The state Economic Development Authority recently named a second group of five executives-in-residence to mentor and advise emerging technology companies at its Commercialization Center for Innovative Technologies in North Brunswick.

Developed in collaboration with the BioNJ industry association, the EIR program is designed for high-level biotechnology executives in transition.

Image: Courtesy of NJEDA

Beginning with the example of self-driving vehicles, Elon Musk and Steve Jurvetson discuss innovation sectors that will advance the most in the next 20 years, from artificial intelligence, to sustainable energy and space exploration. “It’s very important that we have things that are exciting and inspiring for the future because, otherwise, why get up in the morning?” Musk asks.

Brit Morin, founder and CEO of Brit + Co, talks about emerging trends in the maker movement, fueled by crowdfunding and advances in do-it-yourself technology. She says that also means society is just a few years away from having to redefine copyright law for an age when consumers will be able to download designs and create products at home that were originally conceived by others.

I am an entrepreneur. What does that mean? To most people, it means the standard definition of the word, the person who “organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.”

To me, it means something more. It is not only someone who decided to build something out of nothing. It's someone who wakes up every day not knowing exactly what to expect.

Facebook-owned Oculus announced Wednesday that it’s selling its first consumer virtual-reality headset, Rift, for $599. For some buyers the price tag will be just a portion of the overall price, though, as you may need to shell out for a powerful PC to which it will be tethered.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Attendees at the CES conference in Las Vegas will have an opportunity straight out of the Jetsons today: the chance to ride a quadcopter drone.

The 184, built by Chinese consumer drone maker Ehang, is a 440-pound quadcopter with an enclosed seating area for human passengers. It can carry a person up to 10 miles, or up to 23 minutes, at speeds around 60 miles per hour, according to Ehang cofounder and chief marketing officer Derrick Xiong. And just like a small drone, it is capable of flying at heights of up to 2.15 miles, though drone regulation would likely keep it at just several hundred feet.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

SAN ANTONIO, TX - 11 Nov, 2015 -AccelerateH2O has launched the first of seven proposed regional innovative demonstration hubs to test, evaluate, and streamline next generation water technologies to reclaim and reuse resources for residential, agricultural, industrial and utility interests. The firstInnovativeDemonstration Hubhas been formed in partnership with Texas Water Solutions Management Group LLC and Fortress Environmental Services - one of the largest advanced produced water discharge operators in theEagle Ford Shale region - to reclaim water for farming, ranching, manufacturing, and other industrial activities.

Texas does not have well organized, large-scale sites for testing, evaluating, demonstrating the worlds best technologies seeking to enter into our $9 billion market, noted Ed Archuleta, El Paso Water System former President and AccelerateH2Os Chairman. After talking with thirty national and global firms about their previous experience to bring in current and future generations of products and integrated tools - one common response was the need to have seamless access to professionally managed sites to prove out their technologies for state permitting and showcasing effectiveness for investors and procurement decisionmakers.

Governor Andrew Cuomo wants $7 billion dollars worth of investment in Upstate New York this year.

Cuomo was in Rochester Tuesday afternoon revealing another piece of his State of the State address to be delivered in Albany next week.

Part of that investment plan includes a $2 billion economic development proposal, including another competition.

Seattle-headquartered Accelerator is aiming to kick-start New York City's nascent biotech ecosystem, leading its group of big-name investors to back a $48 million funding round for a local upstart.

Drawing on a syndicate that includes Eli Lilly ($LLY), AbbVie ($ABBV) and Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ), Accelerator launched Petra Pharma, a company tapping the expertise of some decorated biotech experts with hopes of developing new therapies for cancer and metabolic disease.

Baltimore, by a curious mixture of geographic positioning, educated talent, proximity to pork, and determined capital, is poised to become a crucial part of the East Coast technology cluster.

