Innovation Leaders has released its annual report detailing companies across 25 different sectors worldwide that accomplish the most from innovative activities. This year, Innovation Leaders highlighted three trends in its analysis: US dominance, partnerships and collaboration, and the impact of big bets and bold moves to deliver tangible, sustained growth.

We are pleased to announce the results of the 2016/17 Innovation Leaders research that identifies the companies which achieve the most from their innovation activities and deliver tangible, sustained growth. Now in its 16th year, this annual analysis profiles the global leaders across 25 different sectors, highlighting the shifts taking place and identifying new achievements.

When Subra Suresh was tapped to lead the National Science Foundation (NSF), in 2010, he saw that many of the pathbreaking discoveries developed through the agency’s grants weren’t finding their way to the marketplace, so he sought to foster better links between government and industry.

This, of course, was not an entirely new idea. Over the years, there have been numerous efforts, ranging from the Bayh-Dole Act, of 1980, to numerous initiatives to revamp technology transfer offices within government agencies, but nothing really seemed able to speed new discoveries out of the labs and into the marketplace.

Digital technology, despite its seeming ubiquity, has only begun to penetrate industries. As it continues its advance, the implications for revenues, profits, and opportunities will be dramatic.

As new markets emerge, profit pools shift, and digital technologies pervade more of everyday life, it’s easy to assume that the economy’s digitization is already far advanced. According to our latest research, however, the forces of digital have yet to become fully mainstream. On average, industries are less than 40 percent digitized, despite the relatively deep penetration of these technologies in media, retail, and high tech.

The number of speakers at the Impact of Science 2017 conference is continuously growing. With the new addition of Helene Hellmark Knutsson, the Swedish minister for higher education and research, joining the other experts and stakeholders such as: Alan I. Leshner (former CEO - AAAS) Koenraad Debackere (General Manager - Leuven University) and Dame Anne Glover (first chief scientific advisor - European Commission). With such a solid foundation with scientific viewpoints as well as insights from policy and industry we are sure the conference will bring new interesting perspectives. To view the other recently confirmed speakers, click here.

During the conference methods for demonstrating impact, the relevance of strategic alliances and (policy) instruments for achieving impact will be evaluated. You will also get the chance to have a first hand look at the soon to be presented LERU report, on how to combine top science with societal impact. The goal of this conference is to stimulate the quality as well as the societal impact of science. To achieve this, all aspects of this issue will be discussed in order to find mutual grounds.

We look forward to meeting you in Stockholm!

When the history of sugar is written, 2016 may go down as the year its image turned. Sure, we always knew those sweet white crystals could rot teeth and cause people to pack on the pounds. Obesity and diabetes were already national emergencies, with the latter representing 10% of U.S. health care costs in recent years. But now an increasing number of researchers and a buzzy book, The Case Against Sugar, have also begun linking our favorite natural sweetener to such dreaded conditions as heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and cancer. (Those conclusions are far from universally accepted to this point.) Adding a dark undercurrent, revelations in the fall suggested that the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists in the 1960s to trivialize its role in coronary problems and instead play up saturated fat as the culprit—which helped shape the direction of nutrition research to this day.

Toy inventor Brendan Boyle talks about key concepts for making brainstorming sessions more effective, like including those adept at the technique and bringing together divergent and convergent thinkers. Boyle, a partner at IDEO who teaches the course “From Play to Innovation” at Stanford’s design school, speaks with creativity expert Tina Seelig, faculty co-director at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu/

Leah Busque, founder and CEO of TaskRabbit, explains the value of sharing a business idea as widely as possible and recounts how doing that over dinner years ago led to a kinship with someone who provided early support and mentorship that proved vital to her startup.

Image: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

Seeking to boost tech in Philadelphia, Comcast Corp. plans an “accelerator” program for start-ups and entrepreneurs on the fourth floor of its new tower in Center City, the company said Monday.

It’s the latest project for Comcast that faces huge hiring needs as the company prepares for the opening of its new $1.5 billion tower in early 2018. Comcast has said it needs a vibrant, tech-skilled labor force.

Image: The new Comcast tower, seen from 23rd and Race Streets. Comcast is looking to help develop a tech-skilled labor force to meet its staffing needs. CLEM MURRAY / Staff

Every year Upfront Ventures surveys Limited Partners (LPs) who are the main source of capital that invests in VC funds and thus the main source of capital that goes to startups to get an early-warning sense of the year ahead, leaving aside any Black Swans.

Several weeks ago, I wrote a missive pertaining to the need to get rid of toxic employees. Clear Out The Rot. The message bears repeating. I know this because more and more often, I find myself having to ask a simple question…

It’s a question I ask after a client goes into a long monologue detailing a particular employee’s poor performance in spite of extensive coaching, training, and oversight. Sometimes I ask it when I’m standing before the entire leadership team of an organization and we’re capturing issues on a whiteboard preparing to solve them…forever. A name gets picked as the issue to solve and the leadership team members can’t help themselves. They all join in with horror stories about this problematic employee, “Fred.”

