The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) intends to publish a federal funding opportunity (FFO) in July 2016 for MEP Centers in the 11 states: Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Nevada, North Dakota, South Carolina and Wyoming. The objective of the MEP Center program is to provide business and technical services to small- and medium-sized manufacturers within the state of operation.

Michele Whyle is Director of Global Sustainability at 3M, widely considered one of the world’s most innovative companies. Its portfolio of 55,000 products includes the Post-it Notes on your desk, the ACE bandages in your medicine cabinet, and many less-visible industrial applications to improve lighting, transportation and power transmission.

Fresh off 3M’s “The Big Picture” exhibition at South by Southwest (SXSW), Michele spoke with Ashoka’s Dan Schiff to talk about the company’s role in innovating through empathy, partnerships for a better world and encouraging more young women to pursue scientific careers.

The market for startup investing travels a curve that, at its peaks, triggers big valuations and relatively easy money for early-stage companies. We saw the height of this curve during the tech boom in 2000, during the early part of 2008, and again during the first three quarters of 2015. At the curve’s lows, in 2001, 2009 and, perhaps now, money can dry up. During these times even growing companies with great teams and the promise of paradigm disruption can find raising a Series A to be difficult.

Venture capitalism is alive and well. And collecting money to fund startups is at a pace not seen since the dot-com bubble days.

How do I know that?

Well, all we need do is check the stats from Dow Jones VentureSource. It recently reported that in Q1, U.S. venture funds have collected about $13 billion.

This amount would be the largest total since the dot-com boom in 2000. That’s a statistic that can offer investors optimism — and instill a justifiable sense of fear — all in the same breath.

Research shows that in leaderless groups, leaders emerge by quickly synchronizing their brain waves with followers through high quality conversations. Simply put, synchrony is a neural process where the frequency and scale of brain waves of people become in sync. Verbal communication plays a large role in synchronization, especially between leaders and followers. Synchrony between leaders and followers leads to mutual understanding, cooperation, coordinated execution of tasks, and collective creativity.

Knowledge@Wharton: Geography and travel are certainly loves in your life, but how did the tie-in with genius come about?

Eric Weiner: I want to state right up from that I’m not a genius. I’m interested in genius the way, say, a hungry person is interested in a Philadelphia cheesesteak…. I’m motivated, like everyone, to be a bit more creative, maybe not to achieve genius.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Some mental illnesses may stem, in part, from the brain’s inability to correctly assign emotional associations to events. For example, people who are depressed often do not feel happy even when experiencing something that they normally enjoy. A new study from MIT reveals how two populations of neurons in the brain contribute to this process. The researchers found that these neurons, located in an almond-sized region known as the amygdala, form parallel channels that carry information about pleasant or unpleasant events.

Everyone is talking about the Internet of Things these days. And why not? Gartner predicts that those tiny little intelligent sensors embedded into everything from toasters to doorframes to cars and sneakers will grow into a community of 21 billion devices by 2020.

All those sensors constantly recording things, sending their data somewhere, and at times talking with one another is about as Orwellian a future as we are likely to get. Even I am guilty of ogling the IoT like a caveman contemplating fire. As recently as last December in my yearly Nextgov wrap-up column, I predicted IoT would make great strides and start to change the world this year.

The history of federal employee retirement systems dates back less than 100 years. The Civil Service Retirement System was created in 1920, the Social Security system was signed into law in 1935 and the Federal Employees Retirement System, with its Thrift Savings Plan, came along in 1986. For decades, employees could count on a 30 to 40 year career followed by a retirement filled with leisure activities and time with family.

In life, we are often presented with opportunities and distractions. If you don’t have your priorities clearly in order, and a plan for taking action, then you’re always at risk of someone knocking on your door and selling you their priorities and their plan. Knowing how to distinguish between opportunities and distractions — and how to minimize the latter — will keep you on the fast track to achieving your business and financial objectives.

Gaining a national edge in the advanced manufacturing space typically isn’t a “top down” process, especially given the speed of technological change. Given that, one of the great strengths of the Obama administration’s National Network for Manufacturing Institutes (NNMI) initiative has been its vision of competitive, “bottom up” project selection and governance.

