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.
College business plan competitions are widespread and are held in most areas at least once per year. Most people assume that business plan competitions are helpful only for undergraduate and MBA students who want to become entrepreneurs. To the contrary, business plan competitions benefit anyone who wants to start their career on the right foot. In fact, many competitions are run by private venture incubators and do not even require school enrollment.
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The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, YEC recently launched StartupCollective, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses.
1. ‘The E-Myth Revisted’
This is a tried-and-true classic in my opinion that any entrepreneur can value from reading or re-reading. It’s especially great for those who are starting out, interested in launching a company and/or are at a sticking point and need some perspective.
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Though Interactive Video (IV) isn’t totally new, projects like Philips’ “Designed to Play,” Maybelline’s “Glamour Eye,” and Bob Dylan’s interactive music video helped spread the gospel of IV in 2013, leading us to believe that 2014 will be a breakout year for IV.
Image: Universal Pictures
While the fights and fumbles over the Affordable Care Act dominated headlines in 2013, the year was also heady with advances in biomedicine. In April, President Obama announced an ambitious federal initiative to map the activity of all the neurons in a brain circuit or, ideally, a whole brain. The $100 million Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project will support neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, and others who propose to develop new technologies that can monitor thousands of neurons simultaneously.
Image: http://medcitynews.com
The January issue of Scientific American features some fantastic photos from the 2013 Olympus BioScapes International Digital Imaging Competition, which welcomes professional photographers and amateurs alike as well as working scientists. Of course, we had room for only so many pictures in the magazine. Here, we present eight additional images from the competition that really caught our eyes.
Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com
What do the growth metrics in the state look like for 2014?
We look at job growth and investment as the two primary metrics. In terms of job growth, I think the forecast is in the range of 60,000 jobs to be added to Michigan’s workforce in 2014. Manufacturing is still very big and very important, and it’s an area where we have to continue to invest a lot of our time and effort because it has such a positive impact overall. But it’s not just the auto sector. This includes the furniture industry, which is still very large in our state, and it includes medical devices. Our agriculture sector is very important to our state, and I think it’s our second largest industry. And then tourism continues to be an extremely bright spot where we continue to show double-digit growth … year over year.
As an entrepreneur, it’s important to realize one surefire reality: you will be spending more time with your partners/employees than with your own family. Thus, how you treat those people should be reflective of how you want others to treat your company. In essence, your end product or service is the result of the strength and happiness of the people that make it all possible.
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Despite the strong showing in third quarter, GDP growth since the official end of the recession in June 2009 has been substandard. Some worry that the U.S. may follow in Japan's footsteps, experiencing a "lost decade" of economic stagnation. It may sound strange, but here's one way to avoid Japan's fate: import young people.
Like many developed countries, Japan has a rapidly aging population. Countries with older populations have lower rates of entrepreneurship. Economic stagnation can be a consequence of slow...
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Every passing month and unanswered résumé dimmed Jim Glay's optimism more. So with no job in sight, he joined a growing number of older people and created his own.
In a mix of boomer individualism and economic necessity, older Americans have fueled a wave of entrepreneurship. The result is a slew of enterprises such as Crash Boom Bam, the vintage drum company that 64-year-old Glay began running from a spare bedroom in his apartment in 2009.
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The U.S. market is a magnet for foreign entrepreneurs. Yet the U.S. immigration system throws up roadblocks to entrepreneurs. There is no “startup” visa, and the visa options that exist are unwieldy and often impractical.
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Like a macabre marine mystery, the carcasses — many badly deteriorated and tossing about in the surf — first turned up along the coast of New Jersey in June. Soon, droves of them washed up in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and most recently Florida, their winter home.
So far this year, nearly 1,000 bottlenose dolphins — eight times the historical average — have washed up dead along the Eastern Seaboard from New York to Florida, a vast majority of them victims of morbillivirus. Many more are expected to die from the disease in the coming months.
Image: Dorothy Edwards/The Virginian-Pilot, via Associated Press
Jess Lee, Cofounder and CEO Polyvore, the popular fashion website named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in 2012, doesn't fit the mold of business leaders born from business books and hollywood films.
But in today's day and age, that doesn't matter.
Image: http://www.fastcompany.com/
Former Microsoft executive Kurt DelBene will take over day-to-day responsibility for the smooth running of HealthCare.gov. The government’s insurance marketplace is just recovering from the pain of a bungled launch. Jeff Zients, who is credited for bringing it back on track, is about to start his new job as a director of the National Economic Council.
With every passing year, the line between technology news and the news becomes harder to distinguish. That’s because technologies like smartphones, the internet and its phenomena — social media and ecommerce for example — has started to permeate our lives so readily and effortlessly, that concepts that seemed outrageous a few years ago now seem everyday. The democratisation of news? Meh. The death of TV. Likely.
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hile the fights and fumbles over the Affordable Care Act dominated headlines in 2013, the year was also heady with advances in biomedicine. In April, President Obama announced an ambitious federal initiative to map the activity of all the neurons in a brain circuit or, ideally, a whole brain. The $100 million Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project will support neuroscientists, nanotechnologists, and others who propose to develop new technologies that can monitor thousands of neurons simultaneously.
Image Courtesy of Ohmega1982 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
There’s nothing more annoying than a meeting that goes on and on and on. As a manager, it’s your job to make sure people don’t go off on tangents or give endless speeches. But how can you keep people focused without being a taskmaster or squashing creativity?
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A finance professor gives seven basic insights to better understand angel investors.
It’s often assumed that the archetypal venture capital firms around Silicon Valley and Boston — the likes of Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital — supply almost all the initial financing for high-growth startups.
If that was ever true, it’s becoming less so by the day. Largely unnoticed, angel investors have been muscling in on traditional venture firms.
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For all the talk about sustainable agriculture, most small farms are not self-sustaining in a very basic sense: they can’t make ends meet financially without relying on income from jobs off the farm.
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When I first started my business, I had to do everything: sales, clerical, tech support. We started building operations by creating email addresses for every conceivable department. I thought the addresses would give us the shiny veneer of corporate success. Half a decade later, I can finally admit that 90% of those email addresses were pointed to me. Although misguided, perhaps we should have been creating those positions instead of faking them.
Image: http://venturebeat.com
In 2008, Dan Malloy, a professional surfer, received a package in the mail from Australia. In it was a thin, rectangular slab of wood with one rounded edge. It was a board like none he had ever seen, remarkable for being so slender and for lacking contours or fins.
Mr. Malloy, then living in Lompoc, Calif., took the board to a nearby surf break. He propelled himself into a wave, stood and then panicked. “I thought, ‘Oh, this wave is way too fast for me, and there’s no chance I can make it,’ ” said Mr. Malloy, who has surfed for decades. But he did make it, and soon was gliding effortlessly through the water — and really fast.
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