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.
Medicine is a data processing business. Doctors measure, notice and inspect, and based on the data they collect, make decisions and take action.
Alas, despite years of promises, online data storage in medicine is a mess. Whenever I visit a new doctor, I have to start over, from the beginning, to the best of my recollection. And I hate forms, so I leave stuff out, or forget things, or my handwriting is a mess.
The European Union is taking action in order to promote entrepreneurship courses for all ages with a view to boost employment opportunities and growth. Education for entrepreneurship is one of the highest return investments policy-makers in Europe can make to support growth and business creation since according to a recent research, 78% of entrepreneurship education alumni were employed directly after graduating at university, against 59 % of a control group of higher education students.
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ei Jun wears many hats — he’s Xiaomi CEO, the board chair at Kingsoft and an Angel investor — and is one of the most respected figures in China’s tech industry. As one of the wildly successful Xiaomi co-founders, he’s also someone worth listening to when it comes to China’s startup scene. In a recent interview, the Beijing News asked him what he thought the differences were between Silicon Valley and China. Here’s what he said:
The biggest difference in the startup environment between (China) and the US is that China doesn’t have enough Angel investors, and there is not enough money being invested.
There is so much advice out there about resumes… what works, what doesn’t… and everything in between.
Thankfully, this infographic by TopCounselingSchools.org breaks through some of the confusion – and talks how to make a resume “sexy” enough to get the attention of recruiters. Just as important, they show some “what not to do” moments and resume turn-offs.
Here are just some of the interesting data points you can use to make your resume more attractive to the person on the opposite side of the table:
One of the dangers of being a good listener is that, well—you listen. Combine this with a tendency to believe that other people generally know what they are talking about, and you’ve got the setup for entrepreneurial enervation.
Herein, five of the most off-target “truths” that business experts inflicted on my entrepreneurial soul:
If you are working too many hours, you’re doing something wrong.
MYTH! The 4-hour workweek? Who’s kidding whom? Maybe this is relevant if your goal is near-total retirement or some other ‘lifestyle option’. Or perhaps you have created a totally self-service online business, have outsourced the satisfaction of your personal needs, and your ambition is a life of leisure. But if you are bootstrapping a company, or you want to change the world with your innovation, be prepared to sweat. And besides, if you know how to build a quality team and you have a worthy goal, why would you want to NOT work?
The Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program pairs top innovators from the private sector, non-profits, and academia with top innovators in government to collaborate during focused 6-12 month “tours of duty” to develop solutions that can save lives, save taxpayer money, and fuel job creation. Each team of innovators is supported by a broader community of interested citizens throughout the country. The 1st round of five projects was launched in August 2012 with 18 inaugural Fellows. You can learn more about the accomplishments to date of the MyUSA (formerly known as MyGov), RFP-EZ, Blue Button, Better Than Cash, and Open Data Initiatives Fellows through the blog posts of each team.
Here's a prediction: If your résumé feels boring, stilted, and borrowed, no one's going to want to hire you.
Recruiters look at a résumé for six seconds. So how do you stand out from the crowd, aside from awesome design?
By avoiding threadbare phrases like "stand out from the crowd," as David Mielach observes at Business News Daily. Once distilled, his points flow like this: Get as specific as possible, avoid tired phrases like the plague, and show--don't tell--the hiring manager why you're the person they need.
New research suggests that people treat hiring like dating. So companies are trying to solve for the qualities that make for Mr. or Mrs. Right.
Like dating, a human endeavor frought with uncertainty, reward, and high turnover, hiring has a habit of taking all the theories and recommendations you have about a candidate (or, from the other side, the company) and emptying them unceremoniously into the nearest garbage can. At a fundamental level, when two people sit down to an interview, it's two humans trying to figure out if they like each other.
Today (March 1) mandatory spending cuts are set to go into effect across the federal government, including to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
In total, the cuts to the federal government will make up $85 billion. The NIH is losing around $1.6 billion of its $35 billion yearly budget, while the NSF should be out $350 million of its annual $7 billion.
Gainesville and Boca Raton, FL – February 28, 2013 - The Institute for the Commercialization of Public Research (the Institute) announced today that it has finalized a funding agreement with Prevacus, Inc., an early stage drug development company spun out of Florida State University to address the mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) market. Every year 4-6 million people suffer from mTBIs many of which do not reach an emergency room and go unreported. Apart from analgesics for associated pain and anti-depressants, there are no approved pharmaceutical therapies for mTBI.
The Institute works with Florida’s research universities and institutions to support new company creation and job growth, and the Seed Capital Accelerator Program bridges early funding gaps, enabling recipients to reach critical milestones and attract additional private investment capital.
Venture investment in health care cratered in 2012. While others cut back, SR One charged ahead.
