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.
Peyton Manning signs a new deal for nearly $100 million to play football. Some guy named CC Sabathia signs last fall for $122 million to throw a fastball over a white piece of rubber.
Both guys at the top of their game. Skill off the charts. Champions. Leaders.
And they still have 3 coaches… each.
You would think it crazy if Peyton suddenly declared he didn’t need a coach anymore.
Are you an Innovator with a market-ready technology looking for your first buyer?
The Canadian Innovation Commercialization Program (CICP) helps Canadian businesses get their innovative products and services to the marketplace by giving them the opportunity to propose their own first contract for their technology to be used within a Government of Canada department or agency. Successful companies with pre-commercial innovations are awarded contracts valued up to $500,000 through an open, transparent, competitive and fair procurement process.
The CICP targets companies with innovations in four priority areas, Environment, Safety and security, Health, and Enabling technologies, who can demonstrate the following:
Finding a good cofounder is a key ingredient of a successful startup. Having had the opportunity to work with a variety of co-founders over the years, and now pairing up with individual co-founders for TandemLaunch portfolio investments, I have developed a couple rules of thumb for what to look for in co-founders.
1. Common Goals, and Values
Ensuring co-founders have common goals basically boils down to alignment of interest. Startups typically fail due to a misalignment of interests, so you need to make sure right out of the gate that both founders have equal interest. It doesn’t do you any good to have two superstar entrepreneurs if one of them wants to build the next Facebook, and the other wants to build a company to flip it for a million dollars in as short a time as possible. Right around the time when you hit that million dollar milestone and you get the first offer, that founding group is going to implode.
I have been teaching an 8-week workshop on technology commercialisation this Fall, and in the course of developing its modules I had a pair of realisations. One, I myself am a startup. As I pass through this mid-life phase of re-invention I weigh certain considerations that any emerging company must resolve: defining purpose and worth and how to make it happen. Two, outlining my personal ambitions through the lens of a business plan – the likes of which my students are expected to create – is incredibly beneficial. There is a process to developing great ideas that matter, then making the leap from concept to market. Working through that process and setting the emergent strategy is equally beneficial for applied personal development; what I call intérpreneurship.
Startech Foundation ( www.startech1.org ) announced today that it is now accepting applications from south central Texas based technology startups for funding by the Texas Emerging Technology Fund. This announcement represents the fourth investment fund of the nationally known program created by the State of Texas and is designed to provide early stage seed funding for technology startups, university faculty, and others that have an emerging technology that may be ready for commercialization.
“Funds may be used for any legitimate business purpose but the primary focus of the fund is to facilitate those technologies that are ready to come off the lab bench and get into the marketplace,” said Jim Poage, President of Startech. “The Texas Emerging Technology Fund has been recognized by other states and national investment groups as a truly innovative program. In South Texas alone it has helped a number of young companies and universities in the valuable role of adding jobs and launching new technologies. We have been pleased that south central Texas companies and universities have received almost $43M,” Poage continued.
Combining the secrets that enable water striders to walk on water and give wood its lightness and great strength has yielded an amazing new material so buoyant that, in everyday terms, a boat made from 1 pound of the substance could carry five kitchen refrigerators, about 1,000 pounds.
One of the lightest solid substances in the world, which is also sustainable, it was among the topics of a symposium in San Diego March 25 at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. The symposium focused on an emerging field called biomimetics, in which scientists literally take inspiration from Mother Nature, probing and adapting biological systems in plants and animals for use in medicine, industry and other fields.
Startup founders are fascinating creatures. They have to be multifaceted and dynamic, yet laser sharp and narrowly focused. During the early days, they must wear many hats and perform a variety of foreign duties, such as HR, PR, sales, marketing and product design. Above all, they have to be just a little bit crazy to even think about stepping into the roller coaster lifestyle called entrepreneurship.
As crazy as they may seem, the entrepreneur’s many duties create a uniquely talented individual. Yet subtle differences in personality and perspective can determine success or failure.
No sea monsters. No strange life. No fish. Just amphipods — tiny shrimplike creatures swimming across a featureless plane of ooze that stretched off into the primal darkness.
“It was very lunar, a very desolate place,” James Cameron, the movie director, said in a news conference on Monday after completing the first human dive in 52 years to the ocean’s deepest spot, nearly seven miles down in the western Pacific.
I still know some entrepreneurs who boast of simply following their gut instincts, rather than listen to anyone or any data, to make strategic decisions. We’ve all worked with autocratic leaders in large companies who seem to thrive in this mode. They all forget or ignore the high-profile failures that have resulted from some single-handed business decisions.
One of the biggest in this decade was the merger of America Online (AOL) with Time Warner, engineered in the early 2000’s by Time Warner CEO Jerry Leven and AOL CEO Steve Case for a whopping $164 billion. Levin famously prevailed on his board and ignored everyone, but in 2010 admitted that he had presided over perhaps the worst deal of the century, since Time Warner was forced to take a $99 billion loss only two years after the merger, and Levin was forced out. It’s been downhill from there.
The second installment of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation's Google Fiber Speaker Series did little to lower an awfully lofty bar set in the series' first session.
John Wilbanks (left), who's a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation and an expert on open content, open data and open innovation systems, delivered the second address of the series earlier this month at the foundation's headquarters Kansas City, Mo.
Following on the heels of the series' first talk by Startup America Partnership CEO Scott Case, in which Case challenged Kansas City to leverage the arrival of Google Fiber to create 2,500 companies and 10,000 jobs, Wilbanks discussed similarly ambitious ideas for Kansas City.
From our talks with innovation management practitioners and business executives it seems that not many organizations have a well-defined and integrated innovation strategy. To find out more about how to go about creating and executing such a strategy, we spoke to Wouter Koetzier and Christopher Schorling at Acceture who encourage a very pragmatic and execution-oriented approach.
Former U.S. Undersecretary for Energy Dr. Kristina Johnson articulates the advantages of various sectors to make impact on critical issues and to drive innovation. Interviewer Dr. Tina Seelig also provides background on the Epicenter, the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation, that seeks to bring entrepreneurship and innovation skills into undergraduate engineering education.
I was taking a walk yesterday with a former Facebook employee who is starting a company.
He can also code.
The fact that he's a technical co-founder puts him at a huge advantage because he doesn't have to employ anyone while he works on coding his own product. Once he's got a prototype, he can look for funding to turn it into a real company.
This the National Mentorship month and the White House held an event to honor 12 Small Business Champions of Change from all over the US on March 7, 2012. I had the great honor to attend this event (Web.com and Network Solutions, the companies I work for, were active supporters of this event and so I was fortunate to get an invitation). I thought I would share the insights on mentoring that came out of this event. You can learn more about the White House program at Champions of Change.
The event started with a plea from an administration official asking all mentors to tell their story using all forms of communication including as he put it, when you meet people at the grocery store. This is an excellent idea. We have been proponents of story telling as it relates to small business success and you will find them in all our blogs and channels with both small businesses themselves and thought leaders participating.
Google is awesome. Yes, there have been questions raised about its new privacy policy and creepy Safari tracking and frankly, it just knows way too much about everyone who has ever created a Google account. But let’s put that aside for a moment and focus on all its cool quirks, shall we?
They’re built into practically every Google product — if you look hard enough, you’ll find that entering the right search term or typing a code can make Google collapse, spin or create fictional characters. Here are 15 easter eggs (hidden, entertaining things developers build into a website or program) for you to discover the next time you’re Googling.
Tech-savvy scientists can help pull the biopharma industry out of the proverbial muck. Drugmakers have fallen short of expectations in translating research breakthroughs into medicines. There are no quick and easy solutions to the industry's problems--biology is infinitely complex, research budgets are finite and the development cycles are long.
Nevertheless, FierceBiotech IT (the information technology wing of the mother FierceBiotech ship) has selected a list of 10 innovators who are challenging the status quo in their respective fields--with computer-based tools playing central roles in their endeavors. The people, who we've playfully dubbed the top "biotech techies," have a wonderful mix of backgrounds. One used to work for a video game maker. Others pioneered DNA sequencing methods. Another has led IT for some of the largest drugmakers in the world.
Universities just love comparing themselves. And one of the most widely recognized measures of the strength of an academic research department is the amount of grant money it takes in.
But nearly a decade ago, the National Institutes of Health, the largest federal provider of basic research money to universities, stopped publishing grant-based rankings, after concluding that it wasn't worth the trouble and didn't fit its mission.
The UK's current copyright laws are being blamed for stifling innovation and growth in the creative sector.
In letter signed by big names like Google's Dan Cobley and university heads it is noted that if the laws are changed then the UK will be able to compete on a world platform.
"Our copyright system is flawed. It limits growth, puts our cultural heritage at risk, holds back scientific discovery, and stifles our country's great comedic tradition of parody," explained the letter.
Green jobs are often said to be a key growth area of the future. But according to a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 3.1 million people, 2.4 percent of all American workers, were employed in "green goods and services" jobs in 2010.
The report defines green jobs across five categories: production of energy from renewable sources; energy efficiency; pollution reduction and removal, greenhouse gas reduction, and recycling and reuse; natural resources conservation; and environmental compliance, education and training, and public awareness.
The majority of these green jobs (2.3 million) come from the private sector. The public sector employed about 860,000 people. The largest sector of employment was manufacturing, with more than 450,000 green jobs.
Venture giant New Enterprise Associates filed paperwork Monday morning signaling plans to raise a 14th fund of as much as $2.3 billion.
The Securities and Exchange Commission filing by NEA comes two years after it closed a $2.5 billion fund.
The firm, which has offices in both Chevy Chase and Menlo Park, Calif., has been a prolific investor through both the recession and the latest consumer Internet boom. And its ability to raise a new fund should be greatly enhanced by a flurry of recent exits, including the November 2011 IPO of Chicago-based Groupon Inc .
