If you’re thinking about starting a company with VC money, I have a few tips for you! My company, Oncora Medical, is a Philly-based digital health company that just raised a $1.2M seed round; it builds predictive analytics software for radiation oncologists. While fundraising for Oncora, I learned some valuable lessons.

1. Act on good advice. When a venture capitalist takes time out of their day to discuss your business with you, validate them by actually implementing their advice. They may have agreed to introduce you to a potential advisor, key opinion leader, or future collaborator. Follow up with those introductions in a timely manner and try to learn as much as you can from the interaction. If the person you are meeting with gives you a specific suggestion about your product or service, make sure you at least look into the value of their suggestion. If you make progress in the areas that they have identified, you have the perfect excuse to reach back out to them with results. A month or two after the initial email, shoot them a specific update email.

I've been both an interviewer and an interviewee in the startup world. In my early days, I had to quickly learn how to handle multiple roles that changed pretty much daily. And while the job came with flexible hours, it took me a while to get used to late nights, missed meals, and weekend work.

The United States ranks 1st in how its domestic policies support worldwide life sciences innovation, according to an analysis released today by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a global technology policy think tank. Released on World Health Day, the findings come in a new report assessing 56 countries—which together comprise close to 90 percent of the world’s economy—on the extent to which their scientific research, drug pricing, and intellectual property policies contribute to global biopharmaceutical innovation.

The Renaissance put knowledge at the heart of value creation, which took place in the workshops of artisan/artists. Here they met and worked together painters, sculptors, and other artists; architects, mathematicians, engineers, anatomists, and other scientists; rich merchants as patrons. All of them gave form and life to Renaissance communities, generators of aesthetic and expressive as well as social and economic values. The result was entrepreneurship that conceived revolutionary ways of working, of designing and delivering products and services, and seeing the world. In short, a spark of prosperity in the hallmark of discontinuity.

More often than not, when talk in New Jersey turns to the pharmaceutical industry tones turn serious and the discussion centers around whether pharma will continue to support the state’s economy in the way it has for more than a century.

What most observers don’t realize is that New Jersey can rightfully call itself the undisputed global leader in biopharmaceuticals, a subset of the pharma industry hailed as key to its future.

Image: http://www.njspotlight.com 

SCRA has started its search for an executive director.

CEO Bill Mahoney announced in February that he would step down from the agency, which commercializes intellectual property and invests in early stage companies.

The organization is now looking for an executive director to report to the executive committee of the SCRA Board of Trustees, a news release said.

The position will execute “SCRA’s enabling legislation to advance technology-based economic development throughout the state by collaborating with public and private organizations, working with the research universities to commercialize applied science, increase university research through public/private partnerships along with Commercialize Technology, advance technology start-ups and administer the Industry Partnership Fund,” the job description said.

The position’s salary ranges from $200,000 to $230,000, and applications are being accepted until April 22.

Innovation Depot released its annual report this week detailing the early-stage business incubator's growth over the last year. The startup hub made some serious moves in 2015, launching software coding bootcamp Depot/U alongside resident web design and digital marketing company Platypi. The Depot also cemented plans to launch another business accelerator called Velocity in a partnership with the Birmingham Venture Club. The program received a $50,000 grant from the federal government as seed capital for development.

The system for funding American flagship public universities is “gradually breaking down,” said Robert J. Birgeneau, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-chair of a two-year project to examine the role of public research universities and recommend changes to help them stay competitive.

Image: Cal students in the Doe Library at UC Berkeley. Photo: Alison Yin/Hechinger Report 

Despite the emergence of hundreds of accelerator programs around the world, we know little about their effectiveness or how differences across programs influence venture performance. To address this gap, Social Enterprise @ Goizueta at Emory University and the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) launched the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative (GALI) in collaboration with a consortium of public and private funders. GALI builds on the Entrepreneurship Database Program at Emory University, which works with accelerator programs around the world to collect and analyze data describing the entrepreneurs that they attract and support. 

