In an interview with Wake County Economic Development's Executive Director, WRAL Tech Wire's Jason H. Parker explores programs that bolster startup communities outside of Durham, Raleigh, and RTP....

Image: Adrienne Cole, Executive Director of Wake County Economic Development

There probably hasn’t been a new generation come along that hasn’t been accused of being lazy and shiftless by those who came before. Millennials are no exception. It seems like Baby Boomers and Generation X love taking shots at millennials to make up for similar abuse they had to put up with from their parents' generations.

Small and medium-sized companies in traditional sectors have lost the momentum to prepare for the next industrial revolution, Industry 4.0. 

For the first time since the financial crisis hit Europe six years ago, SMEs are creating jobs again. The “tentative green shoots of growth” of 2013 gained strength last year, adding more than one million jobs (1.3%), according to the 2015 SME report, presented on Thursday (19 November).

Image: “The future looks relatively bright” for SMEs, the European Commission concluded in a report, but the manufacturing sector is lagging behind. (EASME)

It’s that time of year again in the United States. The time when we are bombarded by non-ending entreaties to overspend on just about anything they can squeeze into a mall or on the webpages of internet retailers, and that’s a lot of space. The big day of the coming holiday weekend is… Black Friday…the day of obsessive consumption. Black Friday, the kickoff off of the frenzy of buying for that end of the year day of showing your love through big piles of boxes under a tree.

Personalities fit into one of two groups -- Type A and Type B -- it’s one or the other. Type A's typically are extremely motivated individuals with lofty goals and the internal fire to go after anything they desire. Type B’s are typically more laid back, lacking the same level of intense self-motivation that Type A's possesses; They also operate at a much lower stress level.

Since last year, Bill Gurley—a partner at the venture capital firm Benchmark, known for early investments in Uber, OpenTable, and Zillow—has stood out from his VC counterparts for his insistence that there’s a bubble in tech startup valuations. In particular, he says “unicorns”—startups valued at $1 billion or more—are the most visible sign of an explosion in valuations that he thinks will end in a bust just as surely as previous bubbles did.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com/

SO YOU’VE STARTED YOUR COMPANY, TALKED TO WAY TOO MANY STRANGERS TO VALIDATE YOUR IDEA, AND HAVE GONE TO WORK BUILDING YOUR PROTOTYPE. BUT WHAT’S NEXT?

The path to IPO is long with many forks in the road. If you’re a B2B company, how do you really get that sales process started and a pilot out? How do you even price a SaaS program? If you’re B2C you know you need millions of app downloads- but how can you get noticed in a crowded app marketplace? And if you’re hardware… good luck navigating crowdfunding, manufacturing, and distribution!

SAN FRANCISCO -- A handful of new wearable and Internet of Things companies were on display at Wearable IoT World Labs’ fall demo day last week. The local accelerator showcased eight companies in the wearable and automotive world in its downtown headquarters.

Image: http://www.eetimes.com

Happy Thanksgiving from the Innovation America Team!  (Rich, JT and Scott)

The science fiction of yesterday is the science fact of today – and some of those made-in-Israel science fiction-to-fact was on display last week at the Israeli headquarters of EMC, at a special event celebrating the company’s Global Innovation Day. “There’s been so much innovation in health care in recent years, much of it developed in Israel,” said Roni Frumkes, Innovation and Business Development leader for the EMC Herzliya Center of Excellence. “It’s a big inspiration to our people to get all these innovations together in one room.”

Starting an entrepreneurial business, or maintaining the competitiveness of a mature business, requires innovation. Yet everyone I know seems to have a different perspective on what constitutes real innovation, and why is seems to happen so rarely. Another challenge is to debunk some of the common myths that seem prevent many from even assuming they can innovate.

