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.
In 15 Years From Now Half of US Universities May Be in Bankruptcy. My Surprise Discussion with @ClayChristensen
“In 15 Years From Now Half of US Universities May Be in Bankruptcy.” Such was the quote of Clayton Christensen followed by, “… in the end I’m excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn’t mind.”
Warren Buffett's annual shareholder letter is out. In it, he has a huge section on newspapers. In the past 15 months, Berkshire Hathaway acquired 28 daily newspapers for $344 million. With what everyone says about the death of print media, many might wonder why he would take these on.
Teenagers are a good measure of what's "cool." Observing which apps they use and how they interact with technology can help the rest of us spot budding trends. And lately it seems teens have grown tired of Facebook. Adam Ludwin recently launched a social photo album app called Albumatic
Most startups fail. Few startups matter. Yet every great company began as a startup, from Thomas Alva Edison's lab in New Jersey to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's garage in Palo Alto, Calif. And every entrepreneur likewise started out as an unknown. We hear about a lot of new companies and meet a lot of founders, and write about far fewer. That's a selectivity driven by reality: It only makes sense to focus on the companies that matter most to our readers. But lately we've run across some genuinely inspiring company builders who strike us as more than just your typical wannabes. Some are first-timers; others are serial entrepreneurs who have yet to become household names.
With more than half of Spain's and Greece’s young people jobless, those with in-demand digital skills are increasingly seeking work in stabler Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. Thousands of young Spanish and Greek professionals are leaving their homeland in search of employment. The result is a mass exodus of young, educated Spaniards – a brain drain, the likes of which has not been seen since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939.
Most worrying from a European perspective, they are not simply leaving for northern Europe. Although firm figures are difficult to come by, Mexico's immigration office, the Instituto Nacional de Migracion, reports the number of Spaniards granted work permits in the last quarter of 2012 alone at 7,630.
By 2018, mobile operators will take more revenue globally from pure data than from their traditional voice services as the world moves towards hyper-connected cities, industry analysts predict. But technological standards remain scarce, EurActiv reports from the the GSMA conference in Barcelona.
A new industry report, published yesterday (25 February) at the Global Mobile Congress in Barcelona, predicts that mobile services will revolutionise people’s lives over the next five years.
The mobile data explosion is being driven by a surge in demand for connected devices and machine-to-machine communications in health, education, energy metering, and carbon emissions, according to the report by GSMA, the global mobile operators association, and developed in collaboration with consultants PwC.
Swedes should be prepared to work until they are 75 and to change careers in the middle of their work life if they are to keep the welfare standards they expect, Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said. The retirement age is being debated in the Swedish parliament ahead of an expected pension reform package in April.
In its proposal, the government wants to give people the right to remain at work until 69 instead of the current 67 cut-off age. Meanwhile, the right to early retirement would be delayed by two years, to 63.
In this highly competitive economy, small businesses need a strategy to flourish and grow. The question to ask yourself is: are you playing to win, not just trying to stay in the game?
With their book Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works authors Roger Martin and A.G. Lafley make the argument that delaying decisions on your strategy can have enormous consequences for your business. Martin and Lafley are both Procter and Gamble executives.
I learned about the book through a mention at Harvard Business Review and asked for a review copy. It turned out to be a thought-provoking strategy book designed for large companies. But it’s one that small business leaders interested in strategy can learn from.
ROCKVILLE, MARYLAND, March 4, 2013 – BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), aregional private-public partnership focusing on commercializing market-relevant biohealth innovations and increasing access to early-stage funding in Central Maryland, today announced that BioHealth Innovation, Inc. President & CEO Richard Bendis is scheduled to present at the upcoming SXSW 2013 conference and the 2013 BIO International Convention this Spring. Mr. Bendis is also serving on the Program Committee for AdvaMed 2013: The MedTech Conference, which will be held in Washington, DC, in September.
Specific information for each event is as follows:
Massive Open Online Courses might seem like best way to use the Internet to open up education, but you’re thinking too small. Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences.
This probably sounds familiar: You are with a group of friends arguing about some piece of trivia or historical fact. Someone says, “Wait, let me look this up on Wikipedia,” and proceeds to read the information out loud to the whole group, thus resolving the argument. Don’t dismiss this as a trivial occasion. It represents a learning moment, or more precisely, a microlearning moment, and it foreshadows a much larger transformation--to what I call socialstructed learning.
Like many successful startups, Mixpanel is pursuing a degree in good hiring practices from the school of hard knocks. CEO Suhail Doshi shares a few things he has learned along the way.
