The City of Memphis’ Office of Business Diversity and Compliance is partnering with Start Co. to launch a new small business accelerator. But, this accelerator will focus on working with minority-owned businesses that want to do business with the City of Memphis.

The accelerator, Start Co. City of Memphis Propel, and the Office of Business Diversity and Compliance will identify promising companies that need “refinement” when it comes to bidding for city contracts.

WASHINGTON — President Obama is set to vastly expand a marine sanctuary northwest of the main Hawaiian Islands, White House officials said Thursday, creating the world’s largest protected marine area as he seeks to cement his environmental legacy in his last months in office.

Mr. Obama will travel next week to Midway Atoll, a remote spit of land within the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, to recognize the designation and highlight the importance of protecting pristine lands and waters as the perils of climate change intensify.

Image: An aerial view of Midway Atoll in June 2007. Credit Burl Burlingame/Honolulu Star-Bulletin, via Associated Press

Alabama has for years had a rich legacy of transforming research into new products, and that was reinforced in 2012 when the state of Alabama created the Alabama Innovation Fund with more than $17 million in competitive grants going to public colleges and universities to bolster high-tech research and innovative ideas, leading to more jobs for Alabamians.

Image: Innovation Depot, a business incubation facility and program that focuses on the development of emerging biotechnology/life science, information technology and service businesses, operates in partnership with the University of Alabama at Birmingham. (File photo/The Birmingham News) 

MADISON – There are no shortage of explanations for why Wisconsin routinely shows up at the bottom of the Kauffman Foundation’s business startup rankings, the latest of which pegged the state 25th among the nation’s 25 largest states.

Those reasons include demographics (an aging workforce and low immigration rates); a capital-intense business core (manufacturing and agriculture) that is hard to crack for most entrepreneurs; a below-average share of adults with higher education degrees; and nagging social and economic problems in Milwaukee, the state’s largest city.

In January 2012, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Kalydeco, the first drug to treat the underlying cause of cystic fibrosis, after just three months of review. It was one of the fastest approvals of a new medicine in the agency’s history. Vertex Pharmaceuticals, which discovered and developed the drug, priced Kalydeco at $294,000 a year, which made it one of the world’s most expensive medicines. The company also pledged to provide it free to any patient in the United States who is uninsured or whose insurance won’t cover it. Doctors and patients enthusiastically welcomed the drug because it offers life-saving health benefits and there is no other treatment. Insurers and governments readily paid the cost.

While driving and listening to National Public Radio one day, Justin Kao heard about the discovery of a “sweet tooth gene” that makes you more likely to crave sweets. “Oh my God,” thought Kao, who has always loved cookies. “I would pay $5 to know if I had that.”

Kao is hoping that millions of other people will be just as eager to spend a few bucks for tidbits revealed in their DNA. He is a cofounder of Helix, a San Francisco–based company that last summer secured more than $100 million in a quest to create the first “app store” for genetic information.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

The AgLaunch accelerator, a joint initiative of Memphis Bioworks Foundation and the Tennessee Department of Agriculture, has announced the inaugural cohort of its three-month accelerator program.

The new programs include an expanded farmer network, university boot camps and targeted programs to assist agricultural businesses in distressed rural counties in Tennessee. Four startup companies were selected to receive the $50,000 investment and three months of intense entrepreneurial programming and business development.

Image: A company that has developed a device that monitors dairy cow herds is one of the… more PBN FILE

The more responsibility you take on at work and in life, the more often you face gray-area problems. These are situations where usually you have done a lot of hard work, on your own and often with other people, to understand a problem or a situation. You’ve assembled all the data, information, and expert advice you can reasonably get. You’ve analyzed everything carefully. But critical facts are still missing, and people you know and trust disagree about what to do. And, in your own mind, you keep going back and forth about what is really going on and about the right next steps. These problems come in all shapes and sizes. What they all have in common, whether they are major or minor, is how we experience them. But how do we resolve them?

Image: LAURA SCHNEIDER FOR HBR

Startup activity in the United States has increased for the second straight year after declining throughout the Great Recession and the years that followed, according to a newly updated index from the Kauffman Foundation. The metropolitan areas with the highest levels in 2016 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity are Austin, Miami, and Los Angeles. Among large states, the most startup activity according to the 2016 index were in Texas, Florida, and California, while Montana, Nevada, and Wyoming had the highest levels among smaller states.

