Innovative start-ups play an important role in the commercialisation of new ideas and technologies. As a result, they contribute directly to the economy. However, their innovative success is often difficult to assess, which is why start-ups are often faced with financing problems. For them, venture capital is an appropriate and important financing alternative. Germany’s venture capital market still lags far behind in an international comparison. In particular, the aim should be to close the gap in the market for start-up finance and large-volume growth finance. Only through this can start-ups successfully develop their ideas and innovations in Germany.

Canada’s record for research-driven innovation is appalling.

That may sound harsh, but the facts speak for themselves. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that Canadian business investment in research and development is running among the poorest performers in the OECD countries. Even with above-average government support, our overall R&D investment is a disappointing 12th.

The White House is getting ready to honor five years since the creation of Challenge.gov — the central web portal for government competitions intended to spur innovation and solve problems — with a forward-looking celebration.

Touting the $72 million in prizes awarded across 400 challenges in the last five years, the Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a special event this fall that will highlight some of the major breakthroughs and civic issues solved through the program.

Image: http://www.federaltimes.com 

In a recent webinar, Stefan Lindegaard, widely recognized innovation expert and author, walked us through what he regularly sees in the corporate trenches as real-world obstacles to innovation. Working with a global, cross-industry client base of companies that is actively trying to innovate reveals consistent stumbling blocks and ways to produce better innovation outcomes.

Starting a small business is a costly endeavor. It’s rare that a business owner has so much cash saved that she doesn’t need any capital once the business really start rolling. One way to secure funding is through a small business bank loan. While bank loans are not easy to obtain, once you’ve been in business at least 2 years and have financial statements which show your company is growing, you can find some local bank or CDFI’s Community Development Financial Institutions that will extend you a loan.

Growing a business is similar to a high-speed roller coaster -- it has ups, downs, twists, and turns. You're simultaneously thrilled yet horrified, and once the roller coaster ends, you're itching to hop on the next exhilarating ride.

The idea of entrepreneurship is romanticized in the media. We're supposedly part of an elite team that consists of the dreamers, doers, and do-gooders of planet Earth. Our journeys are glorified and packaged as fairytales, which often inspires others to take the risk and follow a similar path -- just look at the lives of Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs.

Greece is in a mess you did not create. What’s next? Well, I don’t know. No one does, but that’s the whole point of growing up. You must always prepare yourself for a future you cannot see. This is an effort to provide some guidance to an unanswered question. Awareness of your collective strengths—which you need to use—and weaknesses—which you need to fix—is the key to crafting a strategy for success; as one great Greek once said, know yourself.

There are a lot of mistakes that you can (and likely will) make as an entrepreneur. From hiring the wrong people to not raising enough capital, the potential pitfalls are numerous. However, there’s one mistake that trumps all others: ignoring obvious problems. It sounds like common sense, but it’s a mistake that entrepreneurs make time and time again.

It's not just your imagination: There have been a lot of shark attacks lately, from the Carolina coastline to Australia to South Africa.

It was only a matter of time before someone tried to create a DIY fix.

When a couple was spotted at Kill Devil Hills Beach in the Outer Banks of North Carolina testing out their very own "shark proof" cages, a lifeguard luckily stopped them before they had a chance to fully submerge themselves. According to Jordan Cutrell , who filmed the video, the couple was attempting to take photographs of the cage — so be wary of any crowdfunding campaigns.

WELL-RUN organisations prize discipline, moderation and obedience. But that legacy of the industrial revolution provides thin soil for innovation. So this lively and insightful book by Alexa Clay and Kyra Maya Phillips praises the sort of immoderate behaviour that usually blights career prospects, rather than boosting them.

The U.S. Department of Energy is offering vouchers of $50,000 to $300,000 that will let small clean tech innovators obtain help from federal energy research labs. The $20 million federal initiative is designed to help small businesses that are developing  clean energy tech for advanced manufacturing, buildings, vehicles, wind, water, bioenergy, fuel cells, geothermal and solar. Five national energy laboratories will provide vouchers to more than 100 small clean tech innovators, so they can access the labs’ expertise and tools to test, validate, and introduce new products, expand their businesses, and grow the clean energy sector.

Mark Bittman braves the elements off the coast of California and learns how researchers are helping local and regional seafood producers monitor the effects of ocean acidification.

Image: http://www.nytimes.com

Piloting in business innovation means testing an idea effectively. This is not a straightforward process and requires addressing the right questions: What idea should we test? Which aspect of it? How should we go about testing? How should we measure the results? What do we allow these results to mean and what do we do afterwards?

Image: http://www.innