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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.

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Transporting that futon from the car, up the building steps and into your dorm room – that will be tough. Leaving the comfort of home and family for a campus full of strangers in what is likely your biggest life milestone so far – that won't be easy. Taking Harvard University's Math 55 class, deemed on the school website as, "probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country" – that may be a bit of a challenge for those who sign up.

But being healthy in college? That doesn't have to be so difficult. You can do it; here's your guide.

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Do you want to help change the face of the Maryland Biohealth Community? Are you an experienced entrepreneur itching to work with disruptive technologies and innovative individuals to push them towards being the next big startup?

BioHealth Innovation, Maryland's youngest innovation intermediary wants to put you in the right place to make this happen. We need an experienced individual to to lead our Health IT initiative as our Health IT Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR).

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APPLICATIONS FOR THE 2014 PIPELINE FELLOWSHIP ARE NOW OPEN. TO STAY UPDATED ON EVENTS NEAR YOU, PLEASE CLICK HERE. 

Every year, Pipeline accepts roughly 10 entrepreneurs into our membership – entrepreneurs ready for the next step in their company’s growth and for their own improvement. We focus on the entrepreneur’s leadership and skill development – not just their company growth. Our hope is that our work with each Fellow will help build the skills and networks needed over a lifetime as an entrepreneur – and over multiple ventures.

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Jared Bernstein’s areas of expertise include federal and state economic and fiscal policies, income inequality and mobility, trends in employment and earnings, international comparisons, and the analysis of financial and housing markets.

I usually find economist Robert Shiller’s commentaries resonant and insightful, but this one seemed more confusing than enlightening.  The thrust of the piece is the concern that government activities to promote innovation can just as easily stifle it.

The piece introduces the notion of corporatism, from a new book by Ed Phelps.  What means “corporatism”? It’s:

…a political philosophy in which economic activity is controlled by large interest groups or the government. Once corporatism takes hold in a society…people don’t adequately appreciate the contributions and the travails of individuals who create and innovate. An economy with a corporatist culture can copy and even outgrow others for a while…but, in the end, it will always be left behind. Only an entrepreneurial culture can lead.

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Some observers have warned that the rapid depreciation of the Japanese yen could spark a currency war, particularly with neighbour South Korea whose exporters have made significant inroads against Japanese exporters in the past decade.

However, it is worthwhile noting that although the yen has weakened significantly from its position 12 months ago, it is still trading above levels seen six to seven years ago.

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Innovation doesn’t come easily to most large companies. Yet some big players in nearly every industry are able to turn out one successful new product after another.

Take consumer goods. Unilever, already a leader in the category, launched more than 10 times as many new products in 2012 as it did a few years ago. Unilever’s average value per project increased 75% over the past few years while time to market decreased between 25% and 50%. The company is quick to adapt new products to consumer tastes when necessary. For example, an initiative in its Hindustan Unilever unit encourages employees to buy new products at steep discounts and then provide quick feedback, thus acting as in-house beta testers.

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While innovation happens, we need it to happen much more often

WE can all certainly appreciate that one of the most difficult of things to teach – and to learn – is without doubt innovation, the ability to do things differently from how it was done before to bring about beneficial change for a person, organisation or country.

It’s almost a state of mind, an attitude which encourages the creative process in solving problems by looking at things from different angles and taking unconventional but effective measures in a holistic manner to bring about desired change.

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Program delivers business innovation learning beyond the Stanford campus to global participants for the first time, with plans for Europe and China

BANGALORE, INDIA — Stanford Graduate School of Business started its first part-time Stanford Ignite certificate program in innovation and entrepreneurship in Bangalore August 10. Aimed at nonbusiness technical professionals, it employs Stanford GSB professors on the ground as well as faculty beamed in from Silicon Valley by high-definition educational technology. The course will teach innovators in India how to formulate, develop, and commercialize their ideas.

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Entrepreneurs start and grow companies in spite of government. But Chris Schroeder’s new book Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East reveals a quiet, unnoticed uprising in the midst of front page uncertainty surrounding the region after the Arab Spring. The entrepreneurs leading the revolution illustrated in his book have not been waiting for government direction and resources. To the contrary, they have become the leaders.

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Andrew Duff, Member of European Parliament

With Britain debating whether to leave the European Union, one UK Member of the European Parliament says the argument isn’t just about trade and money – it’s also about science and innovation. 

Andrew Duff, a prominent Europhile from the UK region that includes Cambridge University, says the future of UK science and innovation is dependent on Britain staying in the EU – and, conversely, the rest of Europe needs the UK to make EU science stronger.

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Republican restrictionists keep talking about the fiscal costs of immigration, but they miss the overriding economic benefits. Consider how immigrants are promoting growth and innovation. A new study by the National Foundation for American Policy and the National Venture Capital Association finds that immigrants have helped launch a third of venture-backed companies that have gone...

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One Man s Life One Second at a Time VIDEO

With 86,400 seconds in every day, at least one must be worth remembering. That was one young filmmaker's philosophy when he decided to string together one second of footage each day for the past eight months.

Matt Skuta, a 21-year-old film and media studies major at the University of Oklahoma, took up the project on a whim last December. He was inspired by a similarly-conceptualized video he discovered through Reddit. Eight months later, Skuta posted the above video to YouTube.

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There were days when students studied day and night to get through the entrance examinations and test, scale through group discussions and successfully grab the fat-salaried job in interviews. However, the brink of the recession plaguing the Indian economy has changed this scenario with the disappointing declaration by many IT recruiters of a slash in recruitments. Som Mittal, the President of Nasscom confirmed earlier this month that will indeed decline 22% to 1.8 lakh this year.

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Nothing changes faster these days than science and medical advice. That's why, when it comes to your general health, it's hard to know what information is right, wrong, and somewhere in between.

To find some of the most common health questions that people have, we turned to a book called "Your Health: What Works, What Doesn't" published by Reader's Digest in June 2010.

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Neil Roseman is downright tired of hearing Silicon Valley companies say they “hire only the best and the brightest.” No matter how many times they say it, most still make decisions based on gut feel, basic credentials, GPAs, ivy league educations, flashy company names - even SAT scores. Roseman objects. As the former Technology VP for both Amazon and Zynga, he’s interviewed hundreds of people and believes every phase of the process needs to be meticulously designed to drill deep into skill sets, actual accomplishments, culture fit and leadership potential.

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For years, the cool kids in Silicon Valley have been going on about the "Internet of Things." The "Internet of Things," they'll tell you, is a massive new opportunity in which all the stuff all around you will get fitted with Internet-enabled radio chips and chat wirelessly with each other and your phones, computers, and other gadgets.

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News Flash: People are borrowing money to go to college, long considered the path to professional achievement, and then finding that the loans block their upward mobility. Ironically, student loans may be harming the people they were designed to help and in the process taking a lot of oomph out of the economy.

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Many people in tech believe that VCs slow the pace of their investing during the summer, especially in August. We wanted to verify this using the CrunchBase dataset by comparing deals over the past few years.

We graphed total deals by month in CrunchBase from January 2010 to July 2013, but there was no apparent slump that occurred during the summer months. We did however, discover an interesting trend in January — a New Year’s resolution-like phenomenon: There is a sudden spike in total deals in January, with a sudden drop in deals in February.

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Venture capital funding trends continue to be a good-news, bad-news situation.

During the second quarter of the year, VCs nationwide invested $6.7 billion in 913 deals -- both upticks compared to the first quarter. That's according to the latest MoneyTree Report, prepared by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers using data from Thomson Reuters.

But hearken back to 2012, and the picture looks quite a bit different -- especially in the Bay Area, which traditionally leads the nation in VC funding.

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