In the last five years, federal agencies have undertaken 116 price competitions and challenges that have helped the agencies “spur innovation, engage citizen solvers, address tough problems, and advance their core missions” as well as provide a cost savings for the agencies, according to a new report the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released on August 10. The report highlights several trends that have emerged over the last five years, including:

In the era of high-profile designers, it’s easy to forget another creative archetype: the inventor. The unique breed with the spirit of an entrepreneur and the design sensibility of an infomercial, who wants nothing more than to swim with the chum in Shark Tank and get a new product onto the shelves of your local Target.

Knowledge@Wharton:  How are the changes in health care changing what students like Nishad are learning in medical school?

Nishad Rahman: There are a lot of different changes just at Jefferson alone. I’ll give you a couple of examples. We have something called the College within the College program. We have three of them so far: one is design, one is population health, the other is research. This is basically a degree within getting the overall medical degree where you specialize. For example, if you’re in design, you’re learning about workspaces and how to better design workflow and improve outcomes through the space that you have.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is entertaining proposals to support “academe-industry partnerships, which are led by an interdisciplinary academic research team collaborating with at least one industry partner in order to carry out research to advance, adapt, and integrate technology(ies) into a specified, human-centered smart service system.” Through the Building Innovation Capacity (BIC) element of the Partnerships for Innovation program, NSF intends to make up to $10 million in grants to support research partnerships working on projects that operate in the post-fundamental or translational stage of development with a “clear path to commercialization.” For this program, NSF requires letters of intent by December 2. Read the opportunity..

SMU Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics organised a conference on Financial Technology (or fintech) and Financial Inclusion on August 19. Speaking at the conference, Monetary Authority of Singapore managing director Ravi Menon said that Singapore's banking regulator will review some of the regulatory requirements placed on venture capitalists, to encourage more such investors to set up in Singapore and boost the funding pool for fintech start-ups. Beyond funding, Singapore is also lagging behind fintech hubs like New York and Silicon Valley when it comes to having a pool of experienced mentors and investors in the fintech ecosystem, he added.

Image: ST PHOTO / ALPHONSUS CHERN

In late 2013, Annette Tipton enrolled in an experimental training program in Milwaukee for area companies with at least $1 million in revenue and ambitious expansion plans. Her goal: manage the growing pains at the van service she and her husband started in 2001 to serve seniors and the disabled. Part of an economic development initiative called Scale Up Milwaukee, the free six-month program consists of workshops led by Babson College professors on topics such as sales management and operational finance, plus mentoring sessions and networking events with fellow entrepreneurs.

With various estimates pinning the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) shortfall in the "workforce of the future" somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 people, Rob Hillard, managing partner at Deloitte Consulting, believes the issue Australia is currently facing when it comes to preparing for this is the ambiguity around what those jobs will actually be.

A lot of keynote speeches and “business talks” are bad.

They’re self-promoting, self-congratulatory and ultimately self-serving.

But when done well, talks can be incredibly valuable. They give you an insight—in just a few minutes—into years of hard work and learning that the speaker has done.

I love the efficiency of that medium, and make it a point to watch a few videos each week that I think might teach me something.

After I built my third seven-figure business, one of my employees asked me if I could share with him what I believed to be the key habits that allow me to constantly push forward to create one successful business after another.

There are many aspects to building a business, and while good habits are not all it takes, it is a significant necessity if you are going to create massive change in both your business and your life.

Ultrafast broadband is increasingly a must-have for high-tech companies, especially those in telemedicine, 3D printing, and other emerging industries. But currently, connection speeds vary widely by location—states like Tennessee are home to cities that have built high-speed fiber Internet networks while other states, such as Wisconsin, are trying to play catch-up.

NOTE: this is a repost of Vivek Wadhwa’s post from 2012

America has been extremely worried about the loss of manufacturing to China. Seduced by subsidies, cheap labor, lax regulations, and a rigged currency, American industry has made a beeline to China.

But the tide may soon turn.

New technologies will likely cause the same hollowing out of China’s manufacturing industry over the next two decades that the U.S experienced over the past twenty years. That’s right. America is destined to once again gain its supremacy in manufacturing, and it will soon be China’s turn to worry.