The creation of Ontario’s Ministry of Research and Innovation (MRI) in 2005 signalled that the provincial government had prioritized an agenda of research and innovation.

MRI’s mandate sought to:

• develop an integrated innovation strategy and guide its delivery; 
• invest in policies and programs to deliver on the innovation strategy; and 
• foster a culture of innovation and showcase Ontario’s culture nationally and internationally.

Overall, this agenda represented a commitment to build an economy where innovation is a driver of regional economic growth.

Poor maternal, infant, and child health as well as inadequate coverage of family planning remain significant global health problems facing low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) today. Despite a 47% reduction since 1990, nearly 300,000 women still die annually from causes directly related to pregnancy. The majority of these deaths are attributed to preventable obstetric complications prior to, during, and following delivery, with developing countries carrying the vast majority (99%) of the burden. Additionally, although mortality for children under five years of age has decreased from 12 million annually at the beginning of the last century (in 1900), to 6.9 million annually in 2011, the burden of these deaths now falls primarily in LMICs, with most of these deaths also due to preventable causes. In these same countries mobile phone coverage and access has become nearly ubiquitous, with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) estimating in 2013 that the number of mobile phone subscriptions (6.8 billion) is nearly equal to the human population of 7.1 billion. The opportunity this represents is one that has not been lost on the global health community.

Even before I released the disc, I knew it was a long shot. And, unfortunately, it was a clumsy one too.

We were playing Ultimate Frisbee, a game similar to U.S. football, and we were tied 14-14 with a time cap. The next point would win the game.

I watched the disc fly over the heads of both teams. Everyone but me ran down the field. I cringed, helplessly, as the disc wobbled and listed left. Still, I had hope it could go our way.

Regular readers know I am a total geek when it comes to the ins and outs of the venture capital business. So while we spent the bulk of our time with John Doerr talking about iconic founders he’s worked with, I wanted to make sure we spent at least a little time talking about his industry.

After all, the Internet has changed venture capital as much as it’s disrupted the music industry, newspapers and everything else. Thanks to the rise of open source, commodity hardware, blogs, incubators, institutional seed funds, AngelList, and the overall dramatically lowered cost and time to starting a company, the venture business has been transformed in recent years. Even dominant firms like Kleiner Perkins and dominant investors like John Doerr have had to adapt with it.

At some point or another, we have all heard the saying that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”.

But nowhere is this more apparent, and perhaps even vital, than in today’s economically strenuous times. While national unemployment rates have steadily soared across North America and Europe, the recession and the subsequent shortage of jobs has hit youth the hardest.

Friends,

The White House Champions of Change program highlights the stories and examples of citizens across the country who are "Winning the Future" with projects and initiatives that move their communities forward.

This May, the White House Office of Public Engagement will host a Champions of Change event for entrepreneurs who exemplify the promise of crowdfunding to fuel the growth of startups and small businesses across the Nation. "Crowdfunding" means raising money in small increments from many individuals, typically using an Internet platform. Donation-based crowdfunding is already empowering many entrepreneurs, while investment-based crowdfunding platforms will soon be facilitated by the bipartisan Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which the President signed one year ago and the SEC will implement.

Millennials have disrupted the labor market, making it acceptable to job hop and complete "tours of duty" until a better offer comes along. 

In the process, company loyalty has become a thing of the past, and everyone needs to accept it, say Chris Yeh and Ben Casnocha in the Harvard Business Review. 

We can no longer believe in "this idea that people would go to college, study hard, get a degree, land an entry-level job at a big, stable company." Nor can we believe in the old 20th century compact of employees slowly working their way up the ladder. 

With 500 Startups Accelerator’s new class introduction video and its notorious chant, you can’t help but wonder if the current system for funding startups is really the best route to building lasting companies. Some even believe that the funding-centric mindset of startups in Silicon Valley is toxic.

I couldn’t agree more. Which is why, other than some modest help, we opted to not pursue investors for our company and go it alone instead. I’m convinced that for a lot of startups (though certainly not all) choosing to bootstrap instead of  searching out VC money is the better strategy for a number of reasons.

In spite of being home to some of America’s most successful companies, as varied as Anheuser-Busch, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Purina and Energizer, St. Louis has never been perceived as a bastion of progressivism.

The question as to “why” has no easy answer. Maybe it’s the old-line manufacturing heritage, a culture of Midwestern conservatism, or perhaps even the vast amount of trust fund dollars controlled by families who seemingly invested more into charitable causes (how dare they?) rather than into new technologies.

