ANCHORAGE, ALASKA – October 7, 2015 – Last week, the University Economic Development Association (UEDA) announced winners of its annual Awards of Excellence program during their Annual Summit in Anchorage, Alaska.   Leading initiatives from across North America competed in a six-month process, which included nomination, peer review, live presentations, and, ultimately, selection by attendees of the UEDA Annual Summit as category leaders. The Awards of Excellence Program recognizes UEDA members who are transforming their campuses into engines of economic prosperity through leading edge initiatives in five categories:1) Community Connected Campus; 2) Research and Analysis; 3) Leadership and Collaboration; 4) Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and 5) Talent Development.

Let’s take a moment to consider and applaud these two admirable core values of a very well- known multinational corporation.

Integrity

Our everyday actions are based upon an internally-consistent framework of principles and values. We understand that integrity is more than just a word … it is a daily practice.

Trust

Trust is a relationship of reliance. Our employees, our clients and their clients rely on us to comply with all policies, laws and ethical/professional codes in the performance of our work; and we consistently honor that reliance.

The company? Volkswagen.

Innovation is the engine that drives economic growth. Innovation is what drives entrepreneurs to take their ideas to market, to build businesses, and create jobs. Innovation, though a somewhat nebulous concept, is incredibly important in today’s world, and without it, we would still be stuck in the stone age. Literally.

Innovation’s close ties to the economy are what make it so important. As a society, we want to make sure we do everything we can to foster innovation, because if ideas and action stagnate, our wheels will get stuck in the proverbial mud. Innovation is what has turned places like Silicon Valley into hotbeds of wealth — people are turning their ideas into multi-billion dollar enterprises.

For scientists, there have long been advantages to working in big cities — in close proximity to other scientists and inventors. A new analysis delves into whether this is still the case.

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

It used to be that if you wanted to be an inventor or a scientist, it helped to be around other inventors and scientists, which could mean working at one of a handful of elite universities in a big metro area. New research questions whether big cities are still a primary engine for innovation. NPR's social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam sat down with our colleague David Greene to explain what they found.

NEW YORK, NY – U.S. venture capital firms raised $4.4 billion for 53 funds during the third quarter of 2015, a decrease of 34 percent compared to the number of funds raised during the second quarter of 2015, and a 59 percent decrease by dollar commitments, according to the Fundraising Report by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

As entrepreneurs, investors, and others using business to tackle social challenges gather in San Francisco for the annual Social Capital Markets conference this week, they may be adding a new word to their vocabulary.

The word is “inculators” — shorthand for both incubators and accelerators. It appears in a report released Tuesday by the Unitus Seed Fund, a seed stage venture fund that invests in Indian startups, which partnered with Village Capital and the Global Accelerator Network to survey incubators.

Image: At the Social Capital Markets conference in San Francisco, attendees will do their best to unlock what works and what doesn't for accelerators and incubators. Photo by: Impact Hub / CC BY-SA

GE Ventures (NYSE:GE) and health innovation company StartUp Health said they plan to expand their partnership to invest and support startups in the healthcare innovation sector.

The expansion will allow the partners to accept 10 new qualified companies into their “StartUp Health Academy” program. The 2 companies originally launched their startup focused partnership program in 2013 with 15 consumer health companies.

New Orleans is making its mark as an entrepreneurial hotbed, with multiple incubators fostering business ideas into fledgling companies. Success stories have emerged from the likes of Idea Village, 4.0 Schools and the BioInnovation Center.

A steadily growing list of locally spawned startups -- Kickboard, Dinner Lab and Lucid (formerly Federated Sample) to name a few -- is bolstering the city's reputation.

Image: MobileQubes, which provide a temporary, rechargeable power source for smartphones and tablets, is one of four Louisiana companies to receive financial backing from the NO/LA Angel Network. (Julia Drapkin)

October 7, 2015:   Wipro Ltd’s corporate venture arm Wipro Ventures plans to invest in early-stage venture capital (VC) funds based in the US even as it buys minority stakes in early-to-mid-stage start-ups to help fill gaps in its own range of offerings.

Wipro’s $100 million corporate venture arm, overseen by Rishad Premji, son of chairman Azim Premji, has minority stakes in four US-based start-ups; India’s third-largest software services firm has until now shied away from investing in VC funds.

Image: Hemant Mishra/Mint

In 2013, Jayne Juvan became one of the youngest partners ever at the Cleveland-based law firm Roetzel & Andres — thanks to Twitter.

When Juvan started using social media a decade ago, very few lawyers used such tools.  They didn’t see the opportunity.  But after only a few months of blogging, Crain’s Cleveland Business interviewed Juvan on the use of social media for lawyers. She then began to land clients through social media. 

When leaders of large corporations step down amid controversy, their character is often called into question. Recently, Volkswagon CEO Martin Winterkorn stepped down from his post when news broke that the German automaker installed technology intended to defeat emissions testing.

Though he claimed not to be aware of the wrongdoing, Winterkorn is known as being a hard-driving perfectionist bent on securing the top spot among global car manufacturers. Winterkorn’s resignation also came on the heels of a dispute with the chairman of the company, who claimed to have "lost confidence" in his leadership despite VW’s financial success.

Do you dream of having your own business? Being independent? Being your own boss? Maybe you have a great idea and want to share it with the world.

Good news! There's no day like today to make your dream a reality.

The bad news: the learning curve is steep and there's a long road ahead.

Entrepreneurship can take a serious toll on your psyche. Seriously. It’s been shown that entrepreneurs can be more prone to mental illness than people who are not building their own business.

If you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re reading this, you’re probably not surprised.

Sometimes the entrepreneurial lifestyle can feel like trying to swim in the ocean through the perfect storm. We try to push forward despite the maelstrom of emotions that we go through each day.

Considered an underrated powerhouse by some, Indiana University grabbed the attention of other research universities last month when it announced a $300 million initiative aimed at asking -- and answering -- some of the world’s biggest questions. In so doing, it joined a growing number of research institutions to launch similar programs centered on big ideas. Beside boosting a university’s public profile, advocates of such “grand challenge” research programs say they help cut down silos across campus and reorient the university mission back toward the public good. But such research has its critics, too, who say that these initiatives are often ill defined and tend to favor the life and physical sciences over other fields. So Indiana’s bold move also opened it up to possible criticism, should its initiative fail to meet expectations.

Image: https://www.insidehighered.com

Impeccable timing has led to a drone flyer capturing stunning footage of two whales swimming next to a paddle boarder off the coast of Esperance in Western Australia.

Jaimen Hudson, a local from Esperance, told Mashable Australia about the marvellous footage he managed to capture of two southern right whales getting up close and personal with the paddle boarder, his neighbour Dave Price.

You might think the most successful startups are born in garages (following the famous HP script), but a lot of the most innovative tech ideas were actually made in college dorm rooms.

Research firm Pitchbook determined which schools have created the most companies with a valuation over $1 billion, the so-called "unicorn" companies, before going public. The firm looked at all the unicorn founders and tallied up which schools had produced the most billion dollar companies (whether the unicorns were actually created at the school or the founders created the companies after leaving the school). 

Image: Aly Weisman / Business Insider

There are two types of people in the world: those who love speaking in public and those who are scared stiff at the thought of it. Performance anxiety and stage fright are perfectly normal phenomena that occur to many people. It is important for you to understand what stage fright is, so that you can fully overcome it.

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Bound by a common commitment to spur innovation and assist startups, the Arizona Technology Council, the Arizona Business Incubation Association (AZBIA) and Startup Mexico (SUM) today announced they have signed a cooperation agreement designed to strengthen the economic diversity of their respective regions by fostering knowledge-based businesses.

“Cooperation between Arizona and Mexico pays great dividends”

The three organizations have committed to sharing best practices with one another, ensuring that innovators and technology entrepreneurs across Arizona and Mexico enjoy the best possible support. As part of the agreement, each organization will also work to facilitate contact between startups and angel investors and other financing opportunities across their markets.

Millennials live in a world of contradictions. They are the most educated generation in U.S. history, and yet they earn less than previous generations of young workers. They live in the richest economy that the world has ever seen, and yet stable employment remains elusive. In Texas, Houston and other key metro areas are growing at a record pace, and a big reason for that is millennials, those born between 1980 and early 2000s. In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau recently announced that millennials now make up a greater share of the workforce than any other population segment.

Image: Frank Franklin II, STF

So there we all were, getting really very comfortable in our open innovation activities, learning to collaborate and co-create outside our organizations. Even our management has got “open innovation”.

We are encouraged and allowed to collaborate outside our four walls of the organization as the penny has finally dropped that “not all knowledge resides within the company”.