Football clubs and start-ups are like chalk and cheese but at Manchester City the two are being brought together to hasten its efforts to understand as many paths to innovation as it can.

Though few outside the community may understand this, entrepreneurship is not just about profit and risk. It’s also about endless curiosity and the willingness to try something new. The true entrepreneur won’t be able to resist exploring the lessons below. But while your curiosity might draw you in, what you’ll come away with is something more. Because these seemingly unrelated lessons from our small business community will also make you a better entrepreneur in the end.

The SCUBAJET is a flexible water sports jet-engine that will kick your summer up a notch. The product can be attached to almost any water sport -- paddle board, canoe, scuba, even a dinghi -- and has a speed of almost seven miles per hour.

This story is not a good idea. Not for society and certainly not for me. Because what trolls feed on is attention. And this little bit–these several thousand words–is like leaving bears a pan of baklava.

Business innovation: no matter what industry you’re in, it’s a priority, a critical strategy, a goal, or task #1 on the CEO’s to-do list. There’s good reason for the focus: studies show that innovation leaders outperform competitors 39% of the time, and that their average revenue increases by 23% year over year.

The simplest way to categorize innovation is into two types – incremental and radical.    Incremental innovation is an improvement in an existing thing (e.g. product, process or service).  Radical innovation is finding an entirely new way of doing something.  For example if you had been making spectacles in the 1950s then plastic lenses instead of glass lenses would have been an incremental innovation. Contact lenses or laser eye surgery would have been radical innovations.  Some writers include a third category – disruptive innovation, where the entire industry is disrupted (e.g. Uber) but it seems to me that this is just a variant of radical innovation.

The notion of smart dust sounds like a work of science fiction but scientists at University of California Berkeley have developed a “neural dust” that can be implanted into the body, to monitor internal nerves, muscles or organs in real time.

When it comes to R&D spending, corporate leaders often want to know what others are doing. How much are other companies in different industries spending on R&D? Leaders want to know the level of spending in absolute terms (i.e. total expenditure), and also as a percentage of revenue. The presumption is that R&D spending is somehow connected to increased innovation, revenue growth and profits.

For more than 60 years, investors, analysts, business leaders, and even governments, have classified companies based on industries. First there were Standard Industry Classification codes, which were introduced in 1937, then the North American Industry Classification System, and now we have Standard and Poor’s Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS). Even though these systems are updated regularly, we can no longer rely on standards and measures that were developed in a different age to reflect today’s realities — especially when we’re evaluating tech firms.

Jocelyn Greenky really hates fluorescent lights, so when she started a new job years ago, she showed up with a floor lamp a few weeks in and dragged it over to her desk.

"It did not go over well," she says. That’s how Greenky discovered that every office has its own culture—and as a result, how sometimes even the smallest acts can look like a rebellion.

Open innovation, cross-functional collaboration, customer-centricity, dedicated "innovation time" and managers walking the talk have emerged as hallmarks of the companies which topped The Australian Financial Review Most Innovative Companies list. 

The list, which is now in its fifth year and is judged and compiled by Australian innovation consultancy Inventium, attracted over 1000 nominations – twice as many as last year.

Image: http://www.afr.com

To celebrate five years as CEO of Apple, Tim Cook has given a very long, exclusive interview to the Washington Post about his experiences so far.  But what he didn’t say is just as interesting as what he did.

The interview—all 10,000 words of it—covers a lot of ground, from what it was like to take over from Steve Jobs to Cook’s unusually loud voice on social issues. But he also spoke at length about the development of Apple’s forthcoming products and features. Here, we read between the lines of some of Cook’s utterances.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

Imagine living in a room smaller than a parking spot. Now imagine sharing that room with another person. For students in one residence hall at the College of Wooster, this scenario is a reality. They live in pods much smaller than typical dorm rooms, with singles measuring about 72 square feet and doubles measuring about 108 square feet. (The most common area of a parking spot in the United States is about 161.5 feet.) The trend runs in contrast to dormitory rooms that -- either by choice of the college or the students -- feature lavish amenities.

Image: Students in the pods at the College of Wooster MATT DILYARD, COURTESY OF LITTLE DIVERSIFIED ARCHITECTURAL CONSULTING

On the 10th anniversary of a project that redefined the landscape of Kendall Square, developer Alexandria Real Estate Equities is gearing up to transform yet another area into a mecca for the biotech industry.

It was 10 years ago last month that Alexandria (NYSE: ARE) bought the seven buildings that make up Technology Square, the biggest contiguous campus development in the company’s largest region in the country, for $600 million from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The 1.2-million-square-foot area — which represents about a fifth of the company’s total Boston-area properties — has become home to research facilities for biotechs like Epizyme and Moderna, playing a major role in the areas transformation into the early-stage biotech hub of the world.

Image: The One Kendall Square courtyard. ALEXANDRIA - http://www.bizjournals.com

Google isn't shy about branching out in new neighborhoods. Come September, it opens its next office a few blocks from CNET headquarters. (I mean, we're practically neighbors.)

At around 14,000 square feet, this downtown San Francisco space will host and educate startups and developers at home and abroad, the company said Thursday in a blog post.

The Missouri-based Missouri Innovation Center Technology Accelerator Fund, Llc filed Form D because of $3.00 million offering. This is a new filing. The Limited Liability Company raised $1.00 million so far. That is 33.33% of the $3.00 million offering amount. The total offering amount was $3.00 million. The offering filing was filed on 2016-08-18. Missouri Innovation Center Technology Accelerator Fund, Llc’s clarification was: The Manager will receive an annual fee equal to 2.0% of the non-affiliated members’ capital commitments during the Investment Period.. The offering has $2.00 million left to be raised and is still open.

The Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality, and augmented reality are playing a more important role than ever for middle market companies, as this segment of the enterprise is no longer playing catch-up with technology but is instead viewing tech investments as ways to gain a strategic advantage over competitors, according to a Deloitte survey released today.

"IT is becoming less of an administrative or support function, and is gaining an important seat at the table, driving technology adoption, integration, and strategy," said Stephen Keathley, deputy chief information officer, Deloitte Services LP and national technology leader of Deloitte Growth Enterprise Services.

Valuating early stage companies is hard. Justifying the value to the investors is harder. The early stage companies typically have not made sufficient progress for traditional startup valuation techniques to apply. For example, revenue multiplier or EBITDA (Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) multiplier are useless for the valuation of a pre-revenue company.

Gopher Angels, the Minnesota association of affluent investors, has crossed $11M invested in “high-potential” startup companies in the state since its inception four years ago. Gopher Angels also plans the first Midwest regional conference of the Angel Capital Association on Sept. 22.  More information: www.angelcapitalassociation.org/midwest.

Knowledge@Wharton: In this age of technology and big data, why is there still that disconnect between healthcare providers and patients?

Andrea LaFountain: You kind of answered the question. Big data can be great, but it can also be an enemy depending on how we use the data. There’s an overreliance on what we call “claims data.” We look at the activities of the patient. We can see whether they are visiting the doctor or filling prescriptions, but it doesn’t give us the explanation behind the activities that we’re seeing. That’s what’s missing.