Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Millennials are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce and will make up 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. The generation often caricatured as the entitled “me” generation, is not only taking over the public/private sector by sheer size, but transforming the very nature of the traditional workplace–including how they want to be managed.
University tech transfer offices play a central role in the biotech ecosystem, as the successful commercialization of an academic discovery is the aspiration of many young startups. Navigating–and optimizing–this tech transfer process is therefore critical to the health of the biotech sector.
Before sharing a few venture-specific perspectives on improving tech transfer, it’s worth highlighting the differential role of academia and tech transfer in biotech vs. tech VC-backed startups, as an interesting dichotomy exists. While many of tech’s best entrepreneurs come straight out of (or skip) university and found great companies in their 20s, biotech’s typical scientific founders are professors who retain their roles as principal investigators within academia–and are paired with seasoned Pharma veterans who take on founding management roles.
While the supply of accelerator physicists in the United States has grown modestly over the last decade, it hasn’t been able to catch up with demand fueled by industry interest in medical particle accelerators and growing collaborations at the national labs.
About 15 PhDs in accelerator physics are granted by US universities each year. That’s up from around 12 per year, a rate that held relatively steady from 1985 to 2005. But accelerator physicists often come to the field without a specialized degree.
Innovation is at the top of the Management Agenda for many companies. For excellence in innovation, companies have to master the chain of activities from discovering valuable insight into unmet customer needs to successful market adoption. However, despite large and growing investments into innovation, results remain disappointing. We call this the “corporate innovation problem”. In this 3-part article series we dig deeper into this problem and find that there are actually two root causes for it. We focus on one of the root causes – the “system problem” – and work out six levers of improvement. Acting on these levers offers a solution to the corporate innovation problem and ultimately increases innovation performance.
Just what is the Internet of Things? The generally accepted definition is a digital ecosystem wherein everyday objects have network connectivity, allowing them to send and receive data. The ‘things’ in this case are just about anything that can be fitted with a chip and connected to the internet – cars, wearables, appliances, machines and many more.
The culmination of all this is a world where your devices all talk to each other. Your fridge sends a reminder to your watch to buy milk when it detects you’re about to run out.
Image: http://memeburn.com
Merely 5 percent of healthcare organizations worldwide are “operating at the highest level of digital health innovation proficiency and expertise,” according to a report from digital health consulting firm Enspektos. That means the vast majority have yet to scale and share their innovations, even within their own walls.
Instead, most are in the testing and experimentation phase, not unexpected, given that digital health still is relatively new and that healthcare has historically been slow to embrace change. More than a third are just getting started in digital health.
Image: http://medcitynews.com
The next Australian start-up could be born in Berlin with a new "landing pad" for entrepeneurs trying to access Europe's well-established innovation network of investors, incubators and accelerators.
Trade Minister Steve Ciobo unveiled the landing pad, saying it would give Australian entrepreneurs unprecedented access to Berlin's well-established innovation market which has strong links between potential funders of start-up companies.
Entrepreneurs these days come in all shapes and sizes, but financial liquidity can make or break any enytrepreneur's success. The low cost of technology and marketing has driven a herd of college-age entrepreneurs to start companies from their dorm rooms or parents' basement. At the same time, the structural mistrust of corporations as a whole (catalyst being the great recession) has motivated many 30- and 40-somethings to leave their pension-less jobs to start a business on their own, and build their own success. One thing is for sure though -- both groups of entrepreneurs not only have the same mindset (the Entrepreneur Mindset), but also have the same need for liquidity, no matter what type of life stage or business model.
AOL cofounder Steve Case and his wife Jean were always focused on pushing entrepreneurship through their foundation, but it has become evident that some people were being left out.
“When we look at the data, it looks like half the team is being left on the sidelines,” said Case Foundation Senior VP for Social Innovation Sheila Herrling. That half is made up of women and people of color, she said.
In an interview before she took the stage to speak at the JHU Social Innovation Lab’s Impact and Innovation Forum, Herrling talked about how the foundation is looking to create more opportunity for women and people of color.
Image: Photo by Hilary Geisbert
Dr. Jay Bradner, a decorated cancer researcher from the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, turned heads last year when he accepted a top job at Novartis, one of the world’s largest drug makers. Academics jump to industry all the time, but Bradner made his name with a move pharma almost never makes: When he discovered a potentially cancer-fighting molecule, he just gave it away.
