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.
Most of your work communications are probably over email. You likely email your colleagues and clients more frequently than you speak to them on the phone or meet with them in person.
Unlike face-to-face communication, it can be more difficult to effectively convey important aspects of your personality, attitudes, and style in email.
A Hong Kong VC fund has just appointed an algorithm to its board.
Deep Knowledge Ventures, a firm that focuses on age-related disease drugs and regenerative medicine projects, says the program, called VITAL, can make investment recommendations about life sciences firms by poring over large amounts of data.
This spring Jason Mendelson and I taught a class called Venture Deals with the Kauffman Fellows Academy. It was a blast so we’ve decided to do it again.
KFA uses NovoEd as their platform. Jason and I spent two days recording videos around our Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist explaining each section and going deeper with Q&A. The course is a MOOC that includes significant Q&A that I participated in throughout the course, along with a weekly Google Hangout covering different topics.
In 2011, researchers at the MIT Media Lab debuted Place Pulse, a website that served as a kind of "hot or not" for cities. Given two Google Street View images culled from a select few cities including New York City and Boston, the site asked users to click on the one that seemed safer, more affluent, or more unique. The result was an empirical way to measure urban aesthetics.
Now, that data is being used to predict what parts of cities feel the safest. StreetScore, a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab's Macro Connections and Camera Culture groups, uses an algorithm to create a super high-resolution map of urban perceptions. The algorithmically generated data could one day be used to research the connection between urban perception and crime, as well as informing urban design decisions.
The question keeps educators up at night: Do free, massive open online courses cannibalize enrollment at traditional schools? The results are finally in, part of a new study co-authored by Wharton professor Ezekiel J. Emanuel. Rather than poaching traditional students, MOOCs reach new audiences that business schools, at least, want to target.
In this Knowledge@Wharton interview, Emanuel notes that “it doesn’t seem that MOOCs are undermining traditional business schools, but may be complementing them, enriching them and providing a great opportunity to [engage] other diverse student bodies.”
The outlook in China for private equity (PE) investors to earn acceptable returns remains uncertain following the recent reopening of the initial public offering (IPO) market after a 15-month freeze. Wharton experts predict tough days ahead for PE investors in the country as price wars for attractive investment opportunities threaten to erode the outsized returns PE firms typically seek.
Initial reports, nevertheless, look favorable. The 48 IPOs listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges in the first quarter posted record returns, averaging 54% above listing price compared to 9% for the rest of the world, according to a recent Bloomberg report.
Iceland’s genetic homogeneity has given scientists a wealth of information about human DNA as it is passed down through generations. Then there’s India, which “is like a thousand Icelands,” says Dmitri Mehlhorn, an investor in Bangalore-based Medgenome Labs. Medgenome has just raised $4 million to bring DNA sequencing and big-data analysis to India, Tim Hay reports for VentureWire. The deal follows other recent investments involving startups that collect, analyze or present genetic information about disease. Two weeks ago, Andreessen Horowitz and SV Angel joined other investors to provide a $2 million funding round to SolveBio, which is attempting to build a vast database of DNA variants that researchers can use as a tool in diagnosing and treating disease. About three weeks ago, Google Ventures provided the bulk of a $130 million funding round for Flatiron Health, which is building a DNA database and outfitting it to work with electronic medical records.
Immigration reform is a hot-button topic, one that’s complicated, far-reaching, and divisive. Unfortunately, the conversation about immigration often gets rendered down to a simplistic "us and them" continuum. But pulling back focus on the topic reminds us that almost all Americans are descended from immigrants; that in its early days, the country was built by the dreams and hard work of people who came from somewhere else.
ERIC KING, 30, of Northern Liberties, is founder and CEO of Grand Round Table, a startup on 3rd Street near Market that develops software to help doctors make complicated diagnoses. GRT, which launched in 2012, is getting the correct diagnoses about 70 percent of the time. The company, which was part of the first DreamIt Health accelerator in 2013, has three full-time employees and has raised $110,000 from the Wharton Venture Initiation Program and Ben Franklin Technology Partners.
As China prepares to squeeze in 350 million new urban residents over the new decade, the government will pave 5 billion square meters of new roads and build hundreds of new cities and towns. And as available land space gets smaller and smaller--especially near the bigger metropolitan regions where people really want to live--China may also start building cities on water.
