Committee on Capitalizing on Science, Technology, and Innovation: An Assessment of the Small Business Innovation Research Program--Phase II; Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy; Policy and Global Affairs; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

“Industry now accounts for the vast majority of national R&D, which has been growing for decades.” That’s a quote from a January 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science report on national research and development. While there was a brief uptick with the American Recovery Act, federal research and development has been on a steady downward trend as a portion of gross domestic product for many decades even as commercial R&D has increased. According the AAAS, industry R&D has grown to just under 2 percent of GDP while federal R&D has fallen below 1 percent.

Venture capital funding for digital health care firms slowed in 2015 compared with the previous year, but the size of the average capital deal remained consistent, according to an end-of-year report from StartUp Health, Modern Healthcare reports.

We’ve all heard the advice: if you want to be more productive, cut out the TV and Facebook binges, and you can miraculously have five to 10 hours of your life back each week.

Given the extraordinary low levels of engagement in the U.S. workforce — a recent Gallup poll showed that 70% of employees are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” at work — many leaders are looking for solutions. Some turn to material perks (bonuses, game rooms, free food) in the hopes of making employees happier. However, research suggests that these efforts, while appreciated, do not address more effective drivers of long-term well-being. Instead, leaders should be mindful about giving their employees three things:

Welcome to 2016, the 200th anniversary of the invention of the stethoscope.

If Dr. Eric Topol had had his way, the venerable stethoscope would have been relegated to the dustbin of history by now, as he called for in a memorable TEDMED presentation in 2009.

We have known for some time that cancer is not a static, monolithic disease. Instead, we now think of cancer as heterogeneous. Each patient’s cancer may arise from widely dissimilar origins, even in patients with the same type of tumor.

If you think your most important job as a leader is to write mission statements, set goals, or even increase revenue, you’re focusing on the wrong metrics. Your most significant role doesn’t involve your results; your job is to inspire your employees’ results, says Richard S. Wellins, co-author of Your First Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best In Others.

With a New Year ahead of us, it's time to buckle down on resolutions, and that means prioritizing. You may have your sights set on a committing to a new exercise regimen or carving out more family time. Honing your speaking skills might not top your list.

Cutting out unnecessary spending is always a good idea, whether you're running a profitable business or trying to lengthen your runway at a startup. But how do you decide what is necessary and what is waste as you examine your business expenditures?

Last fall, we overheard that Twitter Engineering Director David Loftesness had some solid wisdom about training newly-minted engineering managers — an often precarious transition. So we sat down with him to see what tips he had to offer, and we were blown away. Not only did David have actionable insights to share, he had plotted out a concrete 90-day plan for engineers making the leap to leadership. We couldn't have been more excited to publish the piece — it's so representative of First Round Review's mission to bring original, non-obvious advice to light. 

Disruption is undoubtedly one of the current words du jour. It describes the outcome when small, agile startups create a new model that flips an industry on its head. Take Uber, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey and Pinterest - all are innovators that have revolutionised their industries.

Wichita State University is creating an Innovation Campus focused on technology, business and community.

After being welcomed to Wichita State in 2012, President John Bardo began developing plans to shift the university’s priorities to innovation. Through strategic planning, the university’s mission became clear: Wichita State will serve as an essential educational, cultural and economic driver for Kansas and the greater public good. A new vision prioritizes the university’s desire to become internationally recognized as the model for applied learning and research.

Our society craves instant gratification -- we want things now and we want them fast.

We are able to rent movies on demand, use our smartphones to have a personal driver waiting outside within minutes and Chipotle’s Twitter feed goes nuclear if someone has to wait in line for more than a couple minutes to get their burrito.

The startup space is filled with advice - giving advice to a starting entrepreneur is so popular that there’s an entire market built around it.   Bloggers, commentators, business gurus, social media experts and wantpreneurs seem to be obsessed with providing the top 10 tips on pretty much anything.

Having time to think about “leadership” at most startups feels like a luxury. It feels like something you could turn your attention to once you have tens of millions of dollars and a large staff to run operations and you could step back from it all and think about how to lead. The reality of most startups is about survival. And because running a company requires money to fuel staff and offices and acquire customers and the like, much of the time spent in early days at a start feels like a constant struggle to raise money, convince others to join your company when they can get offers from companies that have more money and convince existing staff to stick with you despite the hours and stresses and set-backs.

As I travel across Bangalore and other cities attempting to discover interesting street food and local eateries, I am often struck by the creativity, innovation, and business sensibilities that some of the owners exhibit. From humble tea stalls catering to actors and politicians to trained fine dine chefs, many owners bring extensive knowledge and an inspiring spirit of entrepreneurship to their eateries. Here are some of these inspiring stories and what they’ve taught me.

Rewards for creative people; investments in new ideas that challenge the power of the Pope and sovereign rulers, that give impetus to science and give birth to the new class of merchant nobles creators of wealth with their businesses: this the Renaissance.

Ideas awaken the world; they do it reborn. They are, in short, 'renaissance' ideas. “No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world" - so exclaimed Robin Williams, the great interpreter of the movie " Dead Poets Society" (1989). Since his seminal work of 1986 (“Increasing Returns and Long-Run Growth,” Journal of Political Economy 94(5), October, 1002−1037), three years before that movie, the economist Paul Romer explained that due to the non-rivalry of ideas – the fact, namely, that one person's use of an idea does not prevent others to make another use: to say, for example, 'I use your idea in a field other than yours' – innovations that arise from them enable the economy to free from the chains of diminishing returns for which, doubling the input, the output change less than proportionally.

SALT LAKE CITY — This is America, the land of opportunity. With a couple good ideas, a little luck and a lot of hard work, anybody can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and be the next Carnegie or Rockefeller (or for a more time-appropriate reference, the next Bezos or Zuckerburg).

Even if you can't be the next billionaire mogul, who wouldn't want to own their own business, set their own hours and make their own money rather than listen to what some boss tells them to do?

All entrepreneurs grapple with uncertainty at some point in their journey. But as we look at the year ahead of us, we see uncertainty on all sides: a major election, rising interest rates for the first time since 2006 and hushed talks of a “bubble” when it comes to the startup world.

Given the current climate, it’s difficult to make predictions, but we’re seeing some clear trends. Here are my predictions, in no particular order, for entrepreneurship in 2016.