In three years, Mixpanel has grown from two cofounders who just graduated YC with a great idea to a team of 20 people analyzing more than 10+ billion actions every month with 800+ paying customers. Along the way we’ve learned a few things. Most obviously, that the first people you hire are not just members of your team, they are the foundation of your company. Take what we’ve learned into consideration to help ensure that each new hire contributes to that solid foundation that will set your company on the right track for years to come.
Many breakthrough technologies were hatched by hobbyists in garages and dorm rooms. Prominent examples include the PC, the web, blogs, and most open source software.
The fact that flip-flop wearing hobbyists spawn large industries is commonly viewed as an amusing eccentricity of the technology industry. But there is a reason why hobbies are so important.
Growth through strategic collaborations has fueled the expansion of many a company involved in the health care space such as Intermountain Healthcare System and McKesson to add new technologies and markets relatively rapidly. The forms these partnerships take vary according to need and size. Although frequently between smaller and larger companies, it can also be a partnership of equals. It can be particularly useful for small, growing companies to validate their products and give them broader market exposure. On the other hand, if there’s a fundamental difference in goals by the companies in the partnership or the customers aren’t happy with the agreement in practice, it could all go pear shaped, especially for the smaller companies.
It's not that Chaz Gaddie didn't understand the food pyramid. He was a chef. He could recite nutrition facts chapter and verse. And at 6 feet 4 inches tall and 386 pounds, he knew his weight was killing him.
"I was prediabetic, had serious sleep apnea and was eating anti-inflammatories every night to help with the inflammation in my body and burning in my hips," Gaddie said.
He knew lean proteins, whole grains, fruits and vegetables along with exercise would help him reduce.
Last weekend, Wharton Entrepreneurship Club and PennApps organized the Startup Un-Conference, the first of its kind in the Philly student community. The goal was to foster collaboration between the business and tech communities by getting entrepreneurial-minded students together in a room to talk about their startups and products.
We had a few leaders at successful startups give keynote addresses about their successes and failures in starting companies. But the focus was on interactive workshops with 5 to 15 people, led by experienced entrepreneurs, VCs and professors, to give students a chance to dig deeper into the questions and problems they face in their own startups.
Ask yourself this question: “Is innovation caused, or is it serendipitous?” The answer is almost certainly “yes.”
Spend a little time with any strong innovation leader and you will find someone who is very comfortable living with this seemingly contradictory notion. On the surface, innovation often appears random — something that just seems to happen when creative people do creative stuff in creative ways. But what effective leaders of innovative ecosystems know and practice is that there are always limiting factors present in any organization, and the real trick is not in removing limits, but in choosing them.
When New York-based entrepreneur Matthew Hogan quit his steady job in finance to work on a startup idea, he told his two closest friends during a road trip to Atlantic City. A few months later, they each wrote Hogan a $25,000 check.
Many tech entrepreneurs take investment from friends and family to test the viability of an idea. They raise just enough to fund a developer’s salary, office space, monthly rent, and a steady supply of ramen noodle soup.
It’s a time-honored startup strategy, but it’s a risky one. Hogan could make his friends rich, if his startup takes off. But if it craters, that lost $50,000 could haunt their friendship.
Take a look at your innovation pipeline. Odds are it is overflowing with rich ideas brimming with growth potential... on paper at least. Look deeper. Identify the projects that are the most different and disruptive, the ones with the greatest potential to create new growth. How are they staffed? If you are like all too many companies, at least a few will be staffed with — or even led by — people who allegedly are spending five or 10% of their time on the project.
A sprinkle of this and a dash of that can make a nice soup, but it's no way to create vibrant growth businesses. If you really want to disrupt, if you really want to transform, you need to make sure your high-profile projects have their Innovation Pig.
The phrase “work-life balance” is a vexing one. Some people think it is impossible. Others strive for it.
Many entrepreneurs — and pundits about entrepreneurship — reject it as impossible. Others believe that figuring out how to balance work and life is a sign of a more enlightened entrepreneurial perspective.
In Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur, my wife Amy and I talk about many of the tactics we use to integrate work and life, which Amy loving refers to as “all the time that I’m not working.”
Marissa Mayer, chief executive at Yahoo, may not have set out to start a national conversation about working from home when she decided that employees at that Internet company must come into the office. But she has done just that. In a memo, Ms. Mayer’s top human resources executive wrote: “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”
Proponents of telecommuting, however, point to numerous studies showing that people who work from home are on average more productive than other workers and that telecommuting cuts down on traffic during peak hours, reduces companies’ real estate costs and improves employee morale, leading to less turnover. Ten percent of American workers spend at least one day a week clocking in from home, according to government data. The percentage of people working exclusively from home climbed to 6.6 percent of in 2010, from 4.8 percent in 1997.
