Perhaps it is the content I choose to read, but it seems that the corporate guru buzz on creativity and innovation has become an incessant squeal that demands all employers drag more creativity out of their employees. Well, finally, there is a definitive study that guarantees a way to obtain that additional creativity.

Get your employees drunk.

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In contrast to more developed markets such as the US, Israel or the UK, venture capital in the countries of central Europe is still in its infancy. One has only to contrast the value of VC investments in Israel – $1.9bn in 2012 – with the combined value of those in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria – which were €102m.

Barbara Nowakowska, director of the Polish Private Equity and Venture Capital Association, says some international venture capital funds have noticed the region is a growing market with strong potential, a culture of entrepreneurship and little in the way of competition – and see this as an opportunity.

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The tech start-up ecosystem of Silicon Valley and other major hubs, such as Austin and New York City, is similar to the Hollywood movie industry. How's that?

Young creatives, looking to launch their ideas and bring them to reality, need to wade through an arcane process. They need to tap dance with new terms and jargon. And they need to understand the subtleties of financing projects and the agreements they will one-day sign. By the way, the term "angel" investor came from film industry in the 1930s. Who knew?

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Last spring Mark Suster posted “Morning In Venture Capital”, where he spoke of good times returning. Alas, the venture spring that Mark evoked seems to be New England spring: cold and rainy, taking longer than we had hoped. A quick look at the industry statistics makes this plain.

Fund raising is the vital statistic: without LPs (limited partners) there are no VCs (venture capitalists). Chart 1 shows the amount of money raised into U.S. venture funds from 2003 (the bottom of the trough following the tech bubble) to June, 2013. Venture fund-raising recovered after the tech bubble and then collapsed during the global financial crisis (“GFC”) of 2008-2009. It has not recovered again.

Graph: Funds raised by U.S. venture capital funds. 2013 is first half annualized. Data via NVCA. Source (Forbes.com)

Obesity-related illnesses have become such a problem in Europe that they have reached the top political level, with even the EU council's Lithuanian presidency vowing to raise the issue at upcoming ministerials.

In Europe, an estimated 50% of all men and women were overweight in 2008, and 23% of all women and 20% of men were obese, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

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When FiscalNote, a company founded by Tim Hwang ’14, recently raised $1.4 million in funding, the company’s list of backers included Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and the venture capital firm New Enterprises Associates. But among the list of high-powered investors was a more unexpected source of support, coming from Hwang’s own Princeton classmates, Taylor Francis ’14 and Raymond Zhong ’14 by way of the Dorm Room Fund, a venture fund run by student entrepreneurs at various universities across the United States.

The internet is disappearing. And with it goes an important part of our recorded history. That was the conclusion of a study this blog looked at last year, which measured the rate at which links shared over social media platforms such as Twitter, were disappearing.

The conclusion was that this data is being lost at the rate of 11 per cent within a year and 27 per cent within two years.

Pitching to a VC can be like trying to have a conversation with a three year old.  We're constantly distracted, off on tangents, difficult to keep focused.  

We also get bored really easily.

That's why you need to start off every pitch--be it in an elevator or in a meeting--with a hook.  A hook captures the audience's attention and gets them leaning in.

But what makes for a good hook?

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Powerpoint presentations and fancy domains won’t get you anywhere.  Talking to customers/users will.

I was invited to speak on a panel at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business two weeks ago, and was amazed by how many “entrepreneurs” came up to me afterwards (most of whom weren’t GSB students).   This reminded me of a past experience.

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Business owners can advertise products, services, job openings, hours of operation, addresses and, if comes to it, going-out-of-business sales. What they haven’t been able to do, at least since the days of the Great Depression, is advertise that they’re looking for investors to finance growth. That’s about to change.

This isn't a music video for Seal's (Or Steve Miller's, depending on your age.) "Fly Like an Eagle," but it may as well be.

Some beautiful soul attached a camera to an eagle's back and captured the majestic flight that a human's large, dense bones will never experience.

Leading American and European policy makers said greater international collaboration is needed so scientists can share more research data to solve climate, healthcare, economic and other challenges facing the globe.  

“An international problem requires an international solution,” said Rep. Dan Lipinski, the ranking Democrat on the US House Subcommittee on Research. Speaking at a conference in July on US-EU trade policy, Lipinski said, “All trends point to greater access to scientific data” to advance global research faster. “These are big issues that are best dealt with together.”

Supercomputers may date back to the 1960s, but it is only recently that their vast processing power has begun to be harnessed by industry and commerce, to design safer cars, build quieter aeroplanes, speed up drug discovery, and subdue the volatility of the financial markets.

The need for powerful computers is growing, says Catherine Rivière chair of PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe. If we are going to tackle modern challenges - personalised medicines, sustainable energy supply and climate change - and improve industrial processes, we will need "new tools to cope with big data; new working processes to take into account multi-disciplinary problems and teams; and new physical models,” she said.

Today, ARPA-E announced funding for 33 new projects that focus on transportation fuels and advanced lightweight metals manufacturing. The projects are funded through two new ARPA-E programs called REMOTE and METALS.    REMOTE, which stands for Reducing Emissions using Methanotrophic Organisms for Transportation Energy, will provide $34 million to 15 projects aimed at finding advanced biocatalyst technologies that can convert natural gas to liquid fuel for transportation. METALS, which stands for Modern Electro/Thermochemical Advancements for Light-metal Systems, will provide $32 million to 18 projects aimed at finding cost-effective and energy-efficient manufacturing techniques to process and recycle metals for lightweight vehicles. 

Entrepreneurs have all sorts of secrets for their success. Focus, stick-to-it-iveness, passion…even trust. What works well at one company may not work as well at another, and of course, and what works for one entrepreneur might not work as well for another. But in a recent study of empirical data cited in the Harvard Business Review, researchers cited “being a morning person” as something that is strongly correlated with business success. The logic is sound. According to Entrepreneur Magazine, morning people tend to get the day started on the right foot, tend to be up and at work before many other people (thus giving them uninterrupted focus time), and tend to be more optimistic than night owls (which is also a factor in entrepreneurial success).

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CDEC Director Chris Thompson, writing exclusively for The Information Daily, explains how the integration of digital health data into health organisations can hold a significant economic and public value.

The Connected Digital Economy Catapult (CDEC) has just launched its first data platform for innovators. The platform is live through a publicly available alpha version at openhealthdata.cdehub.org.

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The Technopolicy Network is proud to announce the 10th Annual Conference on Innovation Based Regional Development in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia!

At the 10th Technopolicy Annual Conference you will experience how ground breaking knowledge regions get shaped. In the heart of the Gulf region you will meet the main investors in its science and technology and its brand new research institutes. Regional innovation experts from all parts of the world will exchange experiences in effectively turning political ambitions into regional innovation.

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Sweden, Germany, Ireland and Luxembourg are top performers in delivering innovation, according to a new indicator proposed by the European Commission on 13 September. While Japan and Switzerland are the world leaders, the EU holds steady with the US in innovation output.

The new "Indicator of Innovation Output" measures the extent to which ideas stemming from innovative sectors are able to reach the market, provide better jobs and make Europe more competitive. The highest scores went to economies with a high share of knowledge-intensive sectors, fast-growing innovative firms, high levels of patenting and competitive exports.

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We all have that friend. The Debbie Downer who finds fault with sunshine and lollipops and sees a perpetually half empty glass. Well, it turns out being such a drag might be part of their individual personality—a dimension researchers are calling “dispositional attitude.”

A new study says people with a negative dispositional attitude will, as a rule, dislike things. All things. In other words, haters gonna hate.

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As much as the elimination of the ban on general solicitation of private placements through the passage of Rule 506(c) creates significant opportunities for private issuers, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has also proposed a series of rule changes that will, if passed, increase disclosure requirements and impose new consequences for failure to follow the new rules. While these proposals, if adopted, should not dampen your enthusiasm over the doors that new Rule 506(c) will open, you just need to look carefully as you cross the threshold.