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.
Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program are two of the more optimistic voices on Detroit these days. “In midtown and downtown, there’s a sense of incredible energy and optimism,” says Bradley, founding director of the program and coauthor with Katz of The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy. Both spoke in Washington, D.C., last month as part of their book tour.
Duane Roth was a very special person to me and to the San Diego life sciences community. After he took over as the CEO of Connect at the end of 2004, he took on a larger role for the entire technology community—or as Duane would call it, the “Innovation Economy.”
For Duane, San Diego has been a showcase for the entire country, a demonstration of what the new Innovation Economy should look like. To compete against China and Europe, he believed that more U.S. cities should emulate San Diego. There was no better spokesman for the Innovation Economy than Duane, who died tragically in the prime of his life last Saturday, following a July 21 bicycle accident.
Customer churn--where users engage, disengage, and quickly flee--can kill a company. And as William Tincup argues at OpenView, churning through your team will kill you just as dead.
"Employee turnover can be just as damaging," he write, "impeding your ability to attract top talent right now, and lessening the likelihood that you’ll retain your highest performers in the long-term."
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When I graduated from college, I was dead set on making positive change in the world. My passion was international development and I deeply cared about making the world a better place. That is why early in my career I went and took a job in the nonprofit sector, bright-eyed and enthusiastic for a life of helping people in the developing world. The only problem was that I was miserable. I hated my job. I hated the monotonous activities, the clerical work, the pointless meetings, and the “consensus only” culture. No matter how much I told myself that it was all for a great cause, I couldn’t help but feel trapped in an unfulfilling daily routine.
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Ministry of Supply launched in June 2012 to immediate fanfare- garnering 4,000 customers and selling 6,000 dress shirts in our first month. At the time, one of our co-founders, Kit Hickey, described the company as, “an adolescent trapped in a baby’s body, and we had to learn how to sprint before we could learn how to walk.”
Fast-forward one year, and today our company is the proud parent of four beautiful products, with a fifth on the way. The ATLAS performance dress sock is the most technologically advanced and sustainable product we have released to date. Its Kickstarter campaign, that ended recently, raised twice its goal in only 24 hours. So how does the game change between the first and fifth child of a company? Kit wrote an article for Forbes a few months ago entitled “5 Lessons From Managing Our Startup’s Rapid Growth.” Since seven seems like a lucky number, I want to talk about the “7 Lessons for Sustaining Our Startup’s Rapid Growth”
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“Dude, the margarita mix is only half full!”
“What?”
“You didn’t fill the margarita mix! What the hell have you been doing all day??”
These wonderful words were provided to me from a young punk who clearly didn’t read Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective Leaders. This illuminating conversation was at the end of a long shift when I was working as a barback at a bar/restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, FL.
Richard Branson is my kind of billionaire. He has tackled some hard problems in his career: music (Virgin Music), telecommunications (Virgin Mobile), finance (Virgin Money), air travel (Virgin America, Australia, and Atlantic) and space travel (Virgin Galactic). He also finds time to have a lot of fun and to promote numerous charitable endeavors through Virgin Unite.
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Canada’s smartphone industry pioneer BlackBerry is giving a lot more thought to taking the company private, according to a new report from Reuters. The strategy has been tabled before, but CEO Thorsten Heins and the BlackBerry Board of Directors are increasingly mulling the possibility of paying off shareholders and structuring a private equity deal to give them a chance to avoid continued public scrutiny.
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To many people, middle management is a punchline — the physical embodiment of bureaucracy. It's also a significant part of the economy, accounting for some 10.5 million jobs, and one of the most fraught and difficult positions in corporate America, reports Melissa Korn in The Wall Street Journal. The piece profiles Michelle Davis, a 36-year-old analytics director at FICO, who finds herself in the classic middle manager limbo.
Four new "entrepreneurs in residence" have joined BioGenerator to boost the organization's efforts in shepherding new early-stage bioscience companies in the region.
BioGenerator, the not-for-profit venture development arm of BioSTL, launched the entrepreneurs in residence program 18 months ago, and now has a roster of 12 entrepreneurs working with over 100 bio-science start-ups.
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To Mighty Bell CEO and Lean In cofounder Gina Bianchini, the entrepreneurial narrative gets told with consistency: You have a lone-wolf, rugged individualist of a hero that breaks out on their own and, against incredible odds, somehow succeeds.
"Yet this has never been my experience," she said recently, as part of a talk. Her experience is a staggering one: Born and raised in Silicon Valley, Bianchini had a front-row seat to the rise of social media.
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Careers don't move linearly, we've learned: They jump up with serendipitous opportunities, they ratchet up click moment by click moment.
A clever strategy for planning our careers, then, is to create as many of these opportunities as possible. In other words, listen to ReWork CEO Nathaniel Koloc over at HBR, and turn your career into a grand experiment.
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The Discovery Channel's Shark Week got off to a less-than-stellar start this weekend with a two-hour piece devoted to Megalodon, a prehistoric giant shark that grew up to 60 feet (18 meters) long and had jaws powerful enough to crush an automobile. The only problem is that the show suggested these animals still exist, which is definitely not the case. Up to 70 percent of the audience may now think that Megalodon is not extinct, according to a poll from the Discovery Channel.
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Ever since the JOBS Act was signed into law last year, there has been much ado about why angels, venture capitalists and private equity firms will love/hate/be indifferent to the new financing vehicle, crowdfunding. In April 2012, we launched our equity crowdfunding platform focused exclusively on the consumer products and retail industries. While we are still in the early innings of what we hope will be a very long game, I have interacted with countless angels and VCs over the last 18 months, and I spent seven years as a private equity investor before that. As a result, I have gained an appreciation for how each type of investor really views crowdfunding, and it is different from how pundits outside of the industry think they view crowdfunding.
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Although every startup is unique, there are certain common avoidable mistakes that can lead to legal complications which jeopardize the long-term success of the business. I’m not suggesting that every startup needs a lawyer, but you should definitely pay attention, and not be afraid to consult legal counsel if any of these raise qualms for you.
Like other environments, most legal issues don’t result from fraud, but from ignorance on specific requirements, or simply never getting around to doing the things that common sense would tell you to do. Here are five of the most common examples:
In April, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) — the government’s department tasked with providing immigration services —kicked off the first program of its kind aimed at recruiting and supporting globally competitive immigrant entrepreneurs, and granting immediate permanent residency to those who are accepted in the program. Generating Canadians jobs will be an obvious outcome of this effort.
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One reason Canada is a world leader in knowledge-based industries is its integrated approach to driving economic growth through innovation. Not only does Canada provide lucrative research and development (R&D) tax credits and incentives for high-tech projects, it also aggressively supports entrepreneurial efforts, intellectual property rights, and the immigration of highly skilled business workers and leaders.
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The demand for entrepreneurship education and mentorship is going up exponentially, but quality supply can't keep up, says MIT Entrepreneurship Center director Bill Aulet. This week, Wiley published Aulet's book "Disciplined Entrepreneurship" — which aims to serve as an antidote to the issue by offering a framework for learning entrepreneurship.
Is it true, that entrepreneurs are a particularly self-serving species with their own moral ideas and ethical principles? Does the type of the entrepreneurial "homo oeconomicus" exist? And if so: what makes him so? Together with Swedish colleagues of the University of Stockholm, psychologists of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena tried to answer these questions. In their search for anti-social tendencies in the biographies of business founders, they came to surprising conclusions.
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Anchorage has a new, deep-pocketed venture capitalist in town, looking to put money into small businesses and startups.
It's not Sean Parker, the tech mogul who co-founded the music sharing program Napster, then became the president of Facebook. Nor is it anyone else with ties to Silicon Valley or New York City, two hotbeds of venture capital.
Instead, it's the city itself, which last year set up the 49th State Angel Fund with $13.2 million in federal money from President Barack Obama's Small Business Jobs Act.
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