Last week we hosted an Investor Day to showcase 9th Irish Food and Agri-companies to existing and potential shareholders.

It was a great opportunity to hear the investment propositions offered by these businesses and it underlined the dynamism and ambition evident in the sector.

Indigenous Irish-led companies have the odds stacked against them when striving to succeed.

They originate off a relatively small island economy and set out to compete usually against enormous competitors.

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—Salesforce.com will devote a new $50 million investment fund to startups and create an incubator for early-stage cloud startups, Chief Executive Marc Benioff said.

The dual move is the sales-software provider’s latest push to foster an ecosystem of applications that run on its cloud-computing platform.

A quick Google search of business accelerators and incubators will bring up a slew of different options all claiming to be the best service for small businesses looking to get kick-started or seeking help to grow. So how’s a firm supposed to wade through the options and know whether it’s what they need in the first place and then decide which one to apply for?

Image: http://www.managementtoday.co.uk

Babson College, for two decades the world’s No. 1 ranked entrepreneurship educator, is offering the world’s first publicly offered program specifically to help public and private sector leaders create an entirely new internal capacity to formulate and implement entrepreneurship ecosystems in their societies using the most advanced concepts, methods, cases, and practice in the field.

Longitude Capital, an investment firm focused on venture growth investments in biotechnology and medical technology, closed its third fund, at $525m in partner commitments.

Longitude Venture Partners III, L.P. (“LVP3″), which exceeded the initial target of $450m, will continue the firm’s strategy of investing in private and public biotechnology and medical technology companies across all stages of development. The new fund is expected to commit an average of $15-25m per investment in approximately 25 companies.

For years I’ve complained about rankings of venture capitalists, most notably the Forbes Midas List. Not because I’m anti-rankings (I’m not) but, rather, because I’ve felt that they often include too many qualitative criteria, pay too little attention to deal attribution and ignored exits that are cash-small but multiple-big.

Readers have generally nodded their collective head in agreement, and then asked if I was going to try to build a better mousetrap.

Michael Burtov isn’t an engineer, but he had an idea about how to make a wheel that would turn a regular bicycle into an electric one. So Burtov, 37, built a prototype in his kitchen, showed it around, and, two years ago, quit the last company he’d founded to focus on it. The way it works is simple: Just snap off the front wheel of any bike and attach Burtov’s special electric wheel in its place, and the newly powered bicycle can go at 20 miles per hour for up to 50 miles.

Image: http://www.forbes.com

Cluj-Napoca will be, for two days, the center of innovation. In Romania’s second largest city, the Transylvanian Clusters International Conference will bring together over 250 participants, local and international, and more than 50 speakers.

The event will take place between June 24 and June 25 at Cluj Arena and includes five main domains on its agenda: IT&C and Creative Industries, Energy Efficiency, Agribusiness, Innovation in the furniture industry and New materials & technology.

Image: http://www.business-review.eu

CLEVELAND, June 7, 2016 — From NASA Tournament Lab's efforts to increase extra-terrestrial exploration, to GE's goal to "make the unimpossible possible," innovation requires more than a bold vision. Organizations must bravely "open up" to those experts who can help them compete, grow and accelerate the launch of groundbreaking products or make discoveries that improve life for everyone. Today, innovation company NineSigma launched its "Fearless Innovators Podcast Series" to showcase those individuals who are advancing these goals through open innovation (OI). Using this strategy, which can speed product development by up to 50 percent, organizations gain access to a worldwide network of scientific and technical experts for pre-existing IP.

Innovation ecosystems involve many hopeful and inspired people along the journey of bringing an idea to life. There are serial entrepreneurs, incubators, startups, seed investments, venture capital, accelerators, labs, governments, and support services galore to help companies with the latest whiz-bang idea. Like bait on a hook, magazines like Entrepreneur and Fast Company bombard aspiring business people with the happy and ambitious phrases defining what you should do or be to create the next best disruptive invention:

According to research by Michigan State University’s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports, approximately 70% of children in the U.S. are dropping out of organized sports before the age of 13. This is particularly alarming for women because studies have shown that girls who play sports are more likely to graduate from college, find a job, and be employed in male-dominated industries.

EY research shows that among senior business women in the C-suite today, 94% played sports and over half played at a university level — suggesting a strong correlation between their success in sports and their success in business.

