"Zero Barriers: Three Mega Trends Shaping the Future of Entrepreneurship"

Thursday, February 16, 2017 United States Institute of Peace Washington DC

During the event, Kauffman President and CEO Wendy Guillies outlined how entrepreneurs are driving a resurgence of business activity in America but that a long-term decline in entrepreneurship has prevented millions of Americans from achieving economic success.

The Kauffman Foundation also released a new report that reveals three megatrends that are fundamentally reshaping entrepreneurship in America:

Three-dimensional (3D) hierarchical materials are important to a wide range of emerging technological applications. We report a method to synthesize complex 3D microengineered materials, such as microlattices, with nearly fully dense truss elements with a minimum diameter of approximately 20 μm and having high aspect ratios (up to 20:1) without using any templating or supporting materials. By varying the postprocessing conditions, we have also introduced an additional control over the internal porosity of the truss elements to demonstrate a hierarchical porous structure with an overall void size and feature size control of over five orders of magnitudes in length scale. The method uses direct printing of nanoparticle dispersions using the Aerosol Jet technology in 3D space without templating or supporting materials followed by binder removal and sintering. In addition to 3D microlattices, we have also demonstrated directly printed stretchable interconnects, spirals, and pillars. This assembly method could be implemented by a variety of microdroplet generation methods for fast and large-scale fabrication of the hierarchical materials for applications in tissue engineering, ultralight or multifunctional materials, microfluidics, and micro-optoelectronics.

Economic impact analyses are valuable tools for generating insights into the value a new investment can bring to a region, but what does it really mean for your decision-making or tell you about your economy? Guest blogger Paul Scheuren of Impact DataSource explains the essentials of economic impact and shares his firm's know-how in today's article.

Economic impacts occur anytime money changes hands; from consumer to business or even business to business. The biggest misconception is that there is a single value that represents the mystical concept of economic impact. Economic impact is typically measured using four metrics; (1) employment, (2) household earnings, (3) economic output, and (4) value added.

From the moment that SpaceX's Elon Musk announced the company's intention to send two unnamed people in a long loop around the moon in 2018, people started speculating about who those mystery passengers might be. 

Musk didn't give out many clues about the individuals who contracted the company for the flight, aside from saying that they put down a hefty deposit and they know each other. 

Remember the ‘Fitbit for cows’, the wearable that helped farmers increase milk yields? Well, they just announced that they’re part of Y Combinator’s winter ’17 batch.

Cowlar, which started up in Pakistan but is now headquartered in California, builds a tracking wearable that monitors the body temperature and behavior of cows. That allows farmers to detect when the animal is in heat and the best time for insemination.

Manufacturing expanded in February at the fastest pace since August 2014 as factory managers reported stronger orders and production.

The Institute for Supply Management’s index climbed to 57.7, the sixth straight advance, from 56 a month earlier, the Tempe, Arizona-based group’s report showed Wednesday. Readings above 50 indicate growth. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists was 56.2.

The fear of job-stealing robots has been recently stoked in the media and pundits frequently refer to automation as a key driver of long-term middle-class wage stagnation. But are robots actually transforming the labor market at an unprecedented pace? Nope—in fact, the opposite is true. First, it’s important to note that technology and automation have consistently transformed the way work gets done. So, technology itself is not a problem. Robots and automation allow us to increase efficiency by making more things for less money. When goods and services are cheaper, consumers can afford to buy more robot-made stuff, or have money left over to spend on other things. When consumers spend their leftover cash on additional goods and services, it creates jobs. These new jobs help compensate for the jobs lost to automation.

Approximately 14 months after it was initially announced, Roborace has finally unveiled the Robocar, the first driverless electric race car.

Roborace promises to be the first entirely autonomous racing series, and the Robocar will be the car that its teams will field. The Robocar has been teased in the past, but this is its final form, unveiled today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Image: Roborace / Daniel Simon

It was middle school. Nine-year-old Tracy Lawrence was crouched in the bathroom, hurriedly gulping down her lunch in a stall. This was her safe haven from the bullies who gossiped about her and taunted her every day. It was also a way to avoid the humiliation of sitting alone in the cafeteria.

Many years later, that memory returned to Lawrence. She had an epiphany as the now-CEO of the office catering startup Chewse. Gossip may run rampant among pre-adolescents, but it’s not something you should have to tolerate as an adult.

LITTLE SEEMS TO be standing in the way of Comcast, Verizon, and other internet service providers selling your personal information without your permission after the Federal Communications Commission took a first step toward delaying its own rules protecting consumer privacy and security.

Last October the agency passed a set of rules that would have required internet providers to take new steps to protect your private data from hackers.

In January 2009 the three founders of a little-known website called Airbedandbreakfast.com decided at the last minute to attend the inauguration of Barack Obama. Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk were all in their mid-20s and had no tickets to the festivities, or winter clothes, or even a firm grasp of the week’s schedule. But they saw an opportunity. Their online home-sharing company had limped along for more than a year with little to show for it. Now the eyes of the world would be on the nation’s capital, and they wanted to take advantage.

Image: https://www.bloomberg.com

I have avoided phone calls for years, to the extent possible. Especially for one-to-one communication. They are a combination of low-fidelity (no video so no facial cues, often poor quality sound) and intrusive (a ‘foreground’ activity that makes it hard or impossible to multitask). So, as much as possible, I’ve steered people toward consumer video tools like Skype or Hangouts (high fidelity X foreground), or chat tools like Messages or Slack (low fidelity, background).

American industry has a rich heritage of top-notch corporate labs. Bell Labs created not only the transistor, but also other fundamental breakthroughs, such as the laser and information theory. PARC, developed much of the technology we associate with modern computers, such as the mouse and the graphical user interface. Both labs have attained mythical status and rightly so. Yet IBM Research has been no less important, developing early breakthroughs such as the first computer language and the relational database, garnering 5 Nobel Prizes along the way. And unlike Bell Labs and PARC, it’s still going strong.

 Image: http://innovationexcellence.com

Visual Factory Management (VFM) is a term to describe how data and information is analyzed, interpreted and then communicated in a lean systems engineering environment. We focus on manufacturing systems and factory improvement. Avollo’s novel computerized dashboard methodology and interactive multimedia toolkit, combined with VFM principles, focus on finding, collecting, analyzing, presenting and data mining Key Process Indicators that help engineering management to make better decisions.

EAU CLAIRE – When Zach Halmstad looks at the under-construction Confluence Arts Center, the software entrepreneur sees more than a performing arts building. He sees a big part of the future of downtown Eau Claire.

"This is economic development through the arts," said Halmstad, who launched Jamf Software in the early 2000s with a couple of friends and has since led its growth to 600 employees, 10,000 customers and eight offices worldwide.

The story of Jamf and the renaissance of downtown Eau Claire has flowed together, much like the confluence of the Chippewa and Eau Claire rivers in that western Wisconsin city of 64,000 people. It has come to symbolize what can happen when a city builds on its indigenous strengths to attract and retain the talent needed to compete in a modern economy.

When an earthquake and tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant complex in 2011, neither the quake nor the inundation caused the ensuing contamination. Rather, it was the aftereffects — specifically, the lack of cooling for the reactor cores, due to a shutdown of all power at the station — that caused most of the harm.

A new design for nuclear plants built on floating platforms, modeled after those used for offshore oil drilling, could help avoid such consequences in the future. Such floating plants would be designed to be automatically cooled by the surrounding seawater in a worst-case scenario, which would indefinitely prevent any melting of fuel rods, or escape of radioactive material.

Image: This illustration shows a possible configuration of a floating offshore nuclear plant, based on design work by Jacopo Buongiorno and others at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. Like offshore oil drilling platforms, the structure would include living quarters and a helipad for transportation to the site. Illustration courtesy of Jake Jurewicz/MIT-NSE

For many, starting a business may sound like the dream — being your own boss, making your own rules and devising your own schedule.

But the reality is that the entrepreneurial life isn’t all sunshine and roses. Like most good things in life, it comes with risk and challenges.

And on Wednesday a panel of up-and-coming Kansas City entrepreneurs shared their wisdom on risk-taking, positive mindset and the value of networking with a crowd of about 120 aspiring entrepreneurs.

Image: http://www.startlandnews.com

Utah’s best college entrepreneurs are competing for $100,000 in cash and prizes, including a $40,000 grand prize, in the 2017 Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, one of the biggest student-business competitions in the country. Today, the competition got a lot more interesting with the top 20 teams being announced.

Hundreds of students from all colleges in the state compete in the Utah Entrepreneur Challenge, a business-model competition requiring teams to submit a full business plan. The competition is managed by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, a nationally ranked division of the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, and sponsored by Zions Bank.

In the 1930s, the Soviet Union asked Nikolai Kondratieff, a mathematician, to create a model that would “prove” that capitalism would fall and communism would endure.

Kondratieff studied economic history and reached the conclusion that economics was better explained by technology than class struggle. He observed that technology did not evolve linearly, but rather in leaps every 50 to 60 years. Named for the mathematician who made it famous, this pattern is called Kondratieff cycles or K-waves.