up, I’m going to share with you 3 ways you can put your worry about money to rest so you can use the extra brain space for something more productive….

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The old Motorola has been in the back of a drawer since 2004; the Nokia was beneath a pile of papers on the piano since early 2009 (I think). In the United States, they're junk-drawer fodder, unwanted by a culture (and me) fixated on the next upgrade. For the environmentally minded, they're something much worse: e-waste, the catchall term for old electronic devices that nobody wants anymore.

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Www medicalinnovationplaybook com Documents 43556 CC 20Playbook FINAL pdf

Each year, nearly $100 billion is spent in the United States on healthcare related research, with an increasing proportion of the breakthrough research being carried out in academic medical centers. While continued medical progress relies on enhanced academic-industry collaboration, the information available on the academic commercialization system function across these institutions is not uniform and often difficult to access.

The Medical Innovation Playbook is the first-ever comprehensive study of technological innovation and commercialization at the nation’s top healthcare centers.

We believe this in-depth, comprehensive characterization of how each of the top medical centers has organized to stimulate innovation and its commercial application should have broad reach. The Medical Innovation Playbook will offer profiles of dozens of academic institutions and medical centers that will provide an easy-to-understand guide that will be a resource for practitioners, academic executives, trustees, companies, entrepreneurs and investors. 

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Imagine this: you're a power lifter, one of those big dudes at the Olympics that lifts very big things. You lift the big heavy thing, put it down. Crowd cheers. Do you immediately lift it again? Or do you rest for a few minutes?

You rest--if you want to be able to replenish the energy-boosting organic compounds in your muscles. So why not do the same thing in your workday?

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A trusted organization system that you actually use regularly can turn your day from one of chaos to one of focus, effectiveness, and calm.

This is something I’ve learned through repeated failures, actually: when I become loose with my organized habits, my day becomes worse. It gets stressful and crazy, and I can’t focus on anything. Everything is on my head all the time, and I’m always worried that I’m missing something, that I should be doing something else.

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North Carolina’s economy falls squarely in the middle of the pack compared to other states, according to a new state report tracking the state’s progress across a wide range of economic measures.

The North Carolina Department of Commerce on Thursday released the Tracking Innovation report, a snapshot of the state’s performance across 38 economic indicators.

Among the findings:

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Chicago has transformed from being a technological desert to birthing tech startups that have achieved more than $50 billion in collective market value — but it’s still a challenge to attract startup capital and to keep young talent from fleeing to Silicon Valley, venture capitalist and billionaire J.B. Pritzker said Thursday.

Local successes reflect “real companies with real revenue that focus on profitability,” but at the same time, a dearth of local capital exists for still-fledgling ideas, Pritzker said in a keynote speech to the CFA Society of Chicago, a group representing financial analysts and investment professionals that met at the University Club of Chicago.

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You can't just be a good modeling monkey to impress your bosses. Along with financial modeling skills, it is essential to be able to speak the language of the industry one wants to be successful in. Without the appropriate language, it would become increasingly difficult for people to do business in an industry. And it is the same with the PEVC industry as well. Some of the important terms which are necessary to know in the PEVC industry are given below:

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If you, as an entrepreneur, email a VC firm, it’s a crapshoot whether they’ll even open it, much less read it. If you’ve got some heavy hitter, celebrity entrepreneur or investor making the introduction for you, your chances improve astronomically. So start making friends with the right people. That was one of the key takeaways from a panel of venture capitalists, led by Andrew Romans, general partner at Silicon Valley’s Georgetown Angels and author of the book: The Entrepreneurial Bible to Venture Capital: Inside Secrets from Leaders in the Startup Game.

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Collaborations and partnerships are defining 21st century healthcare.

As aging populations put a strain on cash-strapped governments, chronic illness and rare disease prevention is taking centre stage in healthcare. To meet new levels of demand, the sector is ramping up its innovative capacity through collaborations. But harnessing the disruptive potential of these partnerships is still very much a work in progress, according to participants of the INSEAD Healthcare Alumni Summit in Zurich in October this year.

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Less than 10 percent of hospitals have warmed up to RFID technology. That’s the assessment of Mark Roberti, the founder and editor of RFID Journal, so it’s very much an emerging trend in healthcare. The idea is that by using resources more effectively, hospital staff can spend less time running around trying to find medical supplies and more time with patients.

