When the non-family chairman/CEO unexpectedly told family business owners that they had to live without dividends or sell the business, Tommy leaned over and whispered in his cousin’s ear: “Do you get what’s going on? The numbers have always been terrific.”

Despite their shock, Tommy and other family owners shared responsibility for this painful situation. For years, they’d been detached and unengaged owners. No family member worked in the company, and those who sat on the board rubber-stamped management’s decisions. The owners sat passively until faced with the reality that they were at risk of losing the business that had been in the family for three generations.

TODAY, IN 2017, the president’s top economic advisor said he had no worries about robots putting people out of work. “In terms of artificial intelligence taking over the jobs, I think we’re so far away from that that it’s not even on my radar screen,” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told an audience in Washington. “I think it’s 50 or 100 more years.”

Great! That’s a relief! President Trump can go back to horsing around on his big rig confident in the knowledge self-driving trucks won’t replace millions of drivers in a few years.

A Paoli, Pa.-based team of seven working out of a living room just won the top prize at the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE global competition, beating out some big-league, top-dollar competition.

Team Final Frontier Medical Devices, led by Basil Leaf CEO Dr. Basil Harris, was announced as the winner amid cheers last night, following a four-year-long research process.

Image: https://technical.ly 

Though the big American metropolises often hog the smart city headlines, a new study found that U.S. mid-sized cities are the true technology leaders.

A new study into U.S. smart city activity demonstrated that mid-sized cities were filling the pipeline with the most urban technology projects.5

The survey of 54 American cities was produced by the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) in conjunction with IHS Markit.

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) today announced it will launch an 11-state, 15-stop road tour led by the SBA's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, with participation from 11 other federal agencies. This will be the third year of the SBA-led National Innovation Road Tour.

"The last two years of the SBA Road Tour have been a huge success and we've engaged thousands of small innovative firms across the nation, so we are excited to bring back the tour for a third year," said John Williams, SBA Director of Innovation and Technology. 

Deloitte revamped its performance management system in 2015 after discovering that it was spending nearly 2 million hours a year on its review process. Last year, Adobe calculated that its 2,000 managers were investing 80,000 hours into performance reviews. Accenture learned that 75% of its review process was devoted to talking about employees, leaving only 25% for actually talking to them. And that’s before you consider the bias issues long known to plague an already unpopular corporate ritual.

AURP is requesting nominations for the 2017 Board of Directors. All research park members in good standing may nominate themselves, or others, for service on the Board. Board service is for an initial term of three years, with a maximum of two three-year terms allowed.   

We encourage all research park members of AURP to consider serving on the Board. AURP is poised for a bright future as the science and technology sector is undergoing dramatic growth and research parks are key to supporting that growth.  

Worldwide venture capital firms and other venture capital investors put $27.1 billion into 2,228 transactions in the first quarter, up 21% by value of transactions and 2% by number of deals from the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the MoneyTree Report, a quarterly report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and CB Insights.

Around the world, automation is transforming work, business, and the economy. China is already the largest market for robots in the world, based on volume. All economies, from Brazil and Germany to India and Saudi Arabia, stand to gain from the hefty productivity boosts that robotics and artificial intelligence will bring. The pace and extent of adoption will vary from country to country, depending on factors including wage levels. But no geography and no sector will remain untouched.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A little less than two years after the launch of the Fund for Innovation, Invent Penn State has backed nearly 50 emerging Penn State technologies and has provided startup funding to promising new ventures that were born out of the program.

“Although many universities have commercialization programs,” said Vice President for Research Neil Sharkey, “the speed and volume of success that Penn State has experienced recently is unique.”

KANSAS CITY, Mo., April 12, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --  The Angel Capital Association (ACA), the world's largest professional organization for accredited investors, will host investors from around the world at its 2017 ACA Summit, April 26-28 at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis. ACA Summit speakers will address topics impacting individual investors and investment strategies, including building diversity among entrepreneurs, Trump Administration impact on healthcare investing, and growth in new sectors such as blockchain and cannabis startups.

India's Silicon Valley, Bangalore, was a startup darling just two years ago, but now its star appears to be dulling.

