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.
So, you want to start a company. Which business school is best?
Steve Kaplan, an entrepreneurship and finance professor at University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says that's the place to be. As proof, he cites recent student ventures, such as food-delivery service GrubHub, which merged with Seamless earlier this year, and Braintree Payment Solutions LLC, acquired by eBay Inc. EBAY +0.20% for $800 million in September.
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There are a lot of analogies when it comes to entrepreneurship. For me, starting a business was like sailing across a vast ocean on a little boat in search of new land and opportunities ... with your spouse and kids by your side. There are storms, days without wind and times when it’s smooth sailing, but it’s always fun because I’m at the helm. For those who are along for the ride, however, it can be both scary and exhausting— and it shouldn’t be. They should be having as much fun as I am.
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In his book Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur, Richard Branson said “Throwing yourself into a job you enjoy is one of the life's greatest pleasures.”
We are living in a revolutionary age at a time when the lines between work and life are becoming increasingly blurred. Technology has made the world a smaller place. It also means that the ‘working week’ is becoming longer, because more of us spend personal time checking our emails and bringing work home. All the more reason to find something that you love to do, that you’re good at and moreover, something that you think is fun. There’s a reason that the cliché “find a job you like and you’ll never work a day in your life” exists.
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There have been remarkable mechanical advances in prosthetic limbs in recent years, including rewiring nerve fibers to control sophisticated mechanical arms (see “A Lifelike Prosthetic Arm”), and brain interfaces that allow for complicated thought control (see “Brain Helps Quadriplegics Move Robotic Arms with Their Thoughts”). But for all this progress, prosthetic limbs cannot send back sensory information to the wearer, making it harder for them to do tasks like pick up objects without crushing them or losing their grip.
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Despite a downward slide over the last several quarters, things seem to be looking up for venture capital investments in the life sciences — at least anecdotally.
The latest example is a new $250 million fund raised by 5AM Ventures, which invests in early-stage life science companies, primarily those focused on the discovery and development of therapeutics.
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Rising resource prices and expanded production have raised the number of countries where the resource sector represents a major share of the economy, from 58 in 1995 to 81 in 2011. That number will rise: to meet soaring demand for resources and replace rapidly depleting supply, the world should invest a total of up to $17 trillion in oil and gas and in minerals by 2030, double the historical rate. In 20 years, almost half of the world’s countries could depend on their resource endowments for growth.
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Mayor Lee launches Nation’s First Living Innovation Zone
Mayor Edwin M. Lee today, as part of Innovation Month, officially opened the nation’s first Living Innovation Zone (LIZ) – an enterprise that links partners with the City to sponsor the installation of innovative exhibit spaces that make science and technology more accessible in public for the public. The first Zone, a partnership with the Exploratorium and the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District (YBCBD), is being launched on Market Street and Yerba Buena Lane
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Albany, NY - November 14, 2013 - Governor Cuomo today announced the launch of FuzeHub, a new collaborative resource platform developed to spur the growth of New York State manufacturers. FuzeHub aims to better connect small and medium sized manufacturing companies to a wealth of State technology resources, including the New York Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) program, universities, economic development organizations, and other state programs to help these businesses overcome challenges, encouraging innovation and driving economic growth and job creation.
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In 2007, Drew Houston flew to San Francisco determined to find a co-founder for Dropbox. At the time, it was just him. No backers. No team. On a friend’s advice, he walked into Y Combinator’s offices unsolicited to talk to Paul Graham about finding the right person. It didn’t go well.
“It wasn't a great experience, coming in unannounced,” Houston recently told students in an exclusive Dorm Room Fund interview at MIT.
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A strong commercialization program can jumpstart innovation at research schools by helping faculty move ideas into action; providing topnotch advice on licensing and patenting; identifying potential corporate and foundation sponsors to fund research; and providing a startup milieu in which to help turn research into valued products and services. And it can bring in some serious cash: University of Kansas Innovation and Collaboration (KUIC), a centralized organization tasked with bringing the institution's research innovation to market, has grown KU's licensing revenue from $1 million to more than $11 million over the last three years.
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San Francisco-based Burrill & Company looked like it had beaten the odds a little more than a year ago during a tough time for biotech venture capital firms. Burrill said in a statement that it had put together Burrill Capital Fund IV, with “aggregate capital commitments” of $505 million to invest in drugs, diagnostics, medical devices, healthcare delivery, wellness, and digital health.
Actually, it turns out the fund raised about $200 million. Partly as a result of the size difference, the team responsible for investing the cash has split off from Burrill into a new venture firm called Biomark Capital, Xconomy has learned.
Four promising technologies are one step closer to the marketplace thanks to funding from the University City Science Center’s QED Proof-of-Concept Program. Life science and health IT researchers from Drexel University, Temple University and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, received a total of $600,000 through the QED program to develop a potential drug therapy for Lou Gehrig’s disease; validate a new therapeutic compound for pancreatic cancer; develop software to analyze EEG readings and guide diagnosis; and improve communications skills of health care professionals.
After being appointed head of the Innovation 2030 initiative last spring, Anne Lauvergeon kicked-off the initiative’s biggest effort, the government’s global innovation competition, with its opening yesterday. President Hollande publicly threw his full weight behind the initiative with an appearance at the official launch of the competition last Friday at the 104.
You know the feeling. A car alarm is going off in the parking lot and you’re sitting there thinking, “When is someone going to turn that thing off?!”
That’s what the U.S. skills gap has become to many of us: a monotonous bother that we can’t seem to shut off. Eleven million unemployed (BEEP), an ever-increasing number dropping out of the labor market (BEEP), and companies desperate to find qualified people (BEEP).
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"One of the greatest things that Kitchener-Waterloo has done, better than any other city in the country, is create a cluster."
John Ruffolo is pacing the floor at Toronto's OneEleven, a 15,000-square-foot co-working space that opened this week one block north of the city's financial district. The CEO of OMERS Ventures, Ruffolo is in his element as he unfurls a bold vision for the Kitchener-Waterloo/Greater Toronto Area: The time is now, he tells the crowd of 170, to stop thinking of the region as a pair of separately-functioning communities. If the nation's innovation sector is ever to realize its full potential, he declares, the Highway 401 corridor must be actively transformed into a technology "supercluster."
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SMEs have sustainability on their radar. Their main goal is economic sustainability. To achieve this goal, they can take ecological and social sustainability as an opportunity for innovation instead of just considering it as a mere cost driver. Thus innovation and sustainability become the two sides of the coin called profitable growth.
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Big Switch Networks, Skybox Imaging, WiFiSlam, Sourcegraph – the list of startups launched by Stanford students soon after taking the course “Technology Venture Formation” goes on. That’s because the class, formally known as Management Science & Engineering 273, is so much more than a series of lectures.
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New research on entrepreneurship shows that diverse business skills are not always the secret to success in the world of tech start-ups. While different strengths matter sometimes, researchers found that a tech-focused founding team is almost always best.
The research, led by assistant professor Chuck Eesley in Stanford University’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, has been published online by the journal Strategic Management. Two other management professors, from the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), co-authored the study.
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Culture is critically important to business success around the world. That was the response from an overwhelming 84 percent of the more than 2,200 participants in our 2013 Culture and Change Management Survey. The survey, conducted by the Katzenbach Center at Booz & Company, was undertaken to better understand global perceptions of culture, its impact on change, and the main barriers to successful, sustainable transformation.
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The very concept of humility can make us queasy. In this self-promotional era of social media flaunting and positive thinking, to be humble can seem at best to put us at a competitive disadvantage, at worst, to seem hollow. As Jane Austen put it, “Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility.”
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