First up: A new floating city designed by AT Design Office and the Chinese construction firm CCCC, slated to begin development on a pilot scale next year.
The University Economic Development Association (UEDA) is currently seeking nominations for its annual Awards of Excellence program, which recognizes cutting edge university-based economic development initiatives from across the country. The Awards of Excellence Program recognizes higher education institutions and their partners who are transforming their campuses into engines of economic prosperity through creative initiatives in five categories:
Far be it from me to criticize anyone’s skills in using a foreign language as my greatest challenge in getting out of college was the requirement to learn one. I did OK when we talked about French, Spanish or German culture and history—but those discussions were in English. The problem began when the instructor insisted that we try to talk in the other language. My brain immediately went numb. I used to sit in the very back of the class sweating bullets that the clock would finally tick down before the professor could call on me.
Image Courtesy of stockimages / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Raising big piles of venture capital doesn’t always guarantee success. In fact, it often puts more pressure on entrepreneurs to produce eye-popping returns for their investors. A much more desirable path is to raise a small amount of capital or no capital at all — and then produce a huge return. That keeps more of the ownership (and control) in the hands of the founding team. Here’s a look at 25 of the most capital-efficient companies over the past five years.
Image: http://www.geekwire.com/
UT System Innovation Framework 2014
Given the fact that UT System drives $2.5 billion in R&D expenditures (including federal, state, and private research grants and contracts); receives a U.S. patent every two days; signs a commercialization agreement every three days; and starts a new company every nine days - it plans to advance its discovery enterprise by improving the return on investment powered by university innovation. UT System Innovation Framework 2014 is expected to advance research collaboration and commercialization, including campus research and technology transfer programs.
Image: http://utfactsonline.wordpress.com/
People believe that weather conditions influence their everyday work life, but to date, little is known about how weather affects individual productivity. Most people believe that bad weather conditions reduce productivity. In this research, we predict and find just the opposite. Drawing on cognitive psychology research, we propose that bad weather increases individual productivity by eliminating potential cognitive distractions resulting from good weather. When the weather is bad, individuals may focus more on their work rather than thinking about activities they could engage in outside of work. We tested our hypotheses using both field and lab data. First, we use field data on employees’ productivity from a mid-size bank in Japan, which we then match with daily weather data to investigate the effect of bad weather conditions (in terms of precipitation, visibility, and temperature) on productivity. Second, we use a laboratory experiment to examine the psychological mechanism explaining the relationship between bad weather and increased productivity. Our findings support our proposed model and suggest that worker productivity is higher on bad rather than good weather days. We discuss the implications of our findings for workers and managers.
Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Editor's Note: In today's tech startup culture, it's widely understood that it's smarter to build a "minimum viable product" or MVP and get it to market quickly than to labor behind closed doors for years on an elaborate and feature-rich product that, in the end, nobody might really want.
But what if the MVP turns out to be too minimal? In the delightful two-minute video below, startup guru and Xconomist Steve Blank shares some insights about the true purpose of an MVP.
Start-up companies in Wisconsin now have a new way to raise capital.
A new state law lets entrepreneurs raise up to $2 million, from individuals via the internet. "Crowdfunding" allows each person to invest up to $10,000.
Tim Keane teaches at Marquette University.
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
David Deeble opened his suitcase and realized that his machete was missing. So was the plunger, the stuffed rabbit and the juggling pins — not to mention his clothes.
A comedic juggler for a cruise line, Mr. Deeble discovered six hours before the ship’s departure from Singapore that he had grabbed the wrong black wheeled bag on his way out of the airport.
Image: After an airport luggage mixup, Ric Fleisher, an entrepreneur, bought a bright blue bag. Some companies are developing digital tags for luggage that may help eliminate mixups. Credit Tina Fineberg for The New York Times
Does handwriting matter?
Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.
But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.
Image: Michael Mabry
The University of Pennsylvania announced the launch of its new Penn Center for Innovation Monday. It’s a reformulation of the university’s approach to engaging new ideas with the commercial and industrial sector. There are four main divisions of the just-announced initiative. There will be traditional technology transfer, corporate contracts, new venture creation and corporate alliance building, said John Swartley, the center’s head, who is also Penn’s associate vice provost for research.
Image: darren baker With the new Penn Center for Innovation, University of Pennsylvania is reforming its approach to engaging research with the commercial sector.
