The foundations of the Maine’s next economy are under construction, thanks to the energy of the state’s innovators, startup entrepreneurs and determined dreamers. They are busy constructing a new bottom-up economy that is perfectly attuned to who we are, as a state, and to our national brand.

December 20, 2015:   Google has launched a new accelerator programme that will provide funding, mentorship and training to mobile startups in Brazil, India and Indonesia, three growing markets of the world.

Up to $50,000 will be given in equity-free funding, said Roy Glasberg, Google’s global lead for its Launchpad programmes, in a TechCrunch report. The company will look for those startups that can have a clear impact on their home markets, while not having to worry about return on investment.

I’m standing on a dark platform at the edge of a maze of gray walls, where two guides are helping me into my gear. They place a bulky helmet crammed with a virtual-reality headset, headphones, and gesture-recognition hardware on my head, and help me strap a modified laptop to my back.

The guides step away. I stare through my headset at a blue-lined digital abyss. Suddenly, the endless space in front of me opens up with a virtual sizzle of electricity, revealing the entrance to an ancient temple, hidden deep in a lush jungle, where ancient carvings and forgotten treasures await my inspection.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Is your social venture losing its homegrown talent — often to other social ventures? In the past two years, only 30% of open C-suite positions in the nonprofit sector were filled by an internal candidate (the rate at for-profits is 60% of positions). And almost half their replacements came from other nonprofits. This comes at a significant financial and productivity cost to all organizations, as demonstrated by research in corporate settings: Onboarding an external hire can cost up to twice the departing executive’s salary, and the time it takes for an external hire to become productive is twice as long as for someone hired from within.

By almost any standards the startup in which I’m involved, Purple Carrot, has had a successful six weeks since our relaunch. We’re shipping more meals every week; customer feedback is almost entirely positive; very little has gone wrong (how great is that?); a round of funding is nearly complete, and that—combined with real income from our subscribers—is allowing the principals to take a breath, assess the overall picture, and move to the next phase before hitting the fundraising trail again.

This holiday season, support student entrepreneurs by buying gifts from their startups! Members of our Venture Initiation Program have delightful gifts that your loved ones would be thrilled to unwrap:

Barring Eyewear Stunning sunglasses made from premium woods or high-grade matted acetate make a terrific fashion statement, and you’ll be pleased at the low price for these luxury frames. A portion of the price funds cancer research as well, making Barring just the latest Wharton-founded glasses company with a social mission.

Image: Photography by J.N. Anderson on behalf of Barring Eyewear - http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

Though BlackBerry has less than 1% of the smartphone market share today, it once had more than 50%. The question is how such a successful company could fall so far. Journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff provide many of the answers in their book, Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry.

In this week’s regional roundup, we have the dish on everything you should know from regional venture capital and cyber security to building a company that survives a dynamic tech market. For more on this series, read our introduction. 

St. Louis Biz Journal: Big raises, new funds highlight year for venture capital in St. Louis

Not only are established investment firms like RiverVest, Prolog Ventures and Cultivation Capital still growing the St. Louis startup scene, but the city is well on its way to frontloading its venture capital list with new (and growing) additions.

Image: http://www.startlandnews.com

Venture capital firms toting cash from agricultural heavyweights Monsanto Co.MON -0.32%, Syngenta AGSYNN.VX +1.23% and Rabobank Group this week sunk tens of millions of dollars into farm-focused technology startups.

The startups, Blue River Technology and Farmobile LLC, are among a raft of companies that aim to transplant data-crunching techniques and low-cost hardware from Silicon Valley to the Farm Belt, pitching equipment and services that can help farmers raise bigger crops while using less fuel and chemicals.

Image: Iowa farmer Jason Rouse adjusts the Farmobile data-collection device in his combine. Information gathered in real time allows farmers to monitor operations and fine tune decisions. PHOTO: SARAH HOFFMAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL for The Wall Street Journal

Two of Cincinnati’s major seed-stage venture capital firms have received loans from Ohio’s Third Frontier program that allow them to raise their largest funds ever.

CincyTech landed a $10 million loan, while Queen City Angels received $5 million in matching funds on Thursday.

