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.
The innovation value of new solutions can be measured on the basis of 4 factors: performance, harmful effects, user ease and expense. Performance is about increasing value by “more of the good”, all other factors are about adding value by “reducing the bad”, harm, burden or cost. The figures below show some typical questions during a surfboard purchase, and a Value Equation analysis of the values in surfboard patents.
Image: http://www.innovationmanagement.se
We all have our favorite cities, and our subjective reasons for choosing them. They make us happy, keep us entertained, look beautiful at night. Whatever it is. The Cities In Motion Index doesn't care about that. It has objective data: 50 sets of it in all, covering every facet of urban life, from the economy and governance to technology and urban planning.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
When it comes to work perks, flexibility is one of our favorite nice-to-haves, whether that means occasionally telecommuting from home, working variable hours or being part of a job share. In fact, a 2013 LearnVest study found that more than half of us would prefer a flexible schedule.
But are employers actually meeting this growing request?
Image: http://www.fastcompany.com
If the thought of negotiating makes you weak in the knees (not in a good way), take note: It doesn’t need to hurt. In fact, there are several ways to make negotiation palatable and, dare we say, a more rewarding experience.
Whitney Johnson, cofounder of Rose Park Advisors, a Boston investment firm, and author of Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare To Dream, recently explored this topic for Harvard Business Review. Here are four suggestions to make your next negotiation experience more pleasant:
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
It’s the people struggling to make ends meet who often pay the biggest fees to financial services companies—and that includes immigrants sending money back home to their families.
They’re also rarely even on venture capital investors’ radar screens.
Michael Aleles is trying to change all that. His San Diego-based social enterprise Quippi , launched in December, has a fee-free international gift card initially focused on the $23 billion that consumers send back to Mexico from the U.S. every year.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
A RANGE of industry assistance programmes and commercialisation grants will cease to exist, under the 2014 Federal Budget.
Commercialisation Australia, the Innovation Investment Fund, Australian Industry Participation, Enterprise Solutions, Industry Innovations Councils, Enterprise Connect and Industry Innovation Precincts have all been abolished.
Annette Verschuren is not a fan of puck hogs. “If you don’t let people assist,” she says, “you don’t win the game.”
The game could be on ice, but for Ms. Verschuren, it’s usually in the boardroom. She believes that innovation is best achieved through teamwork – and that teams work best when members check their egos, but not their skills, at the door.
Image: http://www.theglobeandmail.com
The first time I tried out a smart watch with a touch screen, I quickly went from feeling excited to feeling clumsy. Tapping or swiping the small display on my wrist often failed to yield the response I expected. It might have been the quality of the screen, but it may have also been simply that the screen was too small and my fingers too big.
Touch screens have largely obliterated clickable keyboards and scrolling buttons or wheels on smartphones in favor of tapping, swiping, pinching, and flicking. Yet when it comes to smaller gadgets like smart watches, they’re not always the best way to access information, and other methods like voice recognition still aren’t that reliable either.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
If you’ve been drinking red wine for "health reasons," a new study might make you scramble for a new excuse.
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found no association between resveratrol — the popular antioxidant found in red wine, chocolate and other foods — and longevity.
New York is becoming a major tech hub. San Diego and Chicago are healthy tech markets, too. But when it comes to tech acquisitions, Silicon Valley still reigns supreme.
Silicon Valley tops the list of the top 10 metropolitan areas in terms of total tech acquisitions last year, according to new data from financial research firm PrivCo.
Image Courtesy of Arvind Balaraman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Car makers aren’t the only ones adapting breathalyzer technology to improve health and safety. A group of researchers from University of Vermont is developing a way to apply the technology to detect bacterial infections in the lungs, such as TB. But researchers with Cleveland Clinic’s Respiratory Institute are working on a breath test for cancer detection, according to a report in The Atlantic.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/19517696@N00/866110617
LONDON − New scientific discoveries have been made to beef up a biofuel, re-use waste heat, get more power from solar panels – and even deliver electricity across a room without using wires.
Here are four promising inventions that offer tantalizing potential to improve our lives and change how we generate and use power.
Image: Scientists in the United States have crossed a fir tree with a gut bacterium, fed it beef soup, and watched it deliver the chemistry of the highest-octane rocket fuel. Credit: Steve Snodgrass via Flickr
Every summer, the National Security Agency offers about 250 internships to undergraduate and graduate students interested in pursuing careers with the federal agency. If you can snag one, your career will be off to a great start.
But getting one is the hard part. There are more than 10,000 applicants every year for the internships, which span the science, technology, engineering and math fields. Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the NSA, on Wednesday told members of the BWI Business Partnership the selection process is grueling because of the high standards and required security clearances.
Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, studies the eating of insects, or entomophagy, and is the author of 'Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security', published in 2013 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Now he is organizing the first international conference to address the question of whether insects can feed the world. Ahead of the conference opening on May 14 in Wageningen, van Huis talked to Nature about researching, and dining on, this neglected food source.
Image: Crickets or grasshoppers can be made very delicious. Credit: istolethetv via Flickr
The trade association for the venture capital industry, the NVCA, gathered yesterday in San Francisco to talk about the state of the industry and some of the key policy issues we are facing. The short list is an obvious one for anyone who has been reading the news lately: Net Neutrality, Immigration Reform and Patent Reform are all hot topics in our industry. More inward-looking topics like the rise of corporate VC and new emerging managers also were batted about.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has adopted a more comprehensive definition of technology transfer and is improving the metrics it relies on when assessing its efficiency and success in transferring technology to the private sector.
The agency's work products and collaborations range widely – from participation in documentary standards committees, to patents and licensing, to research facilities.
Entrepreneurs in government? The idea may sound like an oxymoron to government bashers.
Yet a move is on to bring successful entrepreneurs into state agencies, city halls and economic development agencies to help stimulate business and job growth – and, important to many advocates, help bureaucracies become more creative, efficient and responsive to the public.
Image: Assembly member Ian Calderon (second from left) wants California to have a state entrepreneur-in-residence program. Some cities and states are seeking the advice of entrepreneurs. (AP)
Adam Lashinsky, in a piece for Fortune last week, wrote at length about the question that has crossed the minds of everyone north of San Jose: are we in a bubble? He takes a nostalgic trip down memory lane, talking about the dot-com bubble and how we are starting to see similar behaviors again.
Like Adam, I too was around in the Valley during the crazy days, so a lot he said resonated, but I still am not smart enough to say that we are in a bubble. These days it is hard to tell. In 2000 it was fairly easy to tell.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/19021435@N00/386124762
In the classic television show “The Honeymooners,” many jokes were wrung out of bus driver Ralph Cramden’s membership in the International Brotherhood of Loyal Raccoons, headquartered in Bismarck, North Dakota. When Ralph mentioned in one episode to his wife, Alice, that among the privileges is that they could be buried at the “Raccoon National Cemetery” in Bismarck, Alice’s reply was that it made her not know “if I want to live or die.”
Image: http://www.newgeography.com
Boston represents a unique intersection, of history and innovation. Innovate Now, a four-hour workshop spearheaded by the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers and recently held at District Hall in the Seaport/Innovation District, sought to bridge these two areas and catalyze civic participation from younger members of the local community.
Image: http://betaboston.com