“The reason why healthcare costs are so high is hospitals keep buying things they already have and waste money,” Roberti said at a conference organized by his Journal which focused on RFID in Healthcare. Hospitals have been so focused on the priority of saving lives that they have been slow to adopt technology that saves money.

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Injuries uncovered: Compared to a normal brain on the left, the brain of a former football player, a 59-year-old former linebacker, is riddled with higher amounts of tau protein (non-blue colors).

Eight former pro football players learned this year that they have signs of a degenerative brain disorder called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a condition linked to depression, dementia, and memory loss. These somber findings were uncovered using a new method of brain imaging that, for the first time, enables researchers to spot signs of the condition in the living brain. Previously CTE could only be identified after a victim died.

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Google-bot: The M1 Mobile Manipulator from Meka, one of several robot companies acquired recently by Google.

Google has quietly bought seven robotics companies, and has given Andy Rubin, the man who originally led the Android project, the job of developing Google’s first robot army. And so, the New York Times suggests it might only be a few years before a Google robot driving in a Google car is delivering products to your door.

I somehow doubt Google has anything quite so futuristic in mind. I think the effort is quite similar to both Google’s self-driving car endeavor and its Android project. In other words, it’s all about gaining a dominant position in markets where data is about to explode.

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Former South African President Nelson Mandela died at age 95 on Thursday after months of fighting illness and lung infection, South Africa President Jacob Zuma confirmed.

The anti-apartheid revolutionary and the country's first black president was known for his compassion and progress through peaceful resistance. Mandela spent 27 years in prison for treason of the white minority government and was released in 1990 after negotiating with his captors. He went on to lead the first fully democratic election in the country's history. His contributions and the number of people he inspired are innumerable.

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This Camera Takes Pictures in the Dark

Nothing says James Bond technology like the ability to take photographs in a completely dark room. Now there's a camera at MIT that can do just that.

The 'First-Photon Imager' camera developed by MIT researchers takes pictures in near total darkness by reconstructing 3D images from photons, or single particles of light that are reflected from an object.

 

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More entrepreneurs want to be socially responsible these days, but fear a negative impact on profits, growth, and the ability to find an investor. In the short run, there are real costs associated with the “triple bottom line” of maximizing profit, people (social), and planet (environment). But very quickly, it is becoming obvious to startups that the value and satisfaction exceeds the costs.

To legally facilitate startups who want to give top priority to socially conscious solutions, seventeen states, starting with Maryland in 2010, have passed legislation allowing incorporation as a Benefit Corporation (B-Corp). The B-Corp status is meant to reduce investor suits, and gives consumers an easy way to spot genuine social commitment, without assuming it is a non-profit.

 

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While tremendous interest in entrepreneurship in India continues to surge, there is a troubling and corresponding shortage of seed capital to help get these entrepreneurs’ ventures off the ground.

Sramana Mitra, one of the most highly regarded writers on the Indian startup scene, analyzes the current state of the startup eco-system in India in the latest addition to her acclaimed Entrepreneur Journeys book series, Seed India: How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap In India (December 2013; Amazon Kindle). Mitra proposes ways of navigating the rest of the decade, such that a robust pipeline of entrepreneurs can survive the current malaise, and thrive, while the eco-system develops and matures in parallel.

 

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If you provide some kind of service to clients (as most of us do), you’ll know from experience that some of your beloved masters are easier to work with than others. Some are delightful, some forgettable, and a few you proclaim as downright impossible.  Although your view of the client depends on a multitude of factors (such as your relative levels of experience, your disciplines, and the nature of the project), I will go out on a limb to say that there really is such a thing as an “impossible” client — someone who exhibits one or more “bad behaviors” that make the collaboration more difficult than it needs to be and frustrates your ability to perform the service you have been engaged to provide.  For many of us, when clients act this way, our primal instincts kick in and we’re tempted to respond with even worse behaviors of our ow

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Christopher, a seasoned real estate executive, left his job in early 2013 to move to a competitor’s firm. Less than three months later, he received a call from his former boss Theo — in search of a reference letter himself. Christopher was dumbfounded — he had left his former firm precisely because of Theo, a terrible manager whom colleagues found intolerable.

How should Christopher respond? Could he, in good conscience, say yes to providing a letter of reference to someone he didn’t like or respect?  Could he say no, and tell Theo off?  Christopher listened politely, vacillating between surprise and schadenfrude, racking his brain for a way out of a seemingly no-win situation.

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