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innovation DAILY

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.

Check Out The Most Complete Map Of The Cold Milky Way Galaxy Ever Made Fast Company Business Innovation

The team running the APEX telescope in Chile has released what is the most complete map of the cold gas in the Milky Way galaxy ever seen, reports the European Southern Observatory. The map, which is a series of images shot by three different telescopes, marks the completion of the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL).

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com 

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We’d traveled nearly an hour from our hotel in central Moscow before turning off the highway, down a side street, and onto a gravel road headed toward what appeared to be the middle of nowhere. The minibus, crowded with foreign journalists, crawled up a small hill. There, all by itself at the edge of vast green field, stood a small wooden shack. “Startup Village” was written on its side.

Image: Skolkovo's first building—the "Hypercube." (Reuters/Maxim Shemetov) 

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My friend Ian Hathaway has a Brookings paper out on startup accelerator programs in the US. Here is a summary of the current state of play:

In terms of their geography, accelerator programs are unsurprisingly concentrated in the well-known technology startup hubs and major cities of San Francisco-Silicon Valley, Boston-Cambridge, and New York. These three regions account for about 40 percent of all accelerators in the United States, and almost two-thirds of accelerator-funded deals between 2005 and 2015.

Image: https://www.aei.org 

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For many small businesses to thrive, they need access to capital.  A promising business must be able to find financing to grow their business. If you do not have sufficient cash on hand you must go elsewhere. Typically SMEs start with the proprietor using their own resources and then, from there, you go to friends, crowdfunding, Angels, VCs, banks, non-bank finance etc.

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/ 

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SUZANNAH WEISS

Who comes to your mind when you think of a tech entrepreneur? Based on what we see in the media, chances are you pictured Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, or another white man. Women and minority entrepreneurs aren't the ones you normally hear about. (If you doubt me, do a quick Google search of "famous tech entrepreneurs.") But that doesn't mean they're not out there.

 

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sneakers

Adam Grant, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, had a hit on his hands with his first book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, a look at how generosity can drive professional success. With his second book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, published earlier this month, he questions conventional wisdom about what makes a successful innovator. Over the course of his research, which involved studying and interviewing innovators in different fields, reading up on the history of creative thinkers and analyzing various social science studies, he reached a number of suprising findings. 

 

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sorry

Yes, I am an entrepreneur and I have missed weddings of distant relatives and sometimes close ones as well. Yes, I am an entrepreneur and I have not attended birthday parties of college buddies and of their children. Yes, I am an entrepreneur and I have cancelled movie plans and outdoor trips with family and friends.

 

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Maynard Webb

Part of the Series “The Age of Entrepreneurship”

The workplace is hugely different today from the one in which I started my career. And it’s vastly different from just a few years ago. First, we have to contend with the fact that most young people don’t want to work for companies; they want to start companies. Generation Y is said to be the most entrepreneurial generation ever and MBAs from Stanford prefer to work for smaller companies or start-ups—places with an entrepreneurial culture, with structures they describe as “flat” and “nonhierarchical.” Then, once these companies do get them in the door, it’s with the understanding that they might not stay very long. 

 

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question

It’s a good time to be in the specialty foods business. Retail sales in the United States were worth over $85 billion in 2014 and, overall, $42 billion in sales came from mainstream stores like Target or Costco. Some of these specialty foods can be found in stores from Alaska to West Virginia. Others never make it farther than their local farmers market. But there’s one thing they all have in common — they were started by real people who had an idea for a business and made it happen.

 

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Ian Khan

With so much innovation going on around us, funding the cause is one of the top priorities of any entrepreneur. With popular crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and many others, entrepreneurs, inventors, designers and fanatical believers of their products have created a new niche of raising funds to make their dreams a reality. As opposed to traditional financing and even newer financial models that include Venture capital, this is the world of crowdfunding.

 

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A New Zealand man behind an ambitious crowdfunding campaign that raised millions of dollars to buy a privately-owned South Island beach said Friday he was stunned at its success. ADVERTISING Duane Major's attempt to take Awaroa beach out of private hands and make it a national park quickly went viral, attracting 40,000 donations to raise a total of NZ$2.3 million (US$1.6 million).

Image: Awaroa beach is accessible only by boat or helicopter Photo: AFP 

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surfer

John John Florence of Hawaii won the Quicksilver in Memory of Eddie Aikau surf contest. The 23-year-old won 301 out of a possible 400 points by riding waves of up to 60-feet during the competition in Oahu Thursday. (Additional reporting by The Associated Press)

 

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toothbrush

Knowledge@Wharton: What does innovation look like at Colgate-Palmolive?

Jenny Gomez: Innovation at Colgate is primarily product-driven, given the business model that we’re in and the history of the organization. We classify innovation into four key areas.

The first two are about serving the market that we’re in — building and maintaining the engine of the company. Core innovation (reflects) the type of things we do just to stop us from declining — changes in design; if it’s a licensed character, moving onto the next one; or bringing out a new flavor.

 

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Think You Know Rainbows Look Again Slide Show Scientific American

FOGBOW Sunlight shining through fog gives rise to a white bow. Fog drops are at least an order of size smaller than raindrops. Rather than splitting the colors into well-defined bands, the small drops create much broader bows that overlap and merge into a ghostlike arc. Only the lens-focusing effect of the drop's surface remains distinct, maintaining the high-intensity white bow. Photo: Courtesy of Christopher Michel on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com 

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feedback

Job interviews can feel more like a stylized ritual than a normal conversation. Esquire writer and journalist Cal Fussman, who’s interviewed scores of people from Mikhail Gorbachev to Jeff Bezos to Dr. Dre, gives us his advice, from how to build trust with a subject to getting an honest answer to a tough question.

 

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team

Campbell, the food company best known for its soups, is investing $125 million in a venture fund to help finance food startups, according to the Wall Street Journal. Other large consumer companies are doing the same. They share a motive: Growth is increasingly hard to come by, so large companies are increasingly looking to entrepreneurs to help them find it.

 

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While most successful careers and businesses require a certain amount of risk, few business leaders would likely compare themselves to high-stakes poker players or BASE jumpers plummeting off a cliff. But these professional risk takers may have more in common with you than you think, says science journalist Kayt Sukel, author of the new book The Art of Risk: The New Science of Courage, Caution, and Chance.

Image: Richard Schneider via Wikimedia Commons 

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