Don't get us wrong, Bangalore has a lot going for it — Amazon and Uber have offices there, it is home to over 2,000 active tech startups — but according to a recent report ranking startup hubs, the city has fallen five spots to No. 20 out of 55. 

In the summer of 2016, the board of the Montgomery County Economic Development Corporation (“MCEDC”) identified cybersecurity as a target industry, and commissioned a report by Amplifier Advisors entitled “Building a Cybersecurity Industry in Montgomery County.” The Amplifier report was submitted to the MCEDC board in September 2016.

In November 2016, a group of local cybersecurity CEOs and experts was convened by MCEDC and tasked with vetting the Amplifier report and then recommending strategic initiatives that would put Montgomery County, MD “on the map” as a world-renowned cybersecurity ecosystem.

Back in the 1980s, the eminent quality expert W. Edwards Deming was invited by the chief executive of a major American auto company to give a luncheon talk about quality at a retreat for the company’s corporate senior staff. This was during the era when Japanese carmakers had humbled their American rivals by producing durable, small automobiles. In U.S. manufacturing centers such as Detroit, it was sinking in that the Japanese knew something important that the Americans had overlooked: a basic set of practices for continuous improvement. Dr. Deming (as just about everyone called him) was one of the key figures teaching this body of theory and practices — which later would come to be known as lean production — first in Japan and then back in the U.S.

There was no reason for the patients to receive vitamin D tests. They did not have osteoporosis; their bones were not cracking from a lack of the vitamin. They did not have diseases that interfere with vitamin D absorption.

Yet in a recent sample of 800,000 patients in Maine, nearly one in five had had at least one test for blood levels of the vitamin over a three-year period. More than a third got two or more tests, often to evaluate such ill-defined complaints as malaise or fatigue.

The researchers who gathered the data, Dr. Kathleen Fairfield and Kim Murray of the Maine Medical Center, were surprised. Perhaps they shouldn’t have been.

Who: Deloitte is ranking the 500 fastest growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences and energy tech companies in North America in its annual ranking of the Technology Fast 500.

What: Applications are now being accepted. Companies will be ranked based on percentage revenue growth from fiscal years 2013 to 2016. To be eligible for Deloitte's Technology Fast 500, companies must:

Early in 2014, my year-old company faced a critical launch deadline. Feeling pressured and anxious, I started hiring in a hurry. To make a long story short, it didn’t go well.

I soon realized we’d wound up with some real misfits. A couple of them turned out to be openly contemptuous of the company’s norms and culture, as well as of my own directives as a leader. Others simply hadn’t yet developed the skills they needed to do their jobs well. I should’ve fired the troublemakers early on, but I was afraid of a nasty confrontation and embarrassed to admit my errors. Instead, I spent the next few months hoping things would get better. They didn’t.

Economic development leaders gathered recently to consider the implications of forthcoming tax abatement disclosures. While considering tax abatement disclosure guidelines in relation to our work as economic developers and the nuts and bolts of reporting and compliance, we spent most of our time on communication - specifically how best to talk to colleagues, elected officials and the public about disclosed data. From the Smart Incentives perspective, we suggest the following:

The Raleigh-Durham area is one of the top 20 hubs for tech startups in the country, according to recent data from the Progressive Policy Institute and TechNet.

Out of the top 35 metro areas for tech startups, Raleigh-Durham was named the 17th best hub—beating the neighboring city of Charlotte, which was named the 29th.

The Institute used the Metro Startup Economy Index—a normalized count of job listings in the area that include the word “startup"—to rank the hubs in two lists. The “tech hubs” list included the top 10 startup focal points like San Francisco and New York, and the “next in tech” list included the cities ranked 11 to 35.

Image: Courtesy of Duke Photography - At Duke, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative’s Bullpen provides a space for entrepreneurs to meet and share ideas. 

For someone with kidney disease who needs a transplant, it can take three to five years (and, in some parts of the country, even longer) before an organ is available. Patients on the waiting list for a pancreas can wait two years; the wait for a heart can take months. In the near future, a custom organ could be made for a patient within weeks–using a 3D printer and time in a lab.