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.
Smartphone-collected Big Data has the potential to transform the way we can understand and predict weather systems. Five months ago, we at OpenSignal (a project to map global cell phone signal coverage) launched an app called WeatherSignal to collect atmospheric data from smartphones. WeatherSignal works by repurposing the sensors that already exist in Android devices in order to build a live map of atmospheric readings.
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As part of the growing debate around budgets and taxes, there’s been some discussion about adjusting corporate tax rates while taking away incentives and deductions. We’ve talked about the challenging ripple effects the changes could create for businesses, but what about the broader benefits of some of those credits?
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This is a special edition of Innovation Daily which is focused on the recent Baltic Dynamics 2013 Conference in Riga, Latvia where I had the privilege of being invited to be a keynote speaker. The Conference was organized excellently by Janis Stabulnieks, the Managing Director of the Latvian Technological Center.
This issue will include Janis's summary of the conference , key presentations, press clippings, tv coverage and conference proceedings. We will also have a photo collage illustrating the beauty of Latvia, its culture and people.
Please enjoy and we will plan to do more special editions in the future.
Join business, government and technology leaders for a high-level conversation on the transformation of health care through technology and innovation. Bloomberg Government's first annual health care summit, "Mind the Gap: Connecting Health Care Policy with Next Century Innovation," will convene of health care innovators, medical professionals, and government officials who are helping to redesign U.S. health care during a time of innovation.
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As the United States slowly emerges from the Great Recession, it's clear that cities and metropolitan areas need to find their own economic game changer to create jobs, unlock value, and attract private investment.
Philadelphia could supercharge its economy by growing a globally significant Innovation District.
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America’s economic map is ever changing. Great migrations—settlers westward; African Americans northward; urbanites outward to greener suburbs, then back again—have shaped the country’s history. Cities have heaved skyward; boom towns have come and gone.
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You’re not going to find the most popular Silicon Valley startups on this list. In fact, you’re not going to find any Silicon Valley startups.
Turnstone, a company that helps you design your workspace, took a survey of soliciting nominations for the best young startups to work for. Startups qualified as “young” if they were less than 10 years old and had fewer than 100 employees. You couldn’t nominate your own startup and once the nominations were in, the startups would be further scrutinized by a team of five judge.
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Huge herds of roaming jellyfish are becoming a huge problem in our ocean, causing millions of dollars in damage and injury and death. The JEROS Robot will hunt them down and kill them.
Killer robots are a dead serious moral issue. In its “Campaign to Stop Killer Robots," a global coalition is urging the United Nations to ban the emerging technology of weaponized drones that kill without human intervention. The hope is to forestall an age of “mechanical slaughter.”
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It may be more than just a coincidence that our systems of higher education are struggling to define or re-define themselves just as we are experiencing one of the deepest stretches of economic trouble in our lifetime. The economic hole we have fallen into, both in the U. S. and globally, will require solutions across multiple dimensions, but none will be more important than how we collectively approach the education of young people. In this arena – education – we are slipping inexorably down a bad path.
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LSN tracks investor behavior within the life sciences on a global basis, and in recent times, an interesting trend has emerged in terms of capital dynamics between the US and the EU. Though early stage life science companies globally have fallen victim to the consolidation of venture capital, Europe has been particularly troubled. I wrote last month about an accelerating trend of investment dollars flowing into EU life science companies, but my theories were confirmed over the course of this week.
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Wondering where the venture capital funding has gone in the healthcare industry? According to CB Insights, it’s the following 10 cities–for Q3 ’13 at least. (Listed in order of amounts of deals; note that though San Francisco saw more deals, San Diego saw more funding.)
Education is good. It is good in a different way and for different purposes than you might have thought. College is necessary. It is needed for the advancement of technology, humanity, and to make sure we live like humans. There is no better indicator of societal advancement than the level of education the masses receive.
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1. I need to write a business plan before I start.
No, you don’t. Start-ups are so unpredictable that writing a business plan is a pointless exercise. You don’t exactly know who your customers are or what benefit/value they get from your product/service. If you think you need to prepare a plan to raise start-up funding see point 3 below.
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If there’s one thing that people of pretty much every political persuasion agree on, it’s the need to boost exports. This is true not just at the national level, but also the local one. The balance of world population and economic growth is outside the United States. McKinsey estimates that there will be an additional one billion people added to the global “consuming class” by 2025. An economy focused solely on a domestic American or North American market is missing a huge part of the addressable market, dooming it to slower growth.
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We are very good at following and perhaps even spotting trends in their infancy. We are seeing massive global cultural shifts happening and the web has made them accessible to all.
In researching and creating the 2013 program for Foresight & Trends (#FT13), we narrowed it down to these five trends that will affect everything from Innovation & R&D, to Market Research & Insights, Futuring & Forecasting, Brand Strategy & Design to overall Marketing & Strategy.
The essence of strategy is making wise choices about where and how to compete. In this narrated slideshow, McKinsey principal Chris Bradley uses the revealing lens of economic profit to shed fresh light on what it takes to beat the market.
At first blush, “beating the market” might sound like an expression better suited to investing or financial management than to business strategy. When you think about it, though, overcoming the profit-depleting effects of market forces is the essence of good strategy—what separates winners from losers, headline makers from also-rans.1 A focus on the presence, absence, or possibility of market-beating value creation should therefore help transform any discussion of strategy from something vague and conceptual into something specific and concrete.
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Courtney O’Connell, one of the masterminds behind “The Big Ideas in Higher Education” conference and now Director of Business Development at Equalman Studios, put out a tweet recently for ideas on how to work from home without becoming a recluse. I tweeted to Courtney that her question was great fodder for a blog post. So here are 6 ideas for anyone making the transition from an office to a work from home setting to avoid the recluse trap.
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On March 18, 2010, an Apple engineer left what looked like an iPhone 3 in a German beer garden in Redwood City, California. Another patron later picked it up from a barstool. The next morning, the phone didn’t work (having been disabled remotely) but the finder realized the device looked a bit odd. It had a camera in the front and the exterior felt different. He was able to remove the exterior, revealing a shiny prototype for the new iPhone 4 – a product Apple wasn’t intending to announce for months.
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I am sure many of you have watched an episode of Shark Tank on ABC. The show allows a startup entrepreneur to pitch their idea to a panel of five respected venture investors, who either like or don’t like the opportunity, and if they do, compete for the investment. Many of the times I have watched the show, I end up cringing watching these poor entrepreneurs become the victims of undermarket valuations or a rushed decision which makes for “good TV watching” for the viewers at home, but bad business decisions for the company. I wanted to compare Shark Tank to reality in the venture capital world, to confirm my assumption.