Latin America is destined to emerge as one of the most important regions in the global market for mobile telephony, according to the latest studies published in the sector. The GSMA, the international association of mobile service providers, estimates that during 2014, smartphones represented 32% of all phone connections in Latin America. By 2020, such devices are expected to comprise 68% of all phone connections in the region. In absolute numbers, this will mean that there will be more than 605 million smartphones in the region by the year 2020 — a figure that will be exceeded only by the Asia Pacific region.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi have done it again. This time they’ve spelled out how 139 countries can each generate all the energy needed for homes, businesses, industry, transportation, agriculture—everything—from wind, solar and water power technologies, by 2050. Their national blueprints, released Nov. 18, follow similar plans they have published in the past few years to run each of the 50 U.S. states on renewables, as well as the entire world. (Have a look for yourself, at your country, using the interactive map below.)

With the cost to sequence a human genome dropping by the day and medical records finally going digital, public health experts are excited for a new era of personalized, or "precision," medicine—a big data future in which there is no "average" patient, only individual patients with unique genes, environments, and lifestyles. As a measure of this excitement, this year, President Obama launched a $215 million initiative that will create a health database from 1 million volunteers that is unprecedented in detail. Breakthroughs in prevention, understanding, and treatment of disease are hoped.

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com

There is something to be said for being in control of your car from instant to instant. First, there is a certain pleasure for most of us in choosing, owning and driving our own vehicle. Our constant attention to the road, its condition, and other vehicles’ behavior is required, so that surprises are minimized and dangerous situations are more readily anticipated and responded to. On the other hand, there are those visionaries who dream of getting into a yet-to-be-developed vehicle that will transport them from their suburban driveway to a parking garage in downtown Manhattan without their needing to touch the steering wheel or depress the gas or brake pedals.

It’s that time of year again in the United States. The time when we are bombarded by non-ending entreaties to overspend on just about anything they can squeeze into a mall or on the webpages of internet retailers, and that’s a lot of space. The big day of the coming holiday weekend is… Black Friday…the day of obsessive consumption. Black Friday, the kickoff off of the frenzy of buying for that end of the year day of showing your love through big piles of boxes under a tree.

The famous writer H. G. Wells published his first novel, The Time Machine, in 1895, just a few years before Queen Victoria's six-decade reign over the U.K. ended. An even more durable dynasty was also drawing to a close: the 200-year-old Newtonian era of physics. In 1905 Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which upset Isaac Newton's applecart and, presumably to Wells's delight, allowed something that had been impossible under Newton's laws: time travel into the future. In Newton's universe, time was steady everywhere and everywhen. It never sped up. It never slowed down. But for Einstein, time was relative.

For a generation of CEOs, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma was a guiding light on how to survive industry disruptions. His book educated business executives on where competition would emerge from and how to respond to the threats. Of late, however, journalists and academics have questioned the accuracy of Christensen’s industry analyses and challenged his broad generalizations. His response, in a new Harvard Business Review article, is that his theories have been misunderstood and their basic tenets misapplied. He posits that his prescriptions have been a victim of their own successes.

Image: If Tesla isn’t disruptive, what is? (Beck Diefenbach/Reuters)

One year ago I attended a startup mixer organized by the Weiss Tech House. Through that mixer, I got to meet Henrique Setton WG’16, the lone-MBA student who attended the mixer. We immediately hit it off, speaking about our international experiences and our interest in bridging Silicon Valley with our respective countries. Henrique also offered to connect me to a few Filipinos he had met in Silicon Valley through the company he co-founded, Silicon House.

Image: MBA students and undergrads with entrepreneurial ambitions getting to know each other. - http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

Kim Scott has built her career around a simple goal: Creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together. She first tried it at her own software startup. Then, as a long-time director at Google, she studied how the company’s leaders created an environment where the joy that people took in their work felt almost tangible. As a faculty member at Apple University, Scott learned how Apple takes a different path but is equally committed to creating the conditions where people can do the best work of their careers and love doing it. Along the way, she managed a lot of teams in various states of euphoria and panic. And while she did a lot right, she’d be the first to admit everything she did wrong.

Image: http://firstround.com