I sat down with Bradner Monday as he settled in as head of the Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research (NIBR), a Kendall Square-headquartered operation that employs more than 6,000 scientists with a budget above $6 billion. Here are excerpts from our conversation:
Image: JOHN BLANDING/BOSTON GLOBE - Dr. Jay Bradner is head of the Novartis Institutes of BioMedical Research.
In the fast-paced world of deal making, joint ventures (JVs) are a conundrum. Slow in the making, often with complicated structures and shared management teams, they seem out of place in a volatile era marked by buzzwords that hype agility and nimble strategic moves. Yet there they are, more than 1,500 JV deals completed annually over the past ten years, including around 10 percent of them characterized as large JVs, with an initial value of more than $250 million. Their volume seems likely to endure—more than two-thirds of executives surveyed in 2014 reported that they expect to do more JVs in the future.1
Entrepreneurs face many obstacles in starting a new business, but the founders of Slyde Handboards face a particularly daunting one: how to create a market for a product most people have never heard of, and for a sport they know nothing about.
Yet over the course of five years, Slyde Handboards has grown into a robust company through the use of creative marketing tactics that tap into a world where GoPro videos celebrate unusual sports and start-ups can harness social media — and their fans — to spread the word.
Image: Steve Watts with a handboard in the surf near Dana Point, Calif., photographed using a camera attached to his wrist. Credit Carlos Gonzalez for The New York Times
In the north tower of the Key Center in downtown Buffalo, one of the quietest parts of the Buffalo Billion is taking shape.
Inside, on the fourth floor in temporary space that is less than half filled, IBM Corp. is slowly building what the company and state officials hope will be a key cog in efforts to build up the Buffalo Niagara region’s undersized tech sector, with a goal of creating 500 technology and support jobs by the fall of 2020.
For IBM’s new innovation center in Buffalo, it’s all about data.
Image: Servers in the new IBM Buffalo Innovation Center in Key Tower, Wednesday, March 16, 2016. (Derek Gee/Buffalo News)
Venture capital we know: Early investing in hopefully promising companies, potentially high reward, but more often high risk. Venture capital firms — and rich people usually — are the ones doing it.
But there's also something called corporate venture capital: when companies make investment funds of their own.
You might have heard of the slowdown in deal activity by VC firms in North America in the first quarter of 2016. The decline follows a similar trend registered at the end of last year.
According to a recent report by KPMG and CB Insights, in Q1 2016, venture capital funds invested just $14.8 billion in the US, slightly better than in the last quarter of 2015 ( $14 billion) but significantly distant from the peaks reached in 2015 ($20.4 billion in Q3).
I've worked in and up close to state government. I've seen the good times, and I've ridden through plenty of rough patches, too — like the one we're experiencing now as our Legislature tries to figure out how to close a huge budget hole.
Through it all, I've seen a lot of activity and self-congratulation for accomplishments big and small.
What I haven't seen is a moment of legislative clarity equal to the moment nearly 30 years ago when state lawmakers created the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology.
Unemployment is at a historic low, and the number of job openings is up to 5.4 million, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics's most recent count.
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here are these jobs? SmartRecruiters, a software provider to the likes of Equinox Fitness, Atlassian, and Ubisoft, among others, analyzed data from 700 companies and over 100,000 jobs to find the positions most in demand and the cities that have the most openings. SmartRecruiters’s analysis also offers an eye-opening look into the timing for posting positions and the best time to apply for them.
Image: Flickr user Phalinn Ooi
American University is launching a new Center for Innovation in the Capital on Wednesday, part of its ongoing efforts to position itself as a source for business intelligence in Greater Washington. The new center in AU's Kogod School of Business will be led by Melissa Bradley, the inaugural director for the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiative. She most recently served as a professor of practice at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business with an expertise on impact investing, social entrepreneurship, peer-to-peer economics and innovation.
When ministers ask UK universities to improve their efforts at commercialising academic research, one question always pops up: “Why can’t you do it like Stanford?” The answer could soon be at hand. The US institution, renowned for its success at “technology transfer,” is now advising the UK’s civil servants and universities on how to help academics exploit their ideas.