With the program, the Obama administration has adopted catalytic, as opposed to directive, government. That is, Washington has deployed its grant awards to spur industry-led collaboration to solve critical advanced manufacturing problems, but it has not dictated how. Instead, various federal agencies have announced a series of all-comers competitions to solve critical manufacturing innovation topics, such as lightweight materials or digital manufacturing, and left much to the market. And by all indications, the approach has been effective.

Sleepless nights, financial sacrifice, risk, fear, failure, doubt: I know them all well. I’m a serial entrepreneur.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that starting a new business is easy—keeping it running is the tricky part. To stay inspired while bootstrapping and surviving the market is no small feat. There have been times when I’ve wanted to run out the door or curl up in a ball and sleep for a week. But I haven’t. To survive the punishing hours, the impossible deadlines, the financial risk, the inevitable obstacles, and all of the nightmares that come with running two companies, I’ve learned to focus on what inspired me in the first place: my family.

It’s been 40 years since two college drop outs named Steve met in a garage to build a computer that would revolutionize the world.

That computer was the Apple I, which paved the road to the company we all know now as Apple, Inc.

Within the past four decades, the company has become a tech giant with record-breaking sales and innovative products found in homes and hands all over the world.

Image: http://www.nydailynews.com

The University of Central Florida's business incubator in Research Park has been undergoing a $5 million renovation for about 13 months, including wet lab space, and it means more space for the companies wanting to grow in Central Florida. UPCOMING EVENTS 2016 Bizwomen Mentoring Monday Networking Event APRIL 04, 2016 2016 Women Who Mean Business Awards Luncheon APRIL 29, 2016 See More Events

The 50,000-square-foot incubator on Progress Drive in Research Park is home to 44 promising tech and science companies. Before the renovations, there were 70 offices available, but now the program has 110 offices, giving more space to companies wanting to join. Right now, the incubator at Research Park is 75 percent full, said Carol Ann Dykes, site manager for the program.

Companies launched out of Georgia's universities with early-stage investment from GRA Ventures reached a major milestone in March: A collective total of $1 billion in additional equity investment from venture capital firms and other investors.

Created in 2002, GRA Ventures helps the universities identify inventions and discoveries that have promise in the marketplace. The program then provides grants ranging from $150,000 to $200,000 — and for some projects reaching the company stage, an additional $250,000 loan.

Two-thirds of Americans believe that, in 50 years, robots and computers will do much of the work humans now do. The World Economic Forum’s 2016 report, The Future of Jobs, estimates that 5 million jobs will be lost to automation by 2020 and that the number will keep growing. Jobs that once seemed like "safe bets"—office workers and administrative personnel, manufacturing, and even law—will be hit hardest, the report estimates.

$30 million. That’s how much Invoca raised and we’re announcing it today. It is an heroic accomplishment in a brutal fund-raising market in which only market leaders can bring in that sort of money. But the story started more than 6 months ago. And the narrative may tell you something about your own journey one day.

We started planning our fund raising as much as 14 months ago. Invoca had grown steadily and consistently since 2009 and by 2015 SaaS companies with scale had become hot – trading at a median of 7.3x forward sales with some as high as 12x sales. Many had started IPO’ing and we started to think about our future.

I stand, a cyborg micronaut, in front of the biggest human heart any person has ever seen.

It is Arch Obler huge, a flesh pump the size of a skyscraper, but I manipulate it with god-like facility, rotating it in midair with my hands and bisecting it with just a flick of the finger. Through ventricles and thundering aorta I dive, floating through heart chambers so enormous, they become corpuscle cathedrals.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com 

Now that radical architecture is the status quo in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, it's easy to forget that historic countercultural visionaries once had to wade through plenty of eye rolls as they promoted their ideas.

In 1971, documentarian and Village Voice journalist Howard Smith interviewed inventor and urban futurist Buckminster Fuller about his ideas about urbanism, including wilder concepts like his proposal for a dome covering part of Manhattan. The interview was recently published in The Smith Tapes (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), and it gives us a fascinating glimpse into how Fuller pitched his ideas.

Smart, quasi-autonomous robots and machines are replacing humans in workplaces all over the world. They learn fast, work hard, and certainly complain less. Intelligent technologies are increasingly delivering greater value for less money.

But “better than human” comes with its own managerial challenges. What happens when these algorithmic ensembles underperform? Who retrains “machine learning” underachievers?