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innovation DAILY

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.

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So you landed a job interview at a startup. Now what?

What exactly are you supposed to wear? A suit? Or just jeans and T-shirt?

A bunch of startup guys chimed in on Quora about this very topic. Here is what they had to say.

HauteLook's Greg Bettinelli wrote:

I did attend my first interview with HauteLook wearing a Liverpool soccer jersey and 7forallmankind jeans with large holes near both knees.  This is not advised :)

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Cleveland Clinic has opened a new office in Saudi Arabia, with the primary focus of its new location to be medical education and training.

The office in the Saudi capital of Riyadh opened Sunday and employs three Clinic workers, Cleveland Clinic spokeswoman Eileen Sheil said.

“It’s not a clinical office where patients will be seen,” Sheil wrote in an email. “The primary purpose is medical education and training programs, e-second opinions, consulting as their healthcare system grows and patient support to Cleveland when requested.”

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U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa is co-sponsor of the Research Works Act, which would prohibit federal agencies from requiring public access to journal articles, even if the research was supported by taxpayer dollars.

The battle over public access to federally financed research is heating up again. The basic question is this: When taxpayers help pay for scholarly research, should those taxpayers get to see the results in the form of free access to the resulting journal articles?

Actions in Washington this month highlight how far from settled the question is, even among publishers. A major trade group, the Association of American Publishers, has thrown its weight behind proposed new legislative limits on requiring public access, while several of its members, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's press, have publicly disagreed with that position.

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Every month, a group of Northern Virginia’s top business executives meets for cocktails, dinner and private conversation at — where else? — the Tower Club in Tysons Corner.

A lot has changed in the decades since George Johnson, then the president of the small, struggling George Mason University, first convened the 123 Club, in large part because of the efforts of the men gathered around Johnson’s dining room table.

Because of the foundation they laid, Northern Virginia has become one of the richest and fastest-growing economies in the country. Northern Virginia is finally getting some of the money and attention it deserves from the state government down in Richmond. Tysons Corner, Reston and the Dulles Corridor were developed. Metro was built out into the suburbs. Dulles Airport was transformed from an isolated airport into a thriving domestic and international hub. And George Mason, where I now teach, has become the largest public university in the state and one of the up-and-coming state universities in the country.

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Thanks to the quirky TV show “Portlandia,” Portland, Ore., is better known for its tattoos and its gluten-free bakeries than for its tech scene. But it does have a tech scene, and a growing one at that.

In less than three years, Portland had become home to three incubators for tech start-ups—the Portland Seed Fund, backed by various city and state agencies; the Portland Incubator Experiment, backed by Nike Inc.’s advertising agency, Wieden + Kennedy, with sponsorships from Coca-Cola, Target Brands and Google; and Upstart Labs, which is just starting out.

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facebook

Jack Welch once said, “Change before you have to”. Few other companies today have applied this wisdom with more consistency than Facebook. For better or worse, Facebook has always believed in pushing the envelope when it comes to making to changes to the platform. It is this willingness to constantly challenge both themselves and their users that some have credited with Facebook’s eventual dominance of the social media space.

To be sure, some changes have certainly been more popular than others, with Facebook sometimes drawing the collective ire of its now more than 800-million plus users. Despite the numerous stories one continues to read about people planning a mass exodus from Facebook, however, the global growth stats continue to boggle the mind month after month, with 1-billion Facebook users starting to look more likely sooner rather than later.

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Iowa

One key to growing Iowa’s economy, state economic development director Debi Durham told lawmakers this afternoon, will be growing the state’s population.

Boosting educational investments that prepare young adults for industrial and advanced manufacturing jobs will be important too, she said, but Iowa must attract more people and reverse its current-slow growth trend.

“We literally have to grow our state population,” Durham said. “When you look at our slow growth, when you look at our aging population, when you have this baby-boom population that is eventually going to exit the workforce, we need people.

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Increased commercialization of technology coming out of institutions like the University of Alabama at Birmingham are a component of the state's new economic development plan.

A new economic development strategy for the state of Alabama is scheduled to be unveiled today at the Economic Development Association of Alabama’s 2012 Winter Conference in Birmingham.

The Alabama Economic Development Alliance, a group created last year by Gov. Robert Bentley, worked with Boyette Strategic Advisors to create the plan, which is known as Accelerate Alabama.

According to a version of the plan labeled "Accelerate Alabama Strategy 1-11-12 Final", which is posted on Boyette's website, the strategy will target advanced manufacturing, technology and distribution and logistics, three industries that present opportunities for the Birmingham metro area.

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gomometer

According to one statistic, half of all local searches are performed on a mobile device.  With more people accessing websites using their smartphones, making sure you website is readable on a phone is not something you can ignore. Load times, readability and images often render differently on a smaller screen.  If a website is less functional when viewed on a phone versus a regular PC or laptop, many mobile users will simply leave a site.

Now Google wants to help make sure your website is mobile friendly. Its GoMo site, launched last November, lets you test the functionality of your website on a mobile device. The site uses a tool called GoMoMeter, created by Mullen Advertising, and powered by Keynote Systems‘ MITE product, which allows users to see what their websites would look like on a mobile device. It also provides tips for improving mobile readiness of your site, as well as resources for building the mobile version of your website.

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Axel Tillmann is the CEO of Russian Venture Company-USA, which opened an office in Boston in September.

Russian Venture Company, a Russian government fund of funds, is looking to invest in Boston area startups through a newly-established office here, the CEO of the company's U.S. branch said in an interview Tuesday.

The CEO, Axel Tillmann, said possibilities his group will be pursuing include investing in local startups that would like to host R&D in Russia (which could lead to matching grant funding from Russian organizations); setting up Boston area offices for Russian technology companies; and giving limited partners in the Boston area access to deals in Russia.

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Leadership

A first conclusion is that - relying on the opinions of the entrepreneurs themselves - role models matter for pursuing an entrepreneurial career. The use of entrepreneurial role models appears wide spread: 54 percent of the entrepreneurs have a role model in the pre- and/or post-start-up phase. Of these entrepreneurs, 81% has a role model before starting up their venture and 63% has a role model within the first three years of the business’ operations. Almost half of these entrepreneurs have a role model both pre-and post-start-up, with the majority leaning on the same role model in these two different stages. All these percentages are even higher for first ventures: 27% of our sample consists of experienced entrepreneurs who are less inclined to use role models. This information confirms the potential of role models to serve as a self- reinforcing mechanism when entrepreneurship is gaining popularity in a country or region.

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questions

Now heading into our 11th year continuously growing the TopCoder Community and hosting competitions through our Open Innovation platform, we have learned quite a bit with regards to how enterprise level clients approach the issue of intellectual property in Open Innovation and more importantly, the questions they routinely seek answers to on this topic.

Treating intellectual property very seriously is a smart move, always. Asking in depth questions of your potential innovation platform partner allows you to gauge the maturity of their platform and their ability to handle complex matters. Answers to questions about IP & security will also illuminate for you the type and breadth of work an Open Innovation platform can effectively handle. Why is this very important?

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Solar peel: This 25-micrometer film of crystalline silicon, deposited on a layer of metal, was produced using a new technique.

Today, most solar cells are made with a process that turns almost half of the raw material—highly refined and processed crystalline silicon—into sawdust. A new process developed by startup Astrowatt aims to eliminate most of this waste while making solar cells more efficient.

Conventional solar manufacturing requires sawing a block of crystalline silicon into wafers about 180 micrometers thick. As the saw cuts through the silicon, it turns almost the same amount of silicon (a layer 100 to 150 micrometers thick) into sawdust that can't typically be reused.

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health

Something is clearly happening in the health tech scene if the boom in health-focused accelerators and incubators is anything to go by.  Although the seed investments that are typically part of the accelerator package are small, it does show that investors are actively looking for new projects and entrepreneurs to invest in. Here’s at least three to take note of.  Are we missing any?

In Europe we’re not aware of any incubators yet, although yours truly – HealthStartup.eu – does offer some of the services typical of an accelerator.  For example, check out our upcoming event in Brussel – there’s at least 7 good reasons why you should attend.

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Josh Haner/The New York Times Thomas L. Friedman

In an essay, entitled “Making It in America,” in the latest issue of The Atlantic, the author Adam Davidson relates a joke from cotton country about just how much a modern textile mill has been automated: The average mill has only two employees today, “a man and a dog. The man is there to feed the dog, and the dog is there to keep the man away from the machines.”

Davidson’s article is one of a number of pieces that have recently appeared making the point that the reason we have such stubbornly high unemployment and sagging middle-class incomes today is largely because of the big drop in demand because of the Great Recession, but it is also because of the quantum advances in both globalization and the information technology revolution, which are more rapidly than ever replacing labor with machines or foreign workers.

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Considering how bad it could have been, science didn’t fare all that poorly in the budget bill that President Obama signed on December 23. Not, at least if you factor in the constraints on discretionary spending imposed by the Budget Control Act and look at the results in the aggregate. But it’s still little reason to break out the champagne. And if the result hints at a long-term pattern the news is none-too-good for the investment needed to build American’s science and technology future.

Here are some examples of S&T budgeting that give a flavor of short-term ups and downs.

Increases over 2011 appropriations were claimed by the Department of Energy’s research wing ARPA-E, which receives $275 million, up from $180 million last year. Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy programs receive $1.8 billion, 1.6 percent above ’11. These are all far short of the president’s requests but still not horrible The DOE’s Office of Science gets a one percent increase at $4.9 billion, and Basic Energy Sciences within the office receives $1.7 billion, a small increase.

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Obama

The problem: Federal government assistance for innovative startup companies too often misses the mark

High-growth startup companies are one of the most important drivers of job creation in the economy today. They are also vital to tackling some of our most pressing long-term societal challenges such as improving our health care, education, and energy systems. It’s clearly in our national and economic interest to help entrepreneurs and innovators succeed.

Unfortunately, many existing small-business loan and assistance programs are not optimized to help the innovative startup firms reach their job-creation potential. The reason: Fledgling startup companies—those with great a idea but without a clear path from proof-of-concept to commercialization—face unique financing challenges that the federal government’s small-business policies are not tailored to solve.

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missile

Industry analysts like to refer to 2011 as “the year the cloud arrived.” But now that it’s here, what are we going to do with it?

We’ve got a few ideas.

Vendors are tripping over themselves to bolster their product lineups with cloud-hosted software and services, while customers in the public and private sectors alike are realizing the cost saving benefit of letting someone else worry about their servers and applications. And that’s not even mentioning the burgeoning consumer cloud market, where even Apple sees ample opportunity.

Despite the hype, there’s a lot of substance to the cloud. Here are five trends that you’ll want to keep an eye on this year.

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Innovation Technology

Today, President France Córdova announced the launch of a new development center with a focus in innovation and research commercialization as a part of her "decadal funding plan."

The Innovation and Commercialization Center is expected to aid faculty, staff and students with potential entrepreneurial plans with assistance on any type business, financial, concept testing, or other, needs.

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