Since the recession, public research universities have seen greater cuts than any other sector. Slowly, state support for higher education is inching back up. But what if it never returns to prerecession levels? That’s the question driving the Lincoln Project, which has been studying public research universities since 2013. The final report, released Thursday by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, offers wide-ranging suggestions for these universities’ financial futures.

If you really want to start a business your way without a boss or professional investor hovering over you, then just fund it yourself or through friends and family, and grow it organically. It’s more possible to bootstrap today than a few years ago, as the cost of entry continues to go down. According to many experts, over 90 percent of successful businesses currently start this way.

Talks of a cooldown appears to be just that – talk. For now at least. According to Tech in Asia’s data, venture capital funding in Asia has doubled in Q1 2016 compared to the same period in 2015.

Image: http://ventureburn.com 

As part of its plans to expand and support Digital India initiatives, software and solutions major Oracle today announced at the Oracle CloudWorld it will set up its first incubation centre in country.

Called ‘Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator' the centre will open in Bengaluru on April 8, 2016 and will be inaugurated by Oracle’s President of Product Development Thomas Kurian. Oracle will launch nine incubation centres. 

Image: Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores, California Photo courtesy: Wikipedia 

Payrolls are expected to expand this year, making it more challenging for employers to find good workers. The strong job market likely will pressure employers to offer higher wages and more benefits than in the recent past in order to attract and retain talented employees. This all adds to the cost of hiring. Fortunately, there is some tax help to ameliorate the cost, here are five new employee tax breaks.

At this point, every business under the sun seems to have harnessed peer power in some shape or form. By taking advantage of the skills and knowledge of its consumers, a business need only provide users with a vehicle of growth. Peer-2-peer (P2P) commerce is a proverbial win-win. Income floods in without a lot of investment — whilst consumers are effectively free to buy, sell and engage with one another in any way they see fit.

The Emerging City Champions is a fellowship program for young civic innovators with transformative ideas. We are looking for future city leaders with creative solutions that will enhance civic engagement, improve mobility, and activate public life in public spaces.

Studies show that organisations which take leadership development seriously outperform their competition.  This holds greater truth today when leaders in this cyber age find themselves under greater (and increasing) pressures from globalisation. Twenty-five years ago, very little attention was being paid to the idiosyncrasies and irrational processes that make up individual behavior. Corporations and business schools were preoccupied with models of the rational economic man, not realising that executives are everything but rational decision makers. The emotional aspects of leadership, the importance of corporate culture were all but ignored. Leaders at that time were expected to simply leverage their vision and skills to create sustainable, results-oriented organisations.

Over the past 40 years the world’s population has gotten about 1.5 kilograms heavier each year, leading to an obesity epidemic. According to a study published in The Lancet, there are now roughly 640 million obese individuals around the world. The study found that not only is the number of obese people greater than ever before but that it has surpassed the number of those dangerously underweight as well. The study looked at trends in adult body mass index, which quantifies an individual’s tissue mass based on height and weight, across 200 countries between 1975 and 2014. As the following graphic shows, the U.S. in particular saw a dramatic increase from 1.6 to 13.3 percent of the population being morbidly obese whereas the portion that was underweight dwindled from 7 to 2.5 percent.

Dear Madam / Mr. President:

Over fifty years ago, in March 1964, a document known as the “Triple Revolution Report” landed on the desk of your predecessor, Lyndon Johnson. That report, written by a prominent group of intellectuals that included two Nobel laureates, argued that the United States was on the brink of dramatic social and economic disruption as rapidly advancing industrial automation technology was poised to throw millions out of work.

What used to be “icing on the cake” in a corporate site selection project is now often a key ingredient in the cake itself: economic incentives.

Thanks to an increase in the U.S. gross domestic product, the outlook of manufacturers has improved, and many are eager to move forward with real estate improvement plans — whether those include expansion or relocation of existing facilities into new or revitalized real estate. The general consensus is that during the economic downturn, space optimization studies and lean manufacturing processes aimed at managing workflow and increasing efficiencies served a purpose, but the time seems right to alleviate overcrowding and/or transition from obsolete buildings by expanding footprints and relocating into newer, more ef?cient industrial properties.