Herndon, VA (PRWEB) November 16, 2015

The Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) announced today the release of the Commonwealth Research Commercialization Fund (CRCF) annual report for FY2015, which tracks investments in high-potential technology development and commercialization initiatives throughout Virginia.

In FY2015, CIT announced 38 grants to startups, universities and research institutes engaged in research and development projects totaling $2.8 million in key sectors such as life sciences, cyber security, advanced manufacturing and energy. This investment was leveraged to secure an additional $5.6 million from private sector and university matching funds.

Instant funding, access to influential venture capitalists (VCs), advice from successful founders and startup strategists, connections to other ambitious entrepreneurs and instant credibility? Startup accelerators certainly sound like a sweet deal.

However, incubators aren’t for everyone—and even if your startup is a good fit, it certainly doesn’t mean you’ll make the cut. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about finding, applying and getting accepted to a top startup accelerator.

Image: http://www.sitepoint.com

The adage “demographics are destiny” is increasingly being replaced by a notion that population trends should actually shape policy. As the power of projection grows, governments around the world find themselves looking to find ways to counteract elaborate and potentially threatening population models before they become reality.

When Steve Jobs wanted money for Apple Computer in the late 1970s, he got financing from Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital. Roughly 40 years later, in 2009, when Brian Chesky needed funding for Airbnb, he got an investment from the same Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Not only has Silicon Valley been the place to go for venture capital for over 40 years, its position has become more dominant.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com

So, you’ve been asked to join a board? You’ll surely do your own due diligence, but beware of a potentially dangerous threat: your own brain

I often ask senior executives and experienced directors if they want to join the board of a hypothetical company. I disguise its name but the company is Parmalat, a multinational Italian dairy company that collapsed in 2003 with a EUR14 billion hole in its finances. With all the information in front of them, typically about a third accept. It is not lack of data, of expertise or of ethics. It is deeper than that. Our brain wants to believe. So, before you accept the offer of a position on a board, consider the following pitfalls.

Image: http://knowledge.insead.edu

I had a bunch of topics teed up now that I’m back in LA after 2 weeks of constant travel. I felt excited to write because it’s a cathartic outlet for me and saves me from doing email. But no words would come out this weekend. After watching the terrorist activities in Beirut and Paris and blog post seemed trite. It’s terrible that a group of Islamic extremists is having some success in perverting the Muslim religion in an attempt to divide the rational world of moderate people.

Take a community of problem-solvers, from one of the best universities in the world, and the biggest Italian community of business leaders, then mix them up:  the result will be

‘Ambrosetti Club @ Imperial College London: What Makes a Vibrant Innovation Ecosystem?’

A new appointment along the Technology Forum path, scheduled on November 19th, from 9am until 4.45pm.

Imperial College stands out for its excellence in teaching and research, it is a major biomedical research centre and has formed the first academic health science centre in the United Kingdom. But Imperial College means something more: it means active collaboration between  world-leading research and the industry sector.

Image: FEDERICA ALBERTI

Twenty years ago, Israel's biggest export was oranges.

The tiny nation's size and economy could hardly have foretold its transformation into one of the most entrepreneurial lands on Earth.

"Nobody could imagine (the change in) this place… including the people who were doing high-tech here," Saul Singer told our recent Australian trade mission in Jerusalem.

Entrepreneurship is an appealing idea to many, but few go through with starting their own companies, and even fewer end up being success. Why is this? The challenges of entrepreneurship are tough, multifaceted, and daunting--and not everybody's cut out for the work. You don't need a degree to be an entrepreneur, nor are certain people "born" to be entrepreneurs; in fact, you can get everything you need to start and manage a good business from free resources, networking, and hard work.

Article Removed for Inappropriate Content

We apologize for any inconvenience or offense this article may have triggered.

Stacy, my wife, is an exceptionally grounded individual. She’s responsible, sensible, and disciplined; of the two of us, I’m the one far more likely to binge on Netflix, social media, Reddit, video games, and YouTube. Stacy just isn’t the type of person who gets impulsively addicted to technology.

That was before I introduced her to virtual reality.

Image: http://memeburn.com

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The University of Maryland was honored at the 2015 Innovation & Economic Prosperity (IEP) University Awards by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU).  UMD took home the top honor, the Connections Award, which recognizes an institution working to build connections between innovation and entrepreneurship, talent development, and social, community and cultural development. The award winners were announced today at APLU’s annual meeting in Indianapolis. 

In just four years, Adam Pisoni helped grow Yammer from a team of five with an idea to a company of 500 worth a billion dollars. Today, he’s back to square one, working on a brand new company with just a handful of people — and one question dominates his mind: “What do I want to do differently this time?”

Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, is one of the world’s most successful Internet entrepreneurs. But Ma has never written a line of code. He did not train as an engineer. Instead, Ma studied English in college, and worked as an English teacher and translator before diving into entrepreneurship.

In the 2015 Global Innovation 1000 study, Strategy&, PwC’s strategy consulting group, provides new insights into the ways corporate innovation spending—which totaled $680 billion last year—has been changing in recent years, and examines the implications both for the future course of global economies and for corporate performance. How and where innovation is performed matters: As Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, author of classic texts on corporate strategy and the competitive advantage of nations, has noted, “Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.”

Republicans and Democrats in Congress can rarely agree about anything, especially on immigration. But increasingly, they share a worry that the H-1B visa, a program used to bring tech workers and other experts to the U.S., is being used to ship those jobs overseas. In response, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) proposed a bill to reform the H-1B program. 

Why the controversy? Outsourcing companies “game the H-1B program,” as a recent New York Times article explained, to “dominate” the limited number of visas available.

The theory of disruptive innovation, introduced in these pages in 1995, has proved to be a powerful way of thinking about innovation-driven growth. Many leaders of small, entrepreneurial companies praise it as their guiding star; so do many executives at large, well-established organizations, including Intel, Southern New Hampshire University, and Salesforce.com.

Phil Kennedy no longer saw any other way to get the data. That was how one day he came to lie blissfully unconscious on an operating table in Belize while a neurosurgeon sawed off the top of his skull.

Last year, Kennedy, a 67-year-old neurologist and inventor, did something unprecedented in the annals of self-experimentation. He paid a surgeon in Central America $25,000 to implant electrodes into his brain in order to establish a connection between his motor cortex and a computer.

There are six key elements of an entrepreneurial university, according to Professor Deresh Ramjugernath, pro vice-chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa – good leadership and governance, capacity incentives, entrepreneurship in teaching and learning, a culture of entrepreneurship, stakeholder partnerships, and internationalisation.

Innovation and entrepreneurship for development and for nation-building was what universities really had to do, said the pro vice-chancellor for innovation, commercialisation and entrepreneurship.

When Arielle Jackson started her career at Google, one of her mentors taught her to embrace the fact that marketing is a highly tactical function. To this day, she loves sweating the small stuff — mostly because it all adds up to be big stuff. That’s how she helped home WiFi startup eero pull in $2.5 million in sales in a fortnight via a successful pre-order campaign. All the little stuff — from the details of eero’s website copy to the subtleties of its customer communications — added up. Rainmakers are known for their storm, but Jackson pays mind to each droplet.