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.
Nutty things are happening in biotech. Irrational exuberance has returned. Generalist investors with lots of money are suddenly buying these stocks first and asking questions later. Companies can fire off meaningless press releases, and be rewarded. I heard a big-time money manager talk the other day about a recent biotech IPO being one of the “best performers” in the market. It had a two-week track record, and had done nothing fundamental to earn its tag as a “best performer.”
So it turns out that, contrary to what your SAT scores told you, we can actually get smarter day by day--depending on what we do with our days. As Annie Murphy Paul reports, intelligence isn't set in stone--it's fluid.
This fluidity comes from all sorts of things: the way we think about ourselves, the expertise we develop, the people we surround ourselves with. In short, the way we live our lives shapes our minds, in some seriously mysterious ways.
Image Courtesy of Master isolated images / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
When a thousand CEOs were surveyed about their half-full/half-empty outlooks, more than 80% of them were rated as "very optimistic." Which could be a problem if you care about productivity and the performance of a company.
As Wharton psychologist Adam Grant argues at LinkedIn that optimism--otherwise thought to be as sweetly American as apple pie--can turn tart in any number of ways.
Image Courtesy of zirconicusso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In a perfect--or at least more rational world--the most qualified people would rise fastest. But new research suggests that just appearing to be competent is as important to getting ahead.
How so? Think about why brainstorming has a loudmouth problem: The person with the best ideas isn't the one who gets heard most. Rather, it's the most assertive person--unless you find a way to correct it. Since business is done by people, and people aren't always totally rational, some irrational things happen. Like deferring to the most confident person in the room and allowing a power dynamic to develop from there.
Image Courtesy of pakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Hunting sales whales "It may be best not to go for the home-run account right away," suggests Michelle Fish of Integra Staffing, "because you might not be ready for the size and scope of their business, and you might not get another chance at them if you blow it. Sometimes it's better to get your feet wet with smaller accounts."
Image Courtesy of njaj / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
There's a lot you can do for your child with 99 dollars.
You can purchase 14 gallons of organic milk or 396 lollipops. You can give her 33 rides on the Ferris wheel at the state fair, or you can get him a couple of violin lessons. You could put the money in a savings account, you could buy her her very own LeapFrog LeapPad Explorer digital learning tablet, or you could buy enough pizzas to feed all of her friends on the block. So many options, so many choices.
Image: Fastcompany.com
Investments in electronic health records, tools to help hospitals absorb physician practices anda group working with hospital systems to help them set up their own insurance plans. Those three health IT companies helped drive venture capital investment in the software sector, which hit a 12-year high in the third quarter. Medical device and biotechnology companies collectively marked their lowest investment for a nine month period since 2005, according to the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. It is based on data from Thomson Reuters.
Image Courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I have a full time job working at an extremely unique nonprofit that serves as a donor advocate and sell side analyst to promote a Practical Cure for type 1 diabetes. And I have a part-time job curating and editing content for a super awesome (I’m not biased or anything) entrepreneur website. And I edit/contribute to an online magazine dedicated to being conscious and helping people incorporate giving back into their lifestyles. And I started business school part-time to get my MBA. And I’m training for a half marathon (and just completed a Tough Mudder this past weekend!). Oh and I try to be a good friend, sister, coworker, and employee too.
Image Courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
There are many ways of dividing up America: Red state, Blue state, Rust Belt, Bible Belt, Sun Belt, Stroke Belt...the list could go on. We're defined by our regional economies, voting patterns, stereotypes, geographies, and a lot else besides.
These maps do something different: They look at America in psychological terms. They assess people across five key personality traits--openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism--and show us where the distribution falls.
Image: fastcoexist.com
On Tuesday, Cupertino's city council unanimously voted to green light Apple's new sprawling campus, essentially the last major hurdle for the company before it begins plans for construction later this year. While much has been made of how meticulously designed Apple's new spaceship-style headquarters is--"We've designed it with the same care and attention to detail as we do with all Apple products," Apple's real estate head Dan Whisenhunt recently said--little has been revealed about the facility's internal design and purpose--an area ripe for influence from the company's latest high-profile hire, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts.
As we approach DCBKK, we wanted to have a little chat about our predictions for the future of business as we know it. There’s a shift that’s slowly happening as we progress and we’re starting to see a massive rise in the growth of location independent, professionally run businesses.
Image Courtesy of Victor Habbick / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The death of Jody Sherman was a wake-up call to entrepreneurs everywhere. This tragedy opened the door for company founders everywhere to have a serious discussion with themselves and each other about the toll that starting a company takes on an individual.
If you add up all the startup related events listed on the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale, you get a score of more than 100 which means starting a company could be more stressful than divorce or even the death of a spouse.
Image Courtesy of chanpipat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Jim Clark, former Stanford University professor and founder of several well-known Silicon Valley companies, has donated $60 million to support interdisciplinary research at Stanford.
Clark announced the donation earlier this month at an opportune time and location: the 10th anniversary of the James H. Clark Center for Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, a building he funded with a $90 million gift in 1999. Bio-X, a cross-disciplinary research initiative that focuses on biology and medicine, is housed within the Clark Center.
Image Courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
There are those of us who, due to various gaps in talent and ability, won’t make it in the NBA or win a Nobel Prize in math, no matter how hard we try. Yet we all have the potential to be successful at just about everything we want.
With Halloween right around the corner, don't stress over your lack of costume ideas. We've got you covered.
If there's one thing we know at Mashable, it's technology. Fortunately, we also know a little about costume design*..
Image: Mashable.com
Starbucks’ 95,000 baristas have a competitor. It doesn’t need sleep. It’s precise in a way that a human could never be. It requires no training. It can’t quit. It has memorized every one of its customers’ orders. There’s never a line for its perfectly turned-out drinks.
It doesn’t require health insurance.
Image Courtesy of Sura Nualpradid / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A few weeks into the fall semester, Bruce Maas, chief information officer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, received an e-mail from his chancellor: A junior living in campus housing was frustrated with the wireless network, which he said often left him unable to connect to the Internet. Mr. Maas, who describes the university's wireless capacity as "very robust," asked his networking staff to investigate.
Image Courtesy of Naypong / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A new strain of economic thought is emerging to explain how societies can grow sustainably. It’s not just coming from the public, which has already expressed discontent with the status quo through demonstrations worldwide. And it’s not just coming from business leaders, such as Richard Branson, who co-founded a group called the B Team to reset the values of corporate management. In their own quiet way, academic researchers in the field of innovation have also engaged this issue.
Image Courtesy of renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
A new treatment for thrombosis, one of the first commercial applications for stem cells, and single-step ‘smart’ microcapsules which could deliver sustained release of drugs for up to six months are just some of the technologies being developed by new companies based on Cambridge research, with funding support from the University seed funds.
Image: www.enterprise.cam.ac.u
A new £50 million investment business has been launched to support the development of University spin-outs and other early-stage technology companies in the Cambridge Cluster.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
