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.
Over the last few months, a number of universities across the country have launched pre-accelerator programs – a new trend that has emerged in university-led efforts to support entrepreneurial growth among faculty and students. This week, the Digest examines this growing trend and attempts to provide insight into two important questions about pre-accelerators:
What are they? What are their goals?
In the February 3 Federal Digest, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) issued proposed rules affecting Impact Small Business Investment Corporations (SBICs) and is accepting comments. In addition to codifying the existing, temporary guidelines, the proposal would add new investment certifications, change the expedited processing benefit for reduced fees and replace the branding penalty for non-compliant SBICs with the threat of imposed default.
No matter how many regulations are put in place, drones are cheap enough now that frequent misuse is becoming the norm. There’s no good way of dealing with a dangerous drone: you can jam its radios to force it to autoland, or maybe try using an even bigger drone to capture it inside a giant net. In either of these cases, however, you run the risk of having the drone go completely out of control, which is even more dangerous.
Will wearables be the next big thing after smartphones? Not if Gartner's predictions are right.
According to new research from the firm, as charted here by Statista, smartwatches are the fastest-growing category of wearable devices, with annual sales expected to double (or more) by 2017. Wristband wearables like the Fitbit are expected to grow about 50%. Every other category is predicted to have slower growth.
Image: http://www.businessinsider.com
Landing a dream job isn’t always just about the actual work. Among the best companies to work for, employee review platform Glassdoor found that employees were just as jazzed about mission-driven company cultures, great career advancement opportunities, and amazing benefits and perks.
Apple has officially been dethroned as the king of Wall Street — by the company it once declared "thermonuclear war" against.
Google overtook Apple as the most valuable company in the world by market capitalization on Tuesday after a strong holiday quarter earnings report that drove its stock price up 5% overnight.
When the stock market opened on Tuesday, Google had a market value of $550.6 billion, beating out Apple's market cap of $529.1 billion for the first time in its history.
Image: Alphabet CEO Larry Page speaks at the Fortune Global Forum in San Francisco, Monday, Nov. 2, 2015.IMAGE: JEFF CHIU/AP PHOTO
Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, likes to play a game he calls Find the Robot. As he goes about his everyday life—shopping, traveling through airports—he looks for machines performing tasks that humans once handled. Most of what he sees doesn’t impress him. ATMs, self-checkout kiosks, and boarding pass scanners have been around for years. Beyond that, not a lot has changed. “It’s very hard for robots to do things that are extremely ordinary for humans,” Gordon says. “Turns out that teaching machines to do something like folding laundry is almost impossible.”
Image: A double-arm prototype robot moves a box during a media preview hosted by Hitachi Transport System at a warehouse in Noda City, Japan, on Aug. 25, 2015. Photographer: Akio Kon/Bloomberg
The complex nature of cancer and its manifestation strikes fear in the heart of many who receive the diagnosis. Scientists are making incredible strides, however, in both the development of diagnostic techniques and treatments. International Innovation’s Stephanie Spurr speaks with Professor of Cell and Gene Therapy at UCL, Waseem Qasim, and explores how gene editing is contributing to far greater success in this field
Pro cycling was rocked over the weekend when 19-year-old Belgian rider Femke Van den Driessche, competing in the cyclocross world championships, was caught with a bicycle that had a motor hidden in the frame, and since then many have been talking about one Austrian company's product: the Vivax Assist.
Image: Vivax
Google software engineer Max Braun was unimpressed with the lack of a sci-fi style "smart" mirror, so he built his own. He accomplished this by using a two-way mirror, display panel, controller board, a handful of components, and arts and crafts supplies.
Mobile payments. Digital wallets. Bitcoin. The blockchain. Social trading. Those are just a few technological innovations that collectively have the potential to upend the financial services industry. Given the rapid pace of innovation in financial technology, or “fintech,” it’s no wonder many industry executives appear to be struggling to fully grasp its transformative and disruptive implications.
The nonprofit organization behind Sesame Street is making a venture capital arm to invest in children’s toys, games and innovations in education. The company is seeks to capitalize on the brand being a “gold standard” for anything kid-related. Sesame Worskshop, the nonprofit that produces the decades-old PBS children show, announced Monday that it’s partnering creating a venture advisory arm called Sesame Ventures. Sesame Ventures is partnering with VC firm Collaborative Ventures to produce “Collab+Sesame.”
Image: © Skier Dude / Wikipedia
What is the best-performing venture capital fund in the world? If you judge by the amount of media attention and na
me recognition a firm receives, then Sapphire Ventures would never appear on your list.
Try doing a Financial Times online search of top VC firms Accel Partners, Sequoia Capital or Andreessen Horowitz, and you'll find an average of 300+ article mentions apiece. If you do the same search for Sapphire Ventures and its previous incarnation, SAP Ventures, the total number of online article mentions across both searches is…25.
Image: http://www.businessinsider.com
A new video shot by a drone shows that Apple’s Campus 2, dubbed the "spaceship," is moving into the final phase of its construction, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2016. The video was shot by drone pilot Duncan Sinfield and shows that the exterior ring, from which Campus 2 gets its nickname, is fully constructed in places. The large glass panel windows that will cover the structure have been fitted into place in some portions, and in other places the roof is being lifted onto the building.
We live in a strange time. People can call themselves anything they want and get away with it. If you believe what they write about themselves, pretty much everyone’s a CEO, an entrepreneur, a leader, a startup founder, an award-winning keynote speaker, a best-selling author, or a self-made millionaire.
Recently concluded start-up event in New Delhi was one of the most energetic events I have ever seen. A lot of enthusiasm, positive energy, commitment to the social cause and at the same time great pragmatism. Each one has his/her own story. Very inspiring. Innovation is the heart of any start up. This can be of the following type:
Image: http://swarajyamag.com/
Can you be a successful innovator and yet fail? Absolutely.
Innovators are “first movers.” A common exhortation by academics is that you should become a first mover. If history is a guide, first movers don’t win. Only about 11 percent of them dominate their industries, and about 50 percent fail.
Could a neck-worn device protect the brains of athletes and soldiers against traumatic injury? That’s the promise of technology that researchers are beginning to test in humans after several years of animal studies.
The idea behind such a “collar,” which was originally inspired by studies of animals that tolerate repeated blows to the head, is to slightly increase the amount of blood in the brain and thereby cushion it in a way no helmet can, says Julian Bailes, a co-inventor of the technology, chairman of neurosurgery at NorthShore University HealthSystem, and co-director of the NorthShore Neurological Institute in Evanston, Illinois.
Image: https://www.technologyreview.com
Magic Leap said Tuesday that it raised $794 million in new funding in a round led by Alibaba Group, confirming earlier speculation that the secretive augmented-reality company was raising a large new round of funding. Together with a previous round of $542 million led by Google, this brings Magic Leap’s total raised since late 2014 to about $1.34 billion.
So what’s Magic Leap doing with all that money? A lot of things. The Florida-based company has spent several years now working on hardware to build its so-called “cinematic reality” technology into a head-worn device that makes it possible to see all kinds of digital images—monsters, robots, and more—as though they’re actually in front of you.
