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.
Along with other back-to-school supplies, the University of Maryland's Eastern Shore campus has purchased 200 bulletproof whiteboards for its professors.
The product, sold for $300 each, can be used for their main purpose as portable writing tablets during lectures and also serve as a shield in the event of gunfire, according to a press release from the university.
As part of our initiative to provide thought leadership in the PE and VC industries, we have developed a series of Public Market Equivalent Indexes, designed to provide a comprehensive and forward-thinking picture of performance. These brand new indexes and several other metrics are featured in the recently released quarterly Global Private Equity and Venture Capital Benchmarking Report. Sponsored by R.R. Donnelley and powered by data from the PitchBook Platform report, this report examines more than a decade of global PE and VC fund performance.
As the sea churned all around us, we leaned over the edge of the boat to get a better look. Dozens of dorsal fins cruised here and there; somewhat menacing half-moon tails thrashed about; and, now and then, a colossal gaping mouth breached the water's surface. The creatures' size was daunting; their beauty captivating. Scores of white spots and faint stripes decorated their gray-blue backs—patterns that evoked ribbons and specks of light weaving and glinting on a rippling sea.
On a cloudless morning in late summer, five college students climbed from the sandy shallows into the open hull of a panga, a small skiff powered by an outboard motor, and departed the fishing village of Bahía de Los Ángeles, on the Sea of Cortez. Ordinarily, they would have gone out on the water with me—I was teaching their field course in ecology and evolutionary biology—but this was their day off, and they had hired a local to take them fishing.
Image Courtesy of worradmu / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Freedom… independence… money… and fame. Reasons why you’ve always dreamed about becoming a successful entrepreneur, right?
Then why do you feel like this dream is just a distant island over the horizon, which doesn’t get any closer, no matter how hard you’re struggling against the mighty waves of the ocean?
It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
Image Courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
We don't have a skills gap. We have a thinking gap.
In a recent survey, 95% of over 4,700 fully-employed and passive candidates said they'd be willing to have a serious discussion about a better career opportunity. Another smaller survey earlier this year indicated that more than 75% of these same people would take a modest increase in compensation for a significant career move. Unfortunately, it’s hard to ever have the discussion, since recruiters and candidates alike both establish inflexible conditions (e.g., compensation, title, company, location, skills) before the serious career discussion can ever begin.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Few are more excited about Lego's new Mindstorms sets rolling out next month than Silicon Valley engineers. Many of them were drawn to the tech sector by the flagship kits that came on the market in 1998, introducing computerized movement to the traditional snap-together toy blocks and allowing the young innovators to build their first robots. Now, 15 years later, those robot geeks are entrepreneurs and designers, and the colorful plastic bricks have an outsized influence in their lives.
Over the last 30 years I have served a large range of organizations as either a director or a trustee with the specific role of helping them exploit IT for competitive advantage. From my experience, I believe that there are four highly interdependent categories of contributions the CIO and IT function should make.
1. Generating Top-Line Growth
I'm often struck by how many articles exclusively focus on new or emerging technology and their productivity or efficiency effects. Every discussion on the role of IT and CIOs should start with the question: "What are the potential uses of this technology that will guarantee we stay in business?" This question attempts to tease out an unconscious assumption that "we will always be in business." (Note that the high-profile C-suite executives at firms like Borders, Jessops, and Bank of New England had large IT budgets, but no longer have a company to make more efficient today.)
Image Courtesy of pakorn / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
In South Florida, startup and early-stage funding still makes the news — and there has been a run of it this month.
Some startups are finding their angels in less conventional places. For instance, Mas Equity Partners is the new $1 million funder behind Sportsmanias, a news platform for sports fans. It’s the first tech-startup investment for Mas Equity Partners, which typically invests mainly in later-stage energy companies and also in banking-related businesses, said Jorge Mas, chairman of Mastec.
Image Courtesy of David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
According to a new study, Budweiser is the number one beer that leads to injuries that result in a visit to the ER. The study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that 15 percent of those who wind up in the ER due to alcohol fueled injuries were partaking of Budweiser. Steel Reserve Malt Liquor came in second with 14.7 percent. Then comes Colt 45 (also a malt liquor), Bud Ice (a malt liquor), Bud Light, and Barton’s, a cheap Vodka.