Image: Bob Coy is the president and CEO of CincyTech. LEIGH TAYLOR | COURIER

This was the year when tech companies turned their backs on the initial-public-offering market.

Investment bankers are expecting 2016 to be the year they come back.

Presented with an abundance of funding in the private markets and a volatile stock market that made closing IPOs much harder, many companies that would otherwise have hit the stock market chose not to this year.

The Ohio Third Frontier Commission approved $19.5 million in loans Thursday to Central Ohio funds managed by Rev1 Ventures and NCT Ventures out of a total $60 million in statewide awards.

Required matching dollars raised by the private groups make for a total of $58.75 million in available funds for Central Ohio startups in their earliest stages. The loans from Third Frontier's Pre-Seed Capitalization program must first be approved by the legislature's Controlling Board.

This year will go down in history as the warmest year on record, beating out 2014 for the dubious distinction. That fact alone is striking, considering the sped-up pace of global warming in recent years. However, it's the margin by which this year is beating out all others that is most impressive.

On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a chart that illustrates how far ahead 2015 is compared to the six other warmest years on record. The chart essentially shows that there's no contest — 2015 is running away with the title, propelled by a one-two punch of manmade global warming and a strong El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean:

Fresh air is hard to come by in China these days.

Earlier this month, Beijing issued its first-ever red alert for smog — the most serious warning on a four-tier system adopted a little over two years ago. Now, bottled air from the Canadian Rockies is selling out in China.

Vitality Air, which bottles and resells air from the resort town of Banff in Alberta and Lake Louise in Banff National Park, has sold out its first shipments to China, which it began selling there less than two months ago. The cans of compressed fresh air come with a face mask attached for the user to breath through.

JOHANNESBURG – As the commodities rout makes it increasingly difficult for mining companies to tap capital markets, equity crowdfunding is emerging as an alternate financing mechanism.

Traditionally considered the domain of technology startups, equity crowdfunding appears to be changing the way in which companies, irrespective of the sectors in which they operate, are raising funds. According to Oscar A Jofre, President, CEO and Founder of KoreConX, $30 billion dollars was raised via global equity crowdfunding platforms in the first quarter of the year.

This is the fourth in a series about corporate innovation co-authored with Evangelos Simoudis. Evangelos and I are working on what we hope will become a book about the new model for corporate entrepreneurship. Read part one on the Evolution of Corporate R&D, part two on Innovation Outposts in Silicon Valley, and part three The 6 Decisions to Make Before Setting up an Innovation Outpost.

In our last post, we addressed the six key questions that senior management should address to determine if an Innovation Outpost makes sense for a company. If the answer is yes, here's a step-by-step guide to help set one up. -----

On Monday, I wrote about a new bill introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) to overhaul the Food and Drug Administration. Among other things, the bill would try to speed up FDA approvals in order to boost innovation and address the current dearth of new drugs in the pipeline.

I was skeptical. In recent years, Congress has passed a number of measures to greatly shorten the amount of time that drug applications languish in the FDA bureaucracy, and that hasn't led to a lasting boom in new drugs that are significant improvements over existing treatments. So far, cutting through red tape hasn't ushered in a new age of innovation.

With so much competition in the field today, being an entrepreneur has never been harder. Only the best ideas thrive and turn into growing, successful businesses. Yet entrepreneurs also have more opportunities than ever before to compete on level playing fields with more established brands. These opportunities range from coworking spaces to productivity tools to outsourced HR and accounting options.

We are a culture that wants to believe in fantasy and happy endings, like many of the classic fairly tales. In reality, life is tough and sometimes brutal. Most people are struggling to get by and just pay their bills. What you should be doing is changing your mindset so just getting by is no longer what you are reaching for.

A long time ago in a studio far, far away, filmmaker George Lucas created one of the seminal works of science fiction: the "Star Wars" movie series.

Nearly 40 years later, the ideas introduced by the films are still staples of the genre, and with the theatrical premiere of the latest installment, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," opening tomorow (Dec. 18), fans will be pleased to see lightsabers, hyperdrives and speeders in abundance.

Image: The Millennium Falcon battles TIE fighters. Credit: Disney/Lucasfilm