The city, which was long rarely noticed and underserved, is ideally positioned to take advantage of the startup economy for several key reasons. Here are four of them:

Many articles these days talk about reasons why companies should consider innovation as a core discipline.    A quick Google search on “why innovate” produces 23,600,000 results.  There is a plethora of opinions regarding innovation and why it is important.  Competition is usually one of the reasons but not the only one, especially when looking how the world will be in the near future.  Innovation becomes a critical survival skill when looking at predictions for how we will live, work, and communicate as early as 2020.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com

At the end of every year, Edge reaches out to the smartest people on the planet and asks them a single question in an attempt to find the ideas and concepts that are changing the world of science. This year’s two-part question was: “What do you consider the most interesting recent (scientific) news? What makes it important?”

Not surprisingly, this year’s set of 197 responses converged around a few key themes – the human brain, the human genome, space exploration and artificial intelligence.

Image: A long exposure photograph shows the SpaceX Falcon 9 lifting off, left, from its launch pad and then returning to a landing zone, right, at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Reusable rockets could lead to the start of a new age of space exploration. (Mike Brown/Reuters)

The New Year may also be a year of discoveries for physicists plumbing the deepest mysteries of matter. Since 2013, when scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) confirmed they had discovered the Higgs boson, the particle that lends others mass, physics has been in a kind of limbo. The Higgs was the last missing puzzle piece in the Standard Model, the reigning model to explain the behavior of tiny particles. And yet, key questions about the universe still remained unanswered.

2015 was an amazing year for hardware startups; new smartphones that enable the IoT revolution, the introduction of low cost prototyping platforms such as the Raspberry Pi Zero, hardware accelerators that bring lean manufacturing to entrepreneurs’ attention, and old school retailers that are taking a leading role in development and distribution of early stage ventures.

Image: The ZANO drone, a failed Kickstarter project. Photo credit: Kickstarter

It is always possible to improve, to do things better or more efficiently or more fairly. Whilst the Philippines has many attributes there are also many areas in which improvement can be made, not least under the heading of “the ways in which business is done in the Philippines.”

The development of business in the Philippines is the near exclusive preserve of the local powerful vested interests. The oligarchy. Thus the development of the economy of the nation and the creation of jobs is within their gift and if government is not directly investing itself in job creation other than in positions which just generate miles and miles of red tape, then everybody is beholden to the whims and caprices of these powerful interest parties.

The crisis in soaring drug prices has produced not merely a new class of public enemies to skewer -- step forward, Martin Shkreli! -- but the best evidence yet that the nation's healthcare regulatory priorities are out of whack.

How badly the regulators have failed is the theme of an article by Jeremy Greene of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. His argument is that the Food and Drug Administration has ample authority to quell profiteering in the generic drug market, but hasn't used it.  

You might be surprised to learn that the Consumer Electronics Association is now called the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). The organization behind the popular Consumer Electronics Show (CES) announced the rebrand last November in a move that garnered little attention. Although the CTA produces the world’s largest trade show, drawing more than 170,000 people in 2015, its new name has attracted little comment.

The early results are in: 2016 will be a year of conversational interfaces (think actually having a back and forth with Siri), on-demand services, new tools for sticking to your healthcare goals (and meds)—and of bringing innovation to the underserved. And yes, there will still be a place for the “weird and wonderful.”

Those, anyway, are some results from an informal survey I am conducting of leading venture capitalists to get their views on important trends shaping the market—and their investment decisions—as we enter the new year.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. -- Presidents whose institutions are members of the Council of Independent Colleges have been working on a project to help map the future of their institutions, which are generally small and midsize private colleges. At its annual gathering of presidents here, the CIC held an open forum on the project and released a draft list of characteristics that a panel of presidents identified as "essential" for their institutions, and another list they identified as "negotiable."

Almost every time I finish reading an article about Shark Tank, I think to myself, "If they only knew. . . " The reason is that I have interviewed more than 100 of the best entrepreneurs from the show. And, I've found, a sizeable chunk -- 80 minutes on average -- of their pitches does not make it on to TV. Here are five other fun insights I gained about Shark Tank that most viewers don't know: