The increasingly central role of corporate venture, the adaptation of the traditional venture model to the economic times, and the return of the bull market were all raised as themes at this year's BioTrinity conference. OBN is the membership organisation supporting and bringing together the UK's emerging life science companies, corporate partners and investors.

The first day of the conference opened with senior figures from AbbVie, SR One, Boehringer-Ingelheim Venture Fund, Takeda Ventures & MP Healthcare Venture Management and SV Life Sciences Advisors LLP, discussing the significant role corporate venture firms play in providing life science companies with investment and whether they are indispensable to life science funding in a panel entitled Corporate VC 2013. Now Part of the Furniture.

Most entrepreneurs sneer at the idea of working for a big corporate or medium sized business on the path to becoming the next big thing. It’s not popular these days to have a “boring” day job that doesn’t involve the hustle and bustle of being an entrepreneur.

But before you judge the corporate drones and feel sorry for them and their life choices, it seems fair to have a look at some of the lessons being a part of a corporate can teach you about running your own company and succeeding. Being involved in a big company or simply working for someone is a good way to understand an industry and provides exposure to opportunities and ideas.

Carmel Valley resident and entrepreneur Michael Sick developed a product he said beachgoers use surfer lingo — and his last name — to describe. “‘Sick’ was not always cool, but when people see this they say, ‘Oh man, that’s sick!’” he said. Sick describes the Surf-Grip as a “bodyboard for your hands.” The lightweight foam paddle with a handle allows bodysurfers to have increased buoyancy and velocity when catching waves.

The enormous potential power in solar energy is revealed by measurements which show that solar heat reaches the earth in the Temperate Zone at the average rate of about 4,000,000 calories per square yard per day. During the three months of greatest sunshine, an acre of land receives directly from the sun an amount of heat equivalent to burning approximately 250 tons of high-grade coal. This measurement indicates that unobstructed solar radiation, transformed completely into useful energy, would produce approximately one horsepower per square yard.

This energy determines our climates, causes winds, ocean currents, and rainfall, and produces photochemical reactions whereby a portion of the energy is stored in plants. Thus, solar energy is the ultimate source of our fuels—wood, coal, oil, and gas—as well as of power derived from wind or falling water. However, the stores of fuel energy in coal, oil, and gas, while great, are not inexhaustible. It is therefore of ultimate importance to investigate and develop alternative sources of heating and power.To read the original article: Untapped Potential | MIT Technology Review

Millions of people around the world are likely to be pushed back into poverty because climate change is undermining economic development in poor countries, the World Bank warned in a report released on Wednesday (19 June). Droughts, floods, heatwaves, sea-level rises and fiercer storms are likely to accompany increasing global warming and will cause severe hardship in areas that are already poor or were emerging from poverty, the bank said in the report.

Food shortages will be among the first consequences within just two decades, along with damage to cities from fiercer storms and migration as people try to escape the effects.

Using cash instead of debit and credit cards costs Germans around €150 per person each year, according to an academic study from Steinbeis University in Berlin on the ‘Cost of Cash’. The research by professor Jens Kleine of the Research Center for Financial Services at Steinbeis, is the first time the costs associated with cash in Germany – usually considered to have a strong cash culture – have been studied.

The findings come in advance of proposed changes to the Payments Services Directive, which are expected from the European Commission next month, and which will launch a debate on the relative costs to Europe of cards and cash.

I have made many mistakes trying to innovate organizations as marketeer, consultant and innovation facilitator. The good news is that I learn a lot. Seeing the next generation innovators falling into the same traps, makes me want to share five things an innovator should always remember.

1. Ideate with them and not for them

You can invent on your own, but in an organization you can never innovate alone! You need the support of an awful lot of colleagues and bosses before a big change truly can take place. You need R&D engineers, production managers, IT staff, financial controllers, marketers, service people and salesmen to develop your new product or service, produce it, get it on the market and service it. A new concept needs a lot of fathers and mothers will it survive internally. Therefore you have to give them a chance to discover for themselves, what different paths are possible, what can be developed and what is realistic. If you want to be an effective innovator in an organization you will have to ideate new concepts with them and not for them.

Innovation is actually easy – when the corporate culture is supporting it. Unfortunately today many companies show ”excellent” practise killing the innovative spirit. In this new in-depth article Dirk Loop explores the opportunities every employee – not just executives and innovation managers – has to enhance a culture of innovation. He gives a brief overview on common weaknesses within corporate process frameworks and shows hands-on solutions.

In my new book The Innovation Expedition I point out six ways of committing innovation suicide. And how to avoid these pitfalls in practice.

Start without a business need. Think about the last time you tried to make a dramatic change in your personal behavior. We, as innovators, are faced with the same difficulties. We are all stuck in our habits; doing things in fixed patterns. For years, we continue to read the same journals, drive the same cars, and have the same insurance. The only reason for us to change is when a new, simple and attractive solution comes along, relevant to our needs. It’s as simple as that. So, if your company’s current business is booming, it’s unlikely that the people in your organization will readily break with their habits. Remember: necessity is the mother of invention. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas granted Portugal exclusive rights to the eastern routes that went around Africa. That’s why on March 22, 1518 the King of Spain was persuaded to appoint Magellan and Faleiro; the Spanish Crown felt an urgent need to travel west to find a new commercial route to the Spice Islands. So don’t try to convince others to innovate when there is no business need; you will be turned down.

The heavy hitters of the internet might feel pretty good about themselves for figuring out how to handle big data sets, but national laboratories have been accustomed to managing exabyte-scale loads for years.

It would have been wise for developers at webscale properties to check with government supercomputing experts. Before the Hadoop Distributed File System and the Google File System hit the scene, there were things like Lustre and the Parallel Virtual File System, said Gary Grider, high-performance computing division leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory, at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

The world is getting flatter. The Creative Class economy is dying. As agriculture and manufacturing before it, innovation is converging. In general, that's good news for most places. It's bad news for the winners of the last round of agglomeration. Case study number one, Brazil:

THE world is littered with would-be Silicon Valleys with catchy monikers, from Chilecon Valley (Santiago) to Silicon Wadi (Tel Aviv). Now Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third-biggest city, wants to join the list. Dubbed “San Pedro Valley” in 2011 by a group of start-ups that formed a chance cluster in its São Pedro district, it is now home to nearly 50 young tech firms. (They switched the Portuguese “São” to the Spanish “San” for a cosmopolitan touch.)

Stamford, Connecticut, is nicknamed “The City That Works,” and the Stamford Innovation Center is trying to prove it.

The Stamford Innovation Center is an incubator that claims to have Connecticut’s largest coworking space. In addition to coworking, it offers classes, mentoring, and events and hosts Startup Weekend Stamford and the Lean Launch Ventures accelerator.

Solar panel installations continue to grow quickly, but the solar panel manufacturing industry is in the doldrums because supply far exceeds demand (see “Why We Need More Solar Companies to Fail”). The poor market may be slowing innovation, but advances continue; judging by the mood this week at the IEEE Photovoltaics Specialists Conference in Tampa, Florida, people in the industry remain optimistic about its long-term prospects.

On June 17, 2013, Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Members discussed “Why Entrepreneurship Matters to Black America” on the House floor and online. In honor of the 50th anniversary of National Small Business Week, the CBC highlighted the impact of Black entrepreneurs and small business owners in America and discussed the important role Congress plays in enhancing the small business landscape for minority entrepreneurs.

View highlights of the Twitter chat here. Watch and read CBC Members’ remarks below:

Entrepreneur and entrepreneurship are the acronyms of doing business in the contemporary world. The one in the driving seat in this activity is known as entrepreneur and the myriad of activities done by this person is commonly known as entrepreneurship. But this cannot be called as an academic definition of entrepreneurship.   In simple words, we can define entrepreneurship as the capacity and willingness of a human being to develop, organise and manage a business venture along with the related risks in order to make profit. The risk and uncertainties are further submerged into ambiguity and true uncertainty. The concept of true uncertainty is used where an entrepreneur wishes to bring something really novel to the earth. The most common example of entrepreneurship is starting a new business by any person. When someone starts a new business he/she will carry out feasibility studies, work out return on investment, formulate a business plan, workout a suitable organisation, make a management plan to manage human, financial and material resources etc, this series of activities in a common language will fall in the realm of entrepreneurship.  

The U.S. economy shed more than 8 million jobs during the Great Recession, the steepest decline since the end of World War II. But was there a silver lining to the downturn? According to this study, which is the first to use data from the recession to analyze its effect on people’s decisions to start new businesses, this severe shock to the workforce fueled a surge in entrepreneurship.

The recession, which began in late 2007, sent corporate bankruptcy filings and closures soaring, of course, but its effect on business formation is less clear. Many sources of angel investments, bank loans, and venture capital dried up. However, the rapid increase in layoffs, the availability of newly unemployed workers, and a dearth of employment alternatives may have combined to create higher numbers of entrepreneurs than in pre-recession years.

Entrepreneurs may be in a position to gain a competitive advantage on offshore and domestic manufacturing companies, according to the most recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report. Rates of entrepreneurship are at their highest rate since GEM began tracking in 1999.

Small-business manufacturing firms are gaining an advantage as the economy continues to recover. Entrepreneurs are pursuing opportunities because they want to, not out of necessity. However, most entrepreneurs were focusing on growing their businesses within the U.S. instead of exporting products.

Perhaps it is a “sign of the times” but more and more people have been telling us that they feel stressed, disengaged, disconnected, unfulfilled, fearful, and overwhelmed with too much to do. Sadly, in increasing numbers they’ve revealed to us that they want to feel inspired, and that they want their lives and work to really matter. Much like Sisyphus, the Greek hero who was ordered by the gods to push a big rock uphill only to see it slip out of his hands at the last moment, living the “good life,” a philosophical term originally associated with Aristotle, for many people has become an endless--and joyless--undertaking.

The notion of the “good life” can be viewed as the human quest for meaning, a formidable challenge that involves both making a living and making a life that really matters, that has significance. To be sure, this seems to be easier said than done in light of the overwhelming evidence that points to the opposite: More people than ever before, in spite of obvious advances in our way and quality of life, appear to be experiencing some kind of existential angst or are lost in an empty space that the world-renown psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, described as an “existential vacuum.”

What is a two-part, superhydrophobic coating when it's at home? A miracle, that's what it is. It's called NeverWet. You spray a couple of layers--base and top coat, two separate products--onto the surface of whatever object you want to protect. Then, throw whatever you want at the object, laughing hysterically as it runs right off. Magic.

NeverWet protects against water, mud, salt solutions, acids, bases, and even food and drinks like red wine and chocolate syrup. The demonstration video even shows a coated iPhone taking a dunk and emerging, like Venus from the waves, only drier, although the solution is currently unsuitable for glass products as it dries frosted. Apparently a clear-glass version is in the works.

Here is how the venture capital game used to be played around here: Enlarge This Image

A friend calls a friend who knows a guy. A meeting is taken. Wine is drunk (at, say, Madera lounge in Menlo Park). A business plan? Sure, whatever. But how does it feel?

This is decidedly not how Google, that apotheosis of our data-driven economy, wants to approach the high-stakes business of investing in the next, well, Google. Unlike venture capitalists of old, the company’s rising V.C. arm focuses not on the art of the deal, but on the science of the deal. First, data is collected, collated, analyzed. Only then does the money start to flow.

Google Ventures and its take on investing represent a new formula for the venture capital business, and skeptics say it will never capture the chemistry — or, perhaps, the magic — of Silicon Valley. Would computer algorithms have bankrolled David Packard or Steve Jobs? Foreseen the folly of Pets.com?