Arizona State University and Mayo Clinic announced today that Mayo will become a technology transfer participant to join Arizona Furnace, the startup accelerator that supports entrepreneurial teams using designated research discoveries and intellectual property as the basis for new companies. As ASU and its current partners prepare to launch the second application season for AZ Furnace, Mayo Clinic will provide access to high potential technologies in their extensive intellectual property vault. These technologies, as well as those from ASU, Northern Arizona University and Dignity Health in Arizona, will be made available to entrepreneurs interested in using those discoveries to create products, services and new companies.

As part of its mandate to support Canadian entrepreneurs, BDC Venture Capital announced today it has allocated $135 million in new capital to direct venture investments in innovative healthcare companies. That brings its total direct commitment to the sector to $270 million. Recognizing a massive and growing market opportunity, the BDC Venture Capital Healthcare Fund will broaden its investment strategy and invest in technology, products and services that aim to dramatically improve global healthcare productivity, efficiency and patient outcomes.

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Instead of calculating carbon footprints, this new measurement collects all the resources a country uses--even if they're imported from abroad. The results? Wealthy countries that seemed to be slowing their environmental impact are actually as bad as ever.

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DreamIt Ventures is pleased to announce the launch of DreamIt Health Baltimore, a partnership with The Johns Hopkins University and BioHealth Innovation, Inc. to recruit, invest in, and speed the growth and success of a select group of early-stage health IT companies. The program comes on the heels of a successful health IT program in Philadelphia also built on strong industry partnerships that give participants access and advantages typically out-of-reach to startups.

"The key to making health care more accessible is innovation, and the most fertile focus for health care innovation is in acquiring, storing, analyzing and sharing information," said Ronald J. Daniels, President of Johns Hopkins. "This accelerator project will have important implications for the future use of information as we use technology to find solutions for the most pressing health problems of our day. Just as important, it sets up Baltimore to become even more central to the health care information revolution through the rapid validation of solutions."

How do fish swim in schools, effortlessly coordinating their every move? The answer appears to be ingrained in their genes.

The genetic basis underlying the complex, social behavior of schooling is revealed in two studies published Sept. 12 in the journal Current Biology. The studies suggest that schooling is not a learned behavior, and instead show it relies on several regions of the fish genome.

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My company is approaching its tenth anniversary. This important milestone has prompted me to look back at my decade as an entrepreneur. Founding and running a company has been the ride of my life, but it has had its fair share of ups and down. In retrospect, I would have done a few things differently if I had known better. Here are some things I’d wish I’d known earlier.

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The rise in popularity of modern connected computing can be traced to the late 1980s and early 1990s. The personal computer and later the World Wide Web combined to create an unprecedented explosion in the availability of information and the ability to immediately connect to our fellow humans. 

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If genius is close to madness, then works of genius require working like a mad man, woman, or muppet.

As Amanda Green writes on Mental Floss--drawing from Mason Curry's Daily Rituals: How Artists Work--some of history's most creative people had the most peculiar workflows.

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Let's face it: Anyone can own a business. Building and running a successful company is something else entirely.

We certainly need more employers, but business ownership isn't for everyone. If you've been out of work and your dream and desire is to become an entrepreneur, here are some things to consider:

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Would you believe me if I told you that Grand Theft Auto V cost $250 million to create? In fact, it cost more to create this video game than The Avengers (2012 movie), Avatar (2009 movie) and Toy Story 3 (2010 movie). That’s right … A video game that costs more than an actual movie.

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The innovation system described in The Innovation Master Plan provides a comprehensive approach to a difficult, challenging, and significant problem for organizations, the problem of how to manage innovation in the face of excruciating change.

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Is it possible to identify the best innovators in an organization? Most companies know who their best performers are and this is true for almost every critical initiative except innovation. A current research initiative from Jeffery Phillips is delving deeper into the possibilities to identify the potential of an individual to be a good innovator based on shared traits. The goal is to develop a simple assessment tool that any corporation can use to identify the most talented potential innovators on its team, or to use to identify and hire new people with innovation capabilities.

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We are living in an increasingly litigious age. The number of lawsuits brought against the British National Health Service has doubled in the last four years. The fear of litigation and the real possibility of been found guilty of medical malpractice are inhibiting hospitals and doctors from trying promising new ideas in the treatment of deadly illnesses.

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There are probably at least four pairs of shoes in your closet right now. Consider yourself lucky, because more than 300 million people in developing nations do not even own one pair.

The team behind Unifold is hoping to change that in the near future. Conceptualized by Pratt Institute students Haratio Yuxin Han and Kevin Crowley, Unifold is a shoe made from one piece of recyclable material that takes shape by folding over the cut-out pattern.

Every August for the past 500 years, German festival goers come to the Bavarian forest to see a performance of the traditional folk play Drachenstich, or “Slaying of the Dragon.” Naturally, you’d expect there to be a dragon in this performance — except currently, the part is being played by an enormous animatronic robot that spits real fire.

1. The high cost of getting the first customer and the even higher cost of getting the product wrong.

2. Long technology development cycles.

3. The limited number of people with an appetite for the risks inherent in founding or working at a start-up.

4. The structure of the venture capital industry, in which a small number of firms each needed to invest big sums in a handful of start-ups to have a chance at significant returns.

The potential of storytelling as a research tool for enhancing the understanding of knowledge creation, acquisition and conversion into innovation and innovative business activities is the methodological underpinning of this book's narrative approach. The subtitle comes from Lynceus, one of the Argonauts who accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece, who was said to have excellent sight. Among the various interpretations of the meaning of the Fleece, one version highlights the importance of discovery to innovation by voyaging to 'terrae incognitae' (unknown lands). This book is a narrative of a fictional voyage to the 'terra incognita' of Innoland – the island of innovation and other mental travels that make sense of events and actions which spur innovation.

IT’S easy to be depressed about America these days. We’ve got messes aplenty abroad and the Republican-dominated House of Representatives is totally paralyzed. Indeed, the G.O.P.-led House has become a small-minded, parochial place, where collaboration is considered treason, where science is considered a matter of opinion, where immigration is considered a threat, where every solution is a suboptimal compromise enacted at midnight and where every day we see proof of the theory that America is a country that was “designed by geniuses so that it could be run by idiots.”

Six organizations were named winners of SSTI's 2013 Excellence in TBED award, serving as national models for states and regions investing in science, technology and innovation to grow their economies and create high-paying jobs. Among the winners, a newer program was selected as the Most Promising TBED Initiative, recognized for creative use of existing resources and strong public-private sector support to spur entrepreneurial activity.

"The geographic and programmatic diversity of this year's winners, particularly in the populations they serve, is impressive," said Dan Berglund, SSTI president and CEO. "This group, along with our past winners, has demonstrated growth strategies that are replicable and producing tangible results worthy of emulation to improve the nation's competitiveness."