Researchers believe that due to Budweiser’s relatively high alcohol content, 5 percent, overconsumption of the beverage is nearly as likely to lead to injury as overconsumption of Malt liquor beverages which are also very high in alcohol content. Budweiser contains the highest percentage of alcohol among the nation’s five top selling beers.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, the most supreme of supreme court justices, wrote that the Constitution of the United States is "an experiment, as all of life is an experiment."
So if he can have such a respectful, experimental attitude to the most significant document to the law of the country he served, why can't we have a similar sense of experimentation in our own lives?
We've talked about this at a macro scale: that it can be useful to think of your career as a course of "grand experiments," in which you can test your strengths and tastes and capabilities in the multi-trajectory odyssey that is a contemporary career path. But as Zen Habits blogger Leo Babauta notes, you can iterate on the micro level, too.
Image Courtesy of akeeris / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
There is no doubt that more and more entrepreneurs are scaling the Internet for opportunities that will make them rich in the shortest amount of time possible. Getting rich quick is one of the most prevalent misconceptions that business owners and developers had in mind when thinking about online entrepreneurship. It could because of the minimal requirement in terms of start-up capital or less demand on technical expertise or low-cost operation. Often, the essence of finding fulfillment in their chosen business industry or market has to take a backseat for the idea of building ROIs in a lightning-fast manner. Little these entrepreneurs know that when it comes to a longer lasting business, there is more to success and fulfillment than just counting returns on investment. If your aim is to do business online is focused solely on getting rich quick, be prepared to fail.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
After three decades of weight gains, adult obesity rates remained flat in the last year in every state except Arkansas. Louisiana and Mississippi had the highest obesity rates – more than 34 percent of the adult population in both states was obese -- while Colorado had the lowest rate at just over 20 percent. The report, titled “F As In Fat,” found the poorer and less educated the population, the higher the rate of obesity.
When I began as CEO at the Creative Class, I told my team members that I was not their boss. Early on, I realized the value of changing my vocabulary. Subordinate, employee, and staff became colleague and team, because ultimately that’s what we all are in the workplace.
“Please don’t call me boss, don’t send me approvals like I’m your boss, don’t ask for approval to go on vacation. There is no vacation request form,” I said. “We are all colleagues. You are getting paid for your expertise. I am not going to do performance reviews or expect status reports. It is up to you to manage your own workload, to manage the clients, and to deliver a quality service.”
Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It’s also no surprise that it’s the Nr.1 value for Buffer’s culture, if you see our slidedeck about it. So naturally we are obsessed with it.
I would love to be happier, as I’m sure most people would, so I thought it would be interesting to find some ways to become a happier person that are actually backed up by science. Here are ten of the best ones I found.
Image Courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
This week Facebook’s ban-bot went berserk; Github went down; and all Google services collapsed for a few minutes, taking 40% of the Internet with them. Just another week on the Internet, then. We love our centralized services, until they let us down.
Bruce Sterling calls them “the Stacks”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft. In his most recent (always riveting) State of the World conversation, he wrote:
In 2012 it made less and less sense to talk about “the Internet,” “the PC business,” “telephones,” “Silicon Valley,” or “the media,” and much more sense to just study Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image.
Image Courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Coastal flooding in cities around the world could cause damage totaling $1 trillion annually by the year 2050 if no mitigating steps are taken, new research suggests.
Almost all cities facing the worst damage are in Asia and North America, the study showed. Three American cities — New York, New Orleans and Miami — are at particularly high risk of damage, according to the study, published today (Aug. 18) in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Image Courtesy of Witthaya Phonsawat / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The passenger pigeon, the dodo and the woolly mammoth are just a few of the species wiped off the Earth by changing environments and human activities.
Now, advances in biotechnology could enable scientists to bring extinct animals back from the grave. But critics argue the practice would only hinder conservation efforts, by resurrecting creatures that could not survive in the wild.
In the past two years, many states seeking to move from economic crisis to recovery have updated their economic development strategies and launched new development initiatives. Those states have generally focused on the building blocks of their economies— entrepreneurs and innovation, workforce, investment climate, support for businesses in expanding their markets, and a stronger connection between universities and the state’s economy. Just as importantly, they have focused on blending those elements together to increase their state’s rate of economic growth and provide their state’s citizens with more and better paying jobs.
Six important trends have emerged as governors have updated economic development strategies and intro- duced new initiatives in the past two years:
