General Mills is thinking small. The Big Food giant is launching a new venture capital arm to make quiet bets on small rivals that could someday become big players in the grocery store.

In a new strategy firmed up about three months ago, a General Mills GIS -1.42% business unit called 301 Inc. will take investment stakes in very small regional startups that are looking for capital to grow.

New research in neural networks may let computers identify our daily actions more accurately than the apps on the market that track things like GPS location and heart rate. A new computer model has achieved about 83 percent accuracy in identifying the activities it sees in real-life images—and with just a bit of training it could do this for any user it encounters.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

I spent last week in Oslo and participated in various events during the Oslo Innovation Week. The week was packed with activities such as talks, seminars, workshops, speed dates, investor events, open houses, hackathons plus various pitching and networking events.

Even a world record was made with drones!

Image: Oslo Innovation Week is a week-long series of over 60 individual events by various stakeholders, built around innovation and entrepreneurship. Photo: Gorm K. Gaare / EUP-BERLIN

Every new entrepreneur with a solid business model, strong work ethic and the right amount of persistence has a recipe for success. But relying strictly on drive and revenue isn't enough to sustain or grow a startup for the long term. For that, it's wise to start investing to build equity in your business.

The right investment strategy can help you build a good financial platform for your company as well as help your business evolve. Some investments might cost you in the beginning, but the best ones can produce substantial returns.

A new report finds new partnerships and collaborations between the public and private sectors are helping to strengthen New Jersey’s high-tech industry and create more jobs.

The report, “The Road to an Innovation Ecosystem,” was prepared the NJ Policy Research Organization, an affiliate of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association advocacy group.

Here’s an interesting test you can do: type “how to reward innovation” in Google (or just click the link – we like to make things easy for people). When we checked, there were over 72 million results. Now, do the same with “how to encourage innovation.” We got a little over 9 million results. That’s an interesting statistic for us, especially because of the similar challenges we’ve done in cooperation with  several of our Fortune 500 clients and their 130+ employees from different departments.

Daymond John got a call from Mark Burnett at the perfect time in his career.

It was 2008 and John was 39 years old. He had established a career on the success of his clothing brand FUBU, which he started from nothing out of his mom's house in Hollis, Queens in 1992. Though the brand was bringing in over $300 million in revenue in the late '90s, its popularity faded in the early 2000s.

SHANGHAI -- There are a lot of confusing signals coming out of China lately. Is the dynamo whose steady rise has helped keep the global economy on the path to recovery since the global financial crisis running out of steam? Has the Chinese growth formula broken down?

While Steve Jobs popularized the term “intrapreneurship” in a 1985 Newsweek article, this topic is still gaining traction as the entrepreneurial mindset is increasingly needed within corporations as much as outside to set new vision, disrupt ways of doing things, anticipate change, and solve problems that will better our culture. Innovation is strategy for the future. And since individuals -- you and me -- make up our private sector, public sector and civil society, we need more individuals creating new and better norms within larger structures.

On the path to a dream job, the unpaid or low-paid internship has come to be part of the expected dues-paying process.

But it's not an option for many people, especially if you are coming to your dream industry later in life, after you have more bills to pay and maybe even children to support. Luckily, there are more resources than ever to boost your chances of getting a job in a new industry, even if you’ve never worked in it.

When Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes agreed to be interviewed at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.D Live conference here in Laguna Beach, California, she didn’t know that the event would end up taking place a week after the Journal published an in-depth exposé charging that the company’s blood-testing system had serious problems and that it was actually using commercially available devices for much of its work.

Rather than bail on her appearance, Holmes showed up. And the entirety of her interview with WSJ tech editor Jonathan Krim was devoted to the charges and her response.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

Venture capital funding to real estate tech startups crossed the $1B mark last year, and is projected to reach $1.5B at the current run-rate. With real estate tech investing growing, it’s important to know where the top VCs are putting their money.

CB Insights has delved into smart money VC annual deals and dollars in real estate tech and created a CB Insights Business Social Graph, a visualization that shows how key investors and target companies are related.

Early in my career, my boss once came up to me after a client presentation and said, "You put people to sleep." I was surprised. I'd thought of myself as a good presenter—I was articulate, I avoided filler words, I didn't read off PowerPoint slides. The feedback irked me—until I began to reassess.

My boss suggested that I hear myself speak. Sure, why not? So behind closed doors, I recorded the presentation I gave earlier. It was true! I sounded boring, monotone, and much less confident than I'd thought.

Can making your bed in the morning and keeping a to-do list get you closer to the life you want to lead? Sociologist Dr. Randall Bell, author of the upcoming book Rich Habits Rich Life: The Four Cornerstones of All Great Pursuits, says yes. Bell argues that there’s a direct link between daily habits and success.

"Success is about what you can control," he says. While we don’t have any control over the weather, global economies, or morning traffic, we do have total control over our daily habits; our rituals and routines that define who and what we are. Here are some of the daily rituals Bell says can set you on the path to success.

Here’s a bit of optimism to brighten your day: Great Place to Work just announced that not only do employees at America’s best small and medium-size workplaces say their companies are treating people fairly and making it easier to integrate work and personal lives, but the businesses are growing. The businesses on the list are hiring new staff nearly seven times faster than U.S. companies overall.

Michael C. Bush, CEO of Great Place to Work, said in a statement, "These companies are on the cutting edge of fair, more human-centered workplaces, and their strong business growth is the latest sign that a high-trust culture is a competitive advantage."

Political and private sector leaders from around the state are spending three days at the Capitol, making their best case to win a share of $1.5 billion dollars in economic development monies for their region. Critics have called the competition the “hunger games,” because, under the rules, three regions will win, but four others will lose out on the funds.

Perhaps the most ambitious plan presented by the regions competing for the money may be returning the Olympics to New York. 

Image: MWANNER/WIKIPEDIA COMMONS

For pre-seed and seed stage startups, investor updates are a challenge. Often, founders try to make them too ornate and end up getting behind. Similarly, investors don’t always have the time to fully digest a finely crafted narrative and lose track of what’s happening.

At RSCM, our portfolio of pre-seed and seed-stage investments is at about 400 today, so we have lots of experience with updates. Not only do we read them all, we write a 3-7 line internal summary and each one goes into our CRM system so we have a complete history at our fingertips.

You can predict a lot that will happen, at least in a general way, by paying attention to what is happening now and what has happened in the past. You can predict how people will act based on what they have already done and what they say they will do.  Then there are the totally random events that come out of nowhere and, like a tidal wave, threaten to wipe you out.

All individuals and organizations are at risk of these random events. A story in the Financial Times, “Big US Hedge Funds Hit Hard by Valeant Sell-Off” offers an example. It discusses the huge losses three of the biggest hedge funds, Pershing Square, ValueAct, and Paulson & Co suffered due to a large and rapid fall in Valeant’s share price. It seems all three funds have a very large percentage of their holdings in Valeant.

Something about that wintery mix that just passed through the Midwest announcing that winter’s just around the corner makes Lampuga Surfboard’s Seedmatch campaign even more appealing.  Surf’s up! Just a vimeo away from the beach, sun and swells.  Nearing 400K€ with the financial support from over 337 backers on an equity crowdfunding campaign due to end on 26 October, Lampuga’s black carbon surfboard with 15 horsepower and a top speed of 54 km/h has been wowing audiences in the boating and yachting industries.  The Lampuga team hopes to surf a final pipeline to reach the 500K€ goal.

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com

China will expand preferential tax policies for firms engaged in research and development beginning in 2016, according to astatement posted Wednesday night on the State Council website following a Council meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang.

Venture capital firms investing in new technology start-ups for more than two years will also receive tax breaks beginning in October 2015, the statement said.

Image: China will expand preferential tax policies for firms engaged in research and development beginning in 2016, according to a statement posted Wednesday night on the State Council website following a Council meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang. PHOTO: REUTERS