RICHMOND, Va. — Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed into law Thursday legislation that directs the Boards of Visitors of public colleges and universities to adopt intellectual property policies that are supportive of students, according to a written statement. “This legislation encourages a campus culture that supports entrepreneurship and motivates Virginia’s universities to be hubs of creativity and innovation with the potential to drive regional economic growth,” McAuliffe said. 

Image: Bob Brown/Richmond Times-Dispatch via AP

I recently presented to the Department of Education and spoke about why entrepreneurship should be taught in 1st grade. The initial article that sparked this conversation was “Youth Entrepreneurship - Top 10 Reasons Why the U.S. Department of Education Should Consider This.

I ended the presentation with The Declaration of Entrepreneurship, calling to enact this for all 50 States in the United States to have Entrepreneurship Education in Grades k-12.

Image: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Tim Williamson, CEO of The Idea Village in New Orleans, can make anything – even the most unbelievable of things – sound exciting. He’s quite convincing, turning the most cynical into believers. If you’ve met him, you’ve drank the Kool-Aid. It tastes like whisky and entrepreneurship in New Orleans, and he has spent the past 15 years perfecting his elevator pitch.

Here is the craziest part: no matter how insane his pitches have sounded over the past 15 years, his ideas have had a way of being actualized. When they do, the next pitch becomes even more unbelievable.

Today at ICC we are celebrating the birthday of Leonardo Da Vinci, born on this day five hundred and sixty-four years ago. To mark the anniversary of the man recognized worldwide for his creativity and inventiveness, we are asking ourselves what the great man himself would think about today’s innovation landscape and if he would approve of ICC’s recently released Principles for Creating and Nurturing Innovation Ecosystems for High-Tech Industries.

Nurturing innovation and a dynamic global economy

From creating the first ever designs for a humanoid robot, "The Robot Knight", to inventions that influenced the modern world of manufacturing, Da Vinci is recognized as one of the world's most ingenious inventors of all time. As such we think he would have shared our belief that building investor confidence, promoting technological collaboration and the exchange of knowledge, protecting intellectual property, and opening markets are paramount to encouraging innovation and the development of knowledge-based industries.

You probably know Steve Case best as the man responsible for America Online. But two decades later, Case is continuing the charge to help the new generation of technology and business leaders define the critical path of Internet and innovation to become much more useful to society.

London is currently seeing the rapid growth of an important new urban phenomenon. Innovation districts  — areas which provide the conditions for organisations from different sectors to exchange knowledge, work together and innovate — are springing up across the city, connecting established industries with emerging ones, and helping embed organisations more deeply in their communities.

Image: Granary Square, part of the innovation district in King's Cross. photo by Andrew Smith in the Londonist Flickr pool

THESE days, in the thick of the American presidential primaries, it’s easy to see how the 50 states continue to drive the political system. But increasingly, that’s all they drive — socially and economically, America is reorganizing itself around regional infrastructure lines and metropolitan clusters that ignore state and even national borders. The problem is, the political system hasn’t caught up.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com

“In South Africa universities contribute 2.1% of gross domestic product – more than textiles and forestry – and they employ 300,000 people which puts them on a par with the mining industry.” Such comparisons could change perceptions of the sector as it strives to boost international competitiveness in research and innovation, says Professor Anastassios Pouris.

At a Research and Innovation Dialogue held in Johannesburg from 7-8 April, Pouris delivered an overview of his report on Research and Innovation Funding Instruments to Raise South Africa’s Competitiveness in Science and Technology: Lessons from other developing countries.

Gaithersburg, Md., April 18, 2016 – More than 700 leaders from life science companies, academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, investment funds and government entities across Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. (MD-VA-DC) will convene today and tomorrow for the second annual Regional BioTech Forum. The event will showcase the region’s biotechnology accomplishments and its commitment to advancing cutting-edge research in the MD-VA-DC corridor. Notable speakers will include: Dr. Francis Collins, Director, National Institutes of Health; Maryland Governor Lawrence Hogan; Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe; and Congressman John Delaney.

The Forum, hosted by AstraZeneca and its global biologics research and development arm, MedImmune, in partnership with BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), the Tech Council of Maryland, Inc. (TCM), GlycoMimetics, Inc. and Virginia Bio, will be held at MedImmune’s corporate headquarters in Gaithersburg. The program will build on a collective effort established last year to grow the region’s biotech ecosystem and help it to become one of the top three biotech hubs in the nation by 2023.

