The survival of our species on planet earth is largely going to be determined by what happens in our cities. By 2050, 70% of the world's population will live in them. We are observing a mass migration to cities at an unprecedented rate. The growing urbanization places high demands on infrastructure such as transportation and building as well as increased demand for resources such as food, water, and energy. Global cities can not continue to sprawl as many U.S. cities did in the 20th century.

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New Enterprise Associates has had a hand in a number of Boston’s biotech startups over the years. But it wasn’t until now that the big VC firm officially put a physical footprint in the biotech cluster in Cambridge, MA.

NEA today is announcing that it has opened an office in Kendall Square. It’s on the third floor at 700 Tech Square in Cambridge, and will serve as a local home base for the VC firm and its healthcare partners, many of which serve on boards in the area. NEA already has offices in New York, California, Washington, D.C, Chicago, China, and India.

About twice a month I get the opportunity to sit in on Seed and Series A stage startup pitches in Washington DC. However, the unfortunate truth is that those talented founders I see aren’t generally in the right city to build their businesses. In the first article in this series, I showed some striking numbers to stress what many inferred: there are real costs to locating operations outside of a startup super-hub (San Francisco Bay, New York, or Boston). The short version: it’s just plain harder to get funding, sell your business, or simply survive outside of the super-hubs. In the second article of the series, James Allworth and I proposed some solutions for policy makers.

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My work station is an invading overlord. Belongings march across the long desk I share with several other editors, spilling out of my space and incurring into the neutral zones abutting my colleagues’ work areas. To the east, legions of books, papers, and sticky notes advance, led by a squadron of glass paperweights. To the west, my cotillion of tote bags, receipts, and forgotten coffee mugs blocks any retreat.

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What’s the best way to quickly improve innovation in your organization?

That was the question posed to me recently by Warwick, the head of innovation for the Australia and New Zealand region of a multinational engineering firm.  He asked because their CEO had just announced a new innovation initiative.  It’s an idea contest – submit your ideas, and the person that submits the best one wins $10,000.

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New research shows a full 58 per cent of people feel they are not well-informed about the outputs of publicly-funded science, a finding that presents an obstacle to the success of the €70 billion Horizon 2020 R&D programme in areas such as climate change, healthy ageing, waste management and sustainable energy supplies that will rely on public cooperation to reach their objectives.

However, there’s better news for the Commission in the fact that 77 per cent of respondents to a Eurobarometer poll published today think that science and technology has a positive influence on society.

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Physicist-turned-entrepreneur Hermann Hauser has no doubts about the entrepreneurial potential of Europe. He’s dug deep into his own pockets over the past 20 years to fund more than 100 European start-ups. But to survive and grow fast, young technology companies need large pools of capital - and smart management. And both are lacking in Europe. 

Giving the first annual Science|Business lecture in the European Parliament on 12 November, hosted by MEP Andrew Duff, Hauser argued that Europe has failed to tap equity as the most effective financing tool to grow its innovative small and medium-sized companies. 

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The Honourable Greg Rickford, Minister of State for Science and Technology, today announced the results of a recent competition held by the Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research (CECR) program. Three centres, including the Canadian Digital Media Network, will receive additional funding to advance commercialization in digital communications and environmental related technologies.

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“If you're sweating and your heart rate is up, it's seen as a sign something is going wrong, that you're too nervous, off balance, flustered,” M.I.T. associate professor Jared Curhan tells the New York Times. “Whereas we're showing that something could be very right.”

The "very right" is this: As published in the journal Psychological Science, Curhan and his co-authors found that physical activity can make you better in negotiations, but only if you feel confident beforehand. If you're anxious, the activity will only make matters worse--which reveals something interesting about the way we relate to our phsyical and emotional states.

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Applications are due November 18, 2013

DreamIt Health Baltimore is designed to speed the growth and success of early-stage health IT companies through its program in Central Maryland. Powered by the Johns Hopkins University, BioHealth Innovation, and DreamIt Ventures – the program gives participants access and advantages typically out-of-reach to healthcare startups. DreamIt works with extraordinary teams to create exceptional companies, accomplishing in 3-6 months what would otherwise take years. DreamIt accelerators are characterized by seed capital, intense 1-on-1 mentorship from dedicated, previously successful tech entrepreneurs, access to key people, expertise, and information typically beyond the reach of a startup, informal education from leading industry practitioners, a robust network of DreamIt alumni, and a wide range of free services.  Following a lean startup methodology, the selected teams focus on rapid, iterative interactions with their target markets to reduce risk and find product-market fit as quickly as possible.

As Erie’s industrial landscape continues to change, our roots, once tethered deep in manufacturing, are leading to a trunk that’s on the verge of sprouting new leaves. The color, shape, and size of those leaves will inevitably be determined by the next generation – the Millennials – the new wave of entrepreneurial minds germinating in Erie’s bedrock, forming to shape current and future leaders.

Enter Ignite Erie: A Day of Innovation for Entrepreneurs “designed to be a day of innovation – to talk about innovation-based economic development with two key groups in the community,” explains Perry Wood, Executive Director of the Erie County Gaming Revenue Authority.

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Fresh off a nationwide listening tour and against the backdrop of 1776, a global hub for startups in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker unveiled the department's strategic vision and priorities focused on three key areas: trade, innovation and data. Pritzker said her department will make sure businesses have a strong voice when it comes to strengthening the digital economy by working to protect intellectual property, ensuring robust cybersecurity infrastructure and championing free and open Internet. In the coming months, Commerce will develop a coordinated approach to those policies that affect businesses.

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Ten years ago Clayton Christensen, Jeff Dyer and I were struck by a question that led to over a decade of research: what makes some individuals, and the organisations they lead, more innovative than others? We interviewed and observed hundreds of entrepreneurs, inventors, and other innovators around the world, and collected data on 6,000 more in over 80 different countries to understand how they created and sustained high-performing cultures of innovation.

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What’s the most over-pitched business to venture capitalists right now? Big data, according to a panel of VCs who spoke during the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas this week.

The concept behind a year-old campus in Lee’s Summit that marries high school, college and industry could go national and radically change higher education, leaders meeting in Kansas City said Wednesday.

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and James Shelton, acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, spoke at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to local and regional educators and business and government leaders about spreading the idea behind the Missouri Innovation Campus across the country.

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Sure, there are tons of startup accelerators and incubators. But that doesn’t mean they’re easy to get into. Some have acceptance rates on par with Ivy League schools!

You know that having a solid team and some kind of business plan is important, but what’s going to really make your startup stand out? Here are a few resources from around the web to help you put together a stellar application.

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Economists Robert Gordon and Erik Brynjolffson see very different things when they look at the stagnation of the U.S. economy in recent years. It’s almost as if they’re looking at an optical illusion image – one seeing a candlestick while the other sees two faces just inches apart. In today’s talks, they both outlined their thoughts.

Throughout its history, Silicon Valley has dominated the spotlight for promoting and financing the growth of emerging tech companies. Today Silicon Valley continues to remain the center of tech innovation, in large part, because the startup hotbed now spills well into the San Francisco Peninsula. Among the hundreds of emerging tech companies now headquartered in San Francisco are Pinterest, Square and Uber.

SSTI is pleased to announce our 2014 Annual Conference will be held in Chicago on September 14-16 at the Westin Chicago River North. The Illinois Science and Technology Coalition and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity will serve as the host sponsors.

The Confederation of Indian Industry issued the following news release:

The Global Innovation & Technology Alliance Platform" event, organized by the Global Innovation & Technology Alliance (GITA), in collaboration with the Department of Science and Technology(DST), Government of India and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) was held on November 12-13, 2013.

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