The venture arm of GlaxoSmithKline formed in 1985 and has steadily invested $30 million to $50 million annually. Seeing strong prospects at a time when many conventional venture firms had to sit it out, SR One invested more than $50 million last year, making eight new deals and eight follow-on investments, said Jens Eckstein, its president.
The growth of EdTech is being recognized as an important development to educational innovation. Educational firms Kaplan and Pearson are helping startups and their own brand by investing in this emerging field.
Education is one of the hottest innovation trends right now, and is getting a lot of attention from larger organizations. Kaplan and Pearson, for instance, both announced incubation programs to support startups. Kaplan’s EdTech Accelerator launched in collaboration with startup accelerator TechStars, and Pearson Catalyst is Pearson’s edtech. Both corporate-funded programs will select promising new companies and provide meeting space, industry leader mentoring and other resources. These companies will develop tech-centric learning products that will be demonstrated at events, and founders will present to potential investors.
Drake: How do you feel about the progress the crowdfunding for equity portion of the JOBS Act has taken to date and where are the three industry areas for this new regulation?
Barnett: When I sat down with you at the SEC April 20 to our pleasure and surprise both leadership and the staff expressed their sincere desire and interest to meet the staggered rulings throughout the 270 days timeline.Unfortunately the big boss was not present. While key staffers have worked diligently on crowd funding they have also drafted proposals for commenting on regulation D 506 c which removes the general solicitation ban. Neither of those rulings are making the deadline the SEC had. In an ideal world Walters Chair of SEC would accelerate the ruling on these underlying JOBS Act bills.
This week, I spoke to one of the longest running and most active angel groups in the country, the New York Angels. For a long time, they were basically the only game in town for seed and early stage funding in NYC. Luckily for all of us, including the New York Angels themselves, the ecosystem has bloomed.
Not only has the NYC ecosystem changed, but the whole ecosystem around early and seed investing has innovated. Smaller funds are thriving, and technology has been brought to bear in a major way with efforts like AngelList. In a world where startups can pick up 750k in from just a couple of seed funds, or crowdsource a bunch of angels sight unseen, what's the role of an angel group?
My fingers trembled as I fed page 34 of 72 into the fax machine, deftly pressing the head of each page into its creaky jaws so that this cheap machine wouldn’t snag two pages at once, obscuring the precious scribbles adorning the footer of each page where it read: “Seller’s Initials: _______”.
This is what the last six years were all for. All the labor. All the risk. The brave face for the troops. The self-inflicted unflagging optimism despite no evidence to support it. All those sleepless nights worried about making payroll. The care and feeding of becoming an expert in something. The hard lessons you have to recover from learning. The experience you get just after you need it. The inner doubt suppressed for the morale of the team. No salaries followed by low salaries. The “eat what we kill” mentality. The scrounging and scrabbling and begging and fighting the assholes for those morsels of revenue, those crumbs of validation.
To quote the great radio broadcaster Paul Harvey, "You know what the news is, but now you'll hear 'The Rest of the Story.'" We'll discuss sequester and the soon to expire budget "continuing resolution" (CR), and their possible effects on the SBIR and small business communities. Sequester starts (slowly) on March 1, and the CR ends March 27.
In this issue:
Entrepreneurship is not a job for the Lone Ranger. Every startup requires building and maintaining effective relationships with people, including partners, team members, customers, and investors. That means giving and asking for feedback, and learning from it, especially negative feedback.
“Friction” is feedback mixed with emotion or drama, making it all the more difficult to sort out the value. There should be no immediate assumption that one side is right, and the other is wrong. It may be an indication that one party isn’t giving the feedback well, or the other isn’t taking it well, or both. Both of these modes are wrong, and non-productive.
My senior year of high school, I had the genius idea of taking AP Physics, AP Calculus, and AP Statistics… all at the same time.
I pushed myself so hard that year all because I wanted to graduate from college in less than four years.
I did that. I earned my bachelor’s degree in two and a half years started working a full-time job at the age of 19.
I figured that if I got my degree early and had some experience under my belt, I’d be ahead of the game career-wise. I would be taking steps toward my journey up the “career ladder”. If I did this, I would be a few steps closer to becoming the VP of some great company where my work would consume all of my energy every day.
"We don't have an experimental system, we have a human being," says UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, referring to the unique circumstance that life science innovators must consider when measuring risks against rewards. She also explains why leaders must have an operating style that accommodates employees whose job functions require different schedules and tolerances for risk.
Space entrepreneur and X PRIZE Founder Peter Diamandis believes that the world today is far too adverse to risk. True breakthroughs that expand scientific capability take a tremendous amount of adventurous spirit, which means real mavericks need to be audacious in order to discover greatness.