To learn more, read the PDF

Saturday Night Live recently featured a sketch poking fun at Millennials. It opens with a young woman frantically texting on her iPhone, approaching her boss and asking for a promotion. The boss asks how long she’s been with the company. She replies, “Three days.”

Everyone gets it. Conventional wisdom holds that Millennials are entitled, easily distracted, impatient, self-absorbed, lazy, and unlikely to stay in any job for long. On the positive side, they’re also looking for purpose, feedback, and personal life balance in their work. Companies of all kinds are obsessed with understanding them better.

There is a significant divide between the European Union countries with the greatest capacity to innovate, and those with the least capacity to innovate. The difficult convergence process has been proceeding only very slowly and unevenly, and more recently seems to have come to a halt.

A particular weak spot for the EU is corporate investment in research; in this area, the intra-EU divide is growing. As the business sector is responsible for the persistent R&D intensity gap between the EU and the United States and Asia, the persistent failure of lagging EU countries to catch up in this area provides much of the explanation for the EU’s weak performance compared to other economies.

1,200 people. 1,200 mattresses. One world record. 

On March 22, Aarons, Inc., a Georgia-based electronics and appliances company, broke the record for largest human mattress dominoes during an annual company meeting in Maryland. It took only 13 minutes and 38 seconds to break this totally delightful record. 

Image: http://mashable.com

Most tech startups are silent spaces where earbud-clad engineers peer into monitors. Not Hampton Creek Foods. The two-year-old company’s office—a filled-to-bursting space in San Francisco’s South of Market tech hotbed—grinds, clatters, and whirs like a laundromat run amok. That’s the sound of industrial-strength mixers, grinders, and centrifuges churning out what the company hopes is a key ingredient in food 2.0: an animal-free replacement for the chicken egg.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

The greater Washington region has an accelerator problem and we have to fix it if we want to grow the next generation of technology businesses.

A business accelerator is a term used to describe a broad range of business models that share characteristics: assisting a founder form a new businesses through mentorship, partnership connections, access to related expertise (for example, how to set up a limited liability company or a sales team) and access to investors.

Image: (Photo courtesy of Jonathan Aberman)

The future is always racing towards us. But this era in which we live is different. There is a quickening of the pace of technological change. Examples abound — cognitive computing, augmented intelligence, the industrial internet, new frontiers in materials, manufacturing and mining and agriculture.

This means that in the next 15 years tremendous demands will be made on our citizens, businesses, policymakers and institutions. It is a universal truth that the key to future Australian prosperity is enhanced productivity and application of new technologies is fundamental in achieving this.

BANGALORE, India — On a hot afternoon in a two-story house here, as dogs barked and auto-rickshaws sputtered outside, a venture capitalist grilled three entrepreneurs.

Their start-up, DriveU, provides on-demand drivers for people with cars, differing from Uber or Olacabs, an Indian variant, which offer on-demand taxi services. The three parried questions about the business in a cramped conference room with doors and shutters painted in DriveU’s company colors — shamrock green.

Image: A DriveU chauffeur. DriveU, which provides on-demand drivers for people with cars, gives its best full-time chauffeurs health insurance, something that is nearly unheard-of in India. Credit CJ Clarke for The New York Times

Most seasoned entrepreneurs will tell you that starting a business is one of the most rewarding experiences in life. At the same time, many will caveat that getting a business off the ground is harder than most people think.

For founding startup teams, a bit of preventive care and planning can go a long way.

It’s still popular these days for startup founders to operate in stealth mode, meaning no details about the idea or progress are shared with anyone until the big reveal and rollout. The common reason given is that this prevents any competitor from stealing their idea and beating them to market. In my view, this paranoid approach costs them much more than the risk of being open.

“Distance will die,” or so predicted British economist Frances Cairncross, along with a host of social and media theorists, following the spread of the internet in the 1990s. When every place is connected instantaneously to every other place on the planet, they argued, space itself would become irrelevant. At that point, we would not need offices anymore: Why go to work when work can come to you?

Image: https://hbr.org

If Silicon Valley companies are supposed to shy away from hiring people with gray hair, no one told Maggie Leung.

The senior director of content at NerdWallet, a San Francisco-based financial information company, has made a point of seeking out experienced hires since she joined the company in 2013. She was "immediately at least 15 years older than most people" at the roughly 50-person firm.