In Part II: Structured Seed Capital, we have seen how a Structured Seed Capital framework can capture clusters of best-in-class technology start-ups and return 33% p.a. at a zero risk of loss. For many VCs, this number looks much more like a threat than a promise: Why should Limited Partners choose to invest in traditional VC funds when Structured Seed Capital beats it by magnitudes both in return and risk?

121 Series A deals at an average gross performance of 38% p.a.

In discussions with partners at Top 10 VC firms, we have developed a different perspective on this issue. The i2X framework breeds pioneers instead of seeking nuggets – but this doesn’t mean that seeking nuggets has to get out of fashion. A deeper look into our historic performance reveals that out of 595 start-ups in a diligently designed portfolio, 121 received Series A VC investments. More importantly, they performed in aggregate at a staggering 38% p.a. gross return, dramatically higher than even the top quartile VC average. This means that historically, Structured Seed Capital not only creates a superior asset class in itself but opens a massive new source of high quality deal flow for conventional VC.

Pawel Swieboda is president of demosEUROPA – Centre for European Strategy, and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Europe.

"Europeans might think of themselves as entrepreneurial people, but we can argue that the welfare state and over-regulation have made them risk-averse.

Since the beginning of the economic crisis, self-employment has become a less attractive option. Today, as many as 58% of Europeans prefer to work as employees as opposed to 49% three years ago. In line with this, the World Bank has observed that EU citizens are prepared to accept lower, but “better” growth, with strong social security and a high level of public services At the same time, the European youth population is often described as the “good enough” generation which prefers to adapt to the changing circumstances rather than conquer the world. Europe has seen less intensive product competition, greater levels of regulation, difficulty in access to high-risk capital and a lower number of educated workers than the United States.  

A new kind of artificial heart that combines synthetic and biological materials as well as sensors and software to detect a patient’s level of exertion and adjust output accordingly is to be tested in patients at four cardiac surgery centers in Europe and the Middle East. If the “bioprosthetic” device, made by the Paris-based Carmat, proves to be safe and effective, it could be given to patients waiting for a heart transplant. Currently, only one fully artificial heart, made by Tucson, Arizona-based SynCardia, has U.S., Canadian, and European regulatory approval for use in patients.

Attempts to completely replace the human heart with a prosthetic device started decades ago (see “CPR for the Artificial Heart”). It is hugely challenging to create a device that can withstand the harsh conditions of the body’s circulatory system and reliably pump 35 million times per year, as the heart does. Other complications, such as stroke caused by blood clots in artificial heart implants, have also caused setbacks. For these reasons, fully artificial hearts typically serve as a temporary measure, or as a “bridge to transplant,” although the FDA has recently granted a humanitarian use exemption for one of SynCardia’s artificial hearts for patients not currently eligible for a donor heart.

Kwon Sunbeom's future was mapped out. Talented in math and science, he attended a specialized high school and majored in electronic engineering at a prestigious university. Lifetime employment at one of South Korea's towering conglomerates beckoned.

Instead, while his peers were seeking jobs at Samsung and LG, he scaled back his studies and started a company with friends. Together they invented a garbage bin that compresses rubbish using solar power and wirelessly communicates to be collected when full.

Imagine an office with people; only these people aren’t employed by the same company. One is a lawyer, the other, a freelance app developer, and the small team in the corner is building a service aimed at disrupting the mobile payments industry. This is coworking.

Coworking happens when a group of people, working independently of one another, share a workspace, and it’s happening all around the world. By some estimates, there were 1320 coworking spaces worldwide at the beginning of 2012, up 88% from the previous year. Today there are likely over 2000 coworking communities.

Europe needs to get new data protection rules agreed and in place as soon as possible, creating a single market for data to boost competitiveness on the global scene. “We can’t lose time; we are talking about our prosperity,” said Neelie Kroes, Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, opening the Science|Business Smarter Data for Europe conference.

There are now six megabytes of data for every person on the planet. “It’s just incredible; outside of the imagination,” Kroes said. But advances in machine learning, data mining, visualisation and other analytics are making it possible to tame, manipulate and interrogate this torrent. “The amazing thing is not just the amount but what you can do with it,” she said.

The Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS)is an instrument of the European Commission, developed under the Lisbon Strategy and revised after the adoption of the Europe2020 Strategy to provide a comparative assessment of the innovation performance of EU Member States. It follows the European Innovation Scoreboard established in 2001. Together with the Regional Innovation Scoreboard and the pilot European Public Sector Innovation Scoreboard (under development), it forms a comprehensive benchmarking and monitoring system of research and innovation trends and activities in Europe.

The most recent IUS 2013 has shown that the European Union has become more innovative but the innovation gap between countries is widening. The overall ranking within the EU remained relatively stable, with Sweden at the top, followed by Germany, Denmark and Finland. Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia are the countries that have most improved since last year. Drivers of innovation growth in the EU include SMEs and the commercialisation of innovations, together with excellent research systems.

About a year ago, my co-founder Kunal Sarda, WG’11, and I received the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pitch our business to seasoned investors on the popular ABC reality TV show Shark Tank, thanks to an application notification from the Wharton Venture Initiation Program. We knew that if we wanted the Sharks to fund VerbalizeIt, a language translation community that offers users real-time access to human translators, we would have one chance to deliver a succinct pitch and negotiate for seed funding in front of 7 million viewers.

We spent weeks (or, more accurately, months) preparing for our negotiation, and we are pleased to report that our hard work paid off. We generated a bidding war among the Sharks and successfully negotiated a funding offer. The episode aired this past Friday, May 17, but you can watch a recording of Shark Tank Episode 26 on VerbalizeIt’s website.

When Cleveland-startup Innovative Developments launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter last February, it aimed to gauge interest and generate pre-production sales for Mycestro, a wireless mouse worn on your index finger. The campaign succeeded in generating buzz, leading to coverage in publications like Wired.com and Crain's. It also didn't hurt that in the process it generated $354,115 from a pool of 4,010 backers.

Crowdfunding is an attractive concept to companies within emerging industries whose cutting-edge technologies may not always garner early attention from traditional funding sources. As entrepreneurs in these industries are increasingly questioning the traditional mechanisms by which businesses access capital, crowdfunding has bubbled to the surface as not only a creative approach, but a viable one too. The Mycestro campaign illustrated that the benefits go beyond raising cash.

I'm on my way home after a speaking gig at the 2013 ASUG Annual Conference and SAPPHIRE NOW events. Just me and 19,999 other people who might talk about innovation, but who mostly just do it. And that's where cool new stuff comes from. Stuff like HANA, SAP’s new platform for real-time business, which sounds like its going to cut Big Data down to size. Manageable, human size, that is. Yes, I was with people who do more doing than talking, and that was a breath of fresh air.

I'm not opposed to dreaming up cool new stuff, understand. I do a good bit of it myself, which is how Teamability® got born. But I never talked about innovation as if it were the answer to some cosmic problem.

A team of students at the Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering has designed for NASA a new stethoscope that delivers accurate heart- and body-sounds to medics who are trying to assess astronauts’ health on long missions in noisy spacecraft.

Space is serene, because no air means no sound. But inside the average spacecraft, with its whirring fans, humming computers and buzzing instruments, is about as raucous as a party filled with laughing, talking people.

In March filmmaker and aquanaut James Cameron, back from his record-setting visit to the Challenger Deep in the Marinas Trench 11 kilometers below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, announced the donation of his sub, DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, to Woods Hole, where scientists plan to use its cutting-edge technology to help further their understanding of life in ocean trenches.

The first order of business when the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER arrives at Woods Hole in a few weeks: Fit its custom-made lights, imaging equipment and high-definition 3-D cameras on to Woods Hole’s Nereus robotic sub in preparation for the latter’s dive to the 10-kilometer-deep Kermadec Trench—off the northeastern tip of New Zealand's North Island—in February or March 2014. The Kermadec Trench is a kilometer shallower than the Challenger Deep site that Cameron explored, but Nereus’s mission is crucial to understanding the peculiar inhabitants, ecosystem and geologic activity that have evolved in ocean trenches—the planet’s most hostile habitat.

Thank you Maarten for that introduction and for the invitation to speak at this conference. I think the topic of this gathering could not be more timely or relevant. 

We are living in a disruptive period which is fundamentally altering the form and function of cities and metropolitan areas. Large, sweeping forces—new market dynamics, fiscal constraints, energy transitions, demographic tumult, technological advances, and climate change—are compelling nations and communities to reshape their economies and remake their places in the service of broader productive, innovative and sustainable goals.

This week, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius posted separate entries on the White House Blog touting the effect of federal initiatives on health IT adoption and health industry innovation, FierceHealthIT reports.

The posts were written in response to a New York Times commentary published by columnist Thomas Friedman last week about health industry innovation related to the Affordable Care Act and other federal initiatives.

The annual American Fitness Index, released Wednesday by the American College of Sports Medicine, ranked the Washington area in the top five for the fittest cities in the country.

The index is based on several factors, including smoking, exercise, obesity rates, chronic health problems and access to health care. The index also factors in the availability of parks, recreational facilities, walking trails and farmers' markets.

Watson, the IBM computer system that attracted millions of viewers when it defeated two Jeopardy champions handily in 2011, is finally going to meet its public.

Last week, IBM announced that a version of the artificially intelligent software that gave Watson its smarts is to be rented out to companies as a customer service agent. It will be able to respond to questions posed by people, and sustain a basic conversation by keeping track of context and history if a person asks further questions. An “Ask Watson” button on websites or mobile apps will open a text-based dialogue with the retired Jeopardy champion on topics such as product buying decisions and troubleshooting guidance.

I have been spending most of this month traveling with Belmont students throughout Eastern Europe learning about entrepreneurship.

While in Latvia, we saw huge numbers of “accidental” entrepreneurs.  These are people who had never intended to be entrepreneurs, but who became self-employed out of life circumstances and necessity.

In my experience, inventors and technologists aren’t interested or aren’t very good at building a business, and entrepreneurs aren’t usually good scientists. These people need to find each other, and can jointly make a great team for a new startup. Without the synergy, companies like Apple might never have gotten off the ground.

Historically, it’s also not often that a good inventor was also a good entrepreneur. There are some old arguments that even our entrepreneur heroes, like Thomas Edison, really cheated on the invention side. Most of the great entrepreneurs of recent times, like the young Steve Jobs, had a great technologist, Steve Wozniak, who could implement his dreams.

Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage at the D: All Things Digital Conference Tuesday night, answering questions on the company's cool factor and whether Apple has any plans for wearable tech. 

Though he offered mostly canned responses on his vision for the company and Apple TV, Cook spoke pointedly about Apple's mission to innovate. 

Government regulations and open data initiatives inspire investment in platforms that support accountable care organizations.

Although many companies have yet to fully implement the Affordable Care Act, the law known as Obamacare could drive an increase in new health IT startups and innovation.

"Data that supports medical decision making and collaboration, dovetailing with new tools in the Affordable Care Act, are spurring the innovation necessary to deliver improved health care for more people at affordable prices," U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius wrote in a May 28 blog post.