Image: Beth Brooke-Marciniak, Global Vice Chair of Public Policy at Ernst & Young Courtesy of Picasa

In late April, government workers once again provided valuable insights into how they feel about their jobs, supervisors and senior leadership through the annual Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey. The Office of Personnel Management will provide results on a rolling basis starting in August. 

OPM considers the survey a critical tool in assessing engagement in the workforce through the “consistent, reliable and actionable information it provides the federal government, each agency, and lower level offices within each organization,” according to Beth Cobert, OPM’s acting director, in a March memo announcing the survey.

I’ve represented the Wharton School at three big international events so far in 2016 — the World Government Summit in Dubai, the Wharton Global Forum in Kuala Lumpur, and now the China Development Forum in Beijing. “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” has been at the top of every agenda because countries world over are desperately seeking productivity-enhancing innovation, and because startups seem better at generating it than big established organizations. Nowhere was this more clear than in Beijing last week. Amid a star-studded program of political, business, and academic leaders from China and around the world, there were two rockstars — Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Image: https://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

Three experts explain synthetic biology and discuss its potential to affect fields as varied as medicine, oil, agriculture, and even fragrances.

Synthetic biology, billed by some as the genesis of the next Industrial Revolution, brings together a bewildering number of disciplines: biotechnology, molecular biology, systems biology, biophysics, computer engineering, genetic engineering, and more.

Some business pundits today believe innovation ignites better in startups than in large, established corporations. They believe big companies are weighed down by their own success, too invested in the past to create and execute new ideas. They say, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” I disagree.

In fact, a lot of big companies have proven they are better positioned than emergent firms to create and execute innovation, however on-fire a startup may be. Consider, for example, Hasbro’s evolution from a product company in the 1990s into the brand experience powerhouse it is today by leveraging its core brands

Eskimos have 50 words for snow. Humans only use 10% of our brains. We hear these types of “facts” all the time — but are they true? Scientists are now saying, “Not so simple.”

We have all seen how repetition of a particular statement or idea tends to lend it legitimacy – the so-called “truth effect.” This effect is likely strengthened when the assertion is made in a serious context by intelligent people with authority. Consider the idea, increasingly an assumption of fact, that “startups create jobs.”

The Russian higher education system is based on certain number of large state universities managed and financed by the Ministry of Education and Science. They can also be considered a special type of corporation that needs to undergo organisational change in order to become the pillars of a national innovation system.

To describe the strategy of Russian university system development, managers use the three-stage roadmap of change from the Training University, or University 1.0, concentrating on HR training, to the Entrepreneurial University, or University 3.0 that needs to become cornerstone of the innovation system as the key source of innovative technology startups.

There are plenty of innovative technology startups out there offering incredible opportunities for investors. Despite this, the profits generated by such startups are not always guaranteed, and neither is their success rate. Thus, when an investor thinks of investing in these startups, a wide array of factors will need to come into play. These include the expertise of the founder as well as the scalability of the startup. Figuring that out may seem like tedious work, but it is much better than burning your money in a startup that will prove to be unsuccessful.

The cover of Ernst & Young’s 2016 biotech report has a picture of a parachutist and the subtitle, “Returning to Earth.” According to EY, the biotech industry has experienced explosive growth over the past few years, but that appears to have slowed in 2015. On its own, a 13 percent increase in biotech revenue looks impressive – unless it’s compared to the 18 percent increase in 2014.

So let’s take a few moments to dissect the report. Are biotechs descending, and if so, can we expect a soft landing?

There’s actually a lot of good news in the EY report. In addition to the 13 percent increase in revenue:

Image: http://medcitynews.com

On the surface, India is not an innovation economy. We have too few patents for a country of our size and very few globally path-breaking products have been invented here. We lack a tradition of people starting businesses which go on to undermine the business models of big companies, and we haven’t invented many new industries (with the notable exception of information technology or IT Services). Even the current e-commerce wave is a derivative of what has happened in the West, and in some ways has significantly lagged behind other parts of the world.

Image: The Mangalyaan mission used home-grown technologies to successfully send an operational spacecraft to Mars, on its very first attempt, on a budget of $74 million—less than what it costs to produce many Hollywood movies. Photo: ISRO/AFP