 In many ways, Michigan looks a lot like Wisconsin. It shares hundreds of miles of the same Great Lakes shoreline, and usually votes “blue” in presidential elections and “red” when it chooses governors and its state legislature. It also boasts major research universities that rank among the nation’s best.

Unlike Wisconsin, however, Michigan began investing in its emerging economy years ago — even as the state’s automobile manufacturing base was teetering on the edge of collapse.

There’s a new term in the innovation lexicon.

Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor credited with coining the term “disruptive innovation,” authored a white paper with colleagues Heather Staker and Michael Horn titled “Is K–12 blended learning disruptive? An introduction of the theory of hybrids.” In it, the authors introduce “hybrid innovation”, which is described in a release as “a fundamentally new concept (in) the world of disruptive innovation.” The paper was announced by the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation (formerly the Innosight Institute) on Thursday.

In business, to be a success does not mean you have to be an extraordinary person. The truth, it turns out, is that you can actually achieve great success by doing seven very ordinary things.

For Triggerfish CEO, Stuart Forrest, this is a proven fact because by his own admission he is “very ordinary”. Triggerfish Animation, a Cape Town based film and entertainment company, is the producer of the animated feature films “Adventures in Zambezia” and “Khumba”.

Speaking at this year’s Net Prophet tech conference, the animation producer outlined seven very ordinary things that could lead to extraordinary success.

While many creators look at 3-D printing as a technology full of endless potential, designers Petr Novikov and Saša Jokić saw something with room for improvement.

“There is a variety of different 3-D printing types, and no matter how they work, they all work with layers,” explains Novikov. Machines extrude plastic layer by layer until the desired shape slowly accrues. “We thought that this is strange because layers are not very efficient”: they require the presence of a support structure to prop up an object as it’s printed, which restricts the printing process to horizontal surfaces. Plus the technique can increase the printing time, the use of materials, and the risk of damaging an object when removing it from its support structure.

Technology is a wonderful thing. Now that just about every imaginable gadget is portable and affordable, your small business doesn’t have to be confined to a rented office or your dining room table. You can create a mobile office and take your work anywhere, with room to spare with the use of mobile broadband in your small business.

There are plenty of advantages to having a fully mobile office. Just a few of them include:

Cost savings (i.e. the overhead for a fixed office). Increased productivity — no more wasted downtime. New promotional opportunities, since you can network in person. Streamlined business processes, with everything in one place.

It’s not too late to land an internship – even for summer. There are still quite a few available… but don’t wait!

This message is for all the runners-up and procrastinators who know how valuable internships are, but still haven’t landed one – yet.

Often, April is the busiest month for internship postings, according to Indeed, which ranks as the top job aggregation site around. “They’re advertising still for summer,” said Mike Steinerd, director of sales recruiting at Indeed.

The educational attainment of young Americans has increased over the past two decades, and those who have completed more education earn more money, on average, and are more likely to be employed. That's just one corner of the picture painted by "The Condition of Education 2013," the annual treasure-trove of data from the U.S. Department of Education, released on Thursday.

The report holds few surprises for close observers of American education, but rather offers a comprehensive overview of enrollment and attainment from early education through graduate school, as well as information on how students pay for higher education and how they fare later in the job market.

Countries outside the world's elite university systems are better at transforming research capacity into citations, a report suggests.

While the U.S. and the U.K. are good at converting research inputs into outputs and are improving, the likes of Denmark, Switzerland, France and Ireland are making the most of their resources and improving efficiency at a greater rate, the study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has found.

Companies market to you according to your shopping habits, your age, your salary, and your social-media activities. In the future, they may be able to advertise to you on the basis of your DNA.

Do you carry the genetic variants associated with lactose intolerance? Here, Lactaid has a coupon for you. The genes for male-pattern baldness? That’s accelerated by stress, so maybe you should come in for a discounted massage Jimmy’s Spa & Bath.

Need another reason to work your butt off to be a great intern?

Remember when you sent in that application, and then you waited, and waited, and waited….

And then remember when you found out how you got the internship? Remember how great you felt? Remember how great it was to tell your family and friends?

This is about you. This is your road, your path, what you decide to do in innovation, which technologies and methodologies you embrace, experiment in, and ultimately master. Enterprises are rapidly shifting how they innovate and how they obsess over continuous value creation and Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing are two of the approaches being embraced the world over. 

The “why” is basic, fundamental, and true. Enterprises can not go fast enough. They can not access and source the amazing and hyperspecific talent they need to create new user experiences and solutions. They can not afford to continue to risk so much, for what can be so little return when attempting to innovate via traditional means. They need to change.