The 2017 SBIR Road Tour is a national outreach effort to convey the non-dilutive technology funding opportunity provided through America’s Seed fund (the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs).  SBA will embark on a 13 state road tour, beginning in May 2017, to connect decision makers representing $2.5 billion in early stage funding with small technology firms and innovators.

The competitiveness of the U.S. economy depends on technological progress, but recent data suggests that innovation is getting harder and the pace of growth is slowing down. A major challenge in business and policy spheres is to understand the environments that are most conducive to innovation. One way to do that is to look to history. In our research we focused on the golden age of invention: the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when America became the world’s preeminent industrial nation.

Despite the current political headwinds blowing against globalization, companies continue to recruit talent from around the world and talented people continue to want overseas work experience.

For firms, it’s become imperative to look beyond geographic borders to attract and retain top talent. This is partly due to the fact that 77% of CEOs report being concerned about the availability of key skills, according to PwC. Seventy-seven percent also agree or strongly agree that they move talent to where they need it.

Just in case you were looking for the most expensive destination to relocate to, Numbeo—a firm that collects user-submitted data on countries around the world—has some suggestions. The group compiled information on what it actually costs to live in 120 different places around the world based on the prices for 50 different services or products, including internet access, food at grocery stores, rent, and more.

A riddle: When is a bench not a bench?

The answer: When, as Michigan State University posits, it’s an idea generator.

That’s one of several cringeworthy slogans identified by John P. Leary, an assistant professor of English at Wayne State University.

Mr. Leary keeps an eye peeled for that type of language, which he calls financial jargon seeping out of the business world. The bench, he says, is a good example of its appearance in higher ed.

Image: John Donges, Flickr

How hot are Earth's scorching insides? A sweltering 2,570 degrees Fahrenheit (1,410 degrees Celsius), a new study finds. The discovery reveals that the mantle under Earth's oceans — the area just below the crust that extends down to the planet's inner liquid core — is almost 110 degrees F (60 degrees C) hotter than scientists previously thought, the researchers said. The finding will help scientists more accurately model Earth's many geodynamic processes, including plate tectonics, they said.

Hoping that if you build it, they will come, IBM plans to roll out the world’s first commercial ‘universal’ quantum-computing service some time this year, the company announced on 6 March. Named IBM Q, the system will be accessible over the Internet for a fee.

It will not outperform conventional computers, at least not yet. But the company says that the system will be crucial in developing a market for future quantum machines that can handle complex calculations currently out of reach of classical computers. The cloud service is the latest salvo in the heated battle to build a useful quantum computer.

My uncle was tall, athletic and an avid Jeopardy fan. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, it was shocking to see how quickly the disease affected his body and mind. He passed away less than a year later. I miss him so much.

So when I heard Laura Indolfi speak at TED2016, her words punched me in the stomach. A TED Fellow and biomedical entrepreneur, she talked about why pancreatic cancer is so deadly -- because the pancreas is located in the middle of the body, where cancer cells have a wide variety of vital organs they can spread to, and because tumors here have few blood vessels, which means chemotherapy drugs can't reach them. She shared a different approach -- localized drug delivery for pancreatic cancer. The idea her company is working on: embedding drugs in a small, flexible device that forms a cage around a tumor and delivers treatment as it biodegrades.

While Silicon Valley remains the top area for VC-backed startup funding, activity has long since defused to New York and beyond, with LA and Boston seeing a large number of deals and dollars flowing to startups in the region.

Below we used CB Insights data to compare deals and funding to VC-backed companies in the LA, Boston, and NYC-metro areas from 2012 through 2016.

For years, policy discussions about America’s innovation-driven, high-tech economy have focused on just a few iconic places, such as the Route 128 tech corridor around Boston, Massachusetts; Research Triangle Park in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Austin, Texas; Seattle, Washington; and, of course, California’s white-hot Silicon Valley. This has always been too myopic a view of how innovation is distributed across the country, because many other metropolitan areas and regions—from Phoenix to Salt Lake City to Philadelphia—are innovative hot spots, too, and many more areas are developing tech capabilities. An unfortunate result of this myopia has been that policy debates about how to bolster the country’s innovative capacity have often been seen as the province of only the few members of Congress who represent districts or states that are recognizably tech-heavy, while many members from other districts focus on other issues. This needs to change, not only because the premise is incorrect, but also because the country’s competitive position in the global economy hinges on developing a broad-based, bipartisan, bicameral understanding and support for federal policies to spur innovation and growth.

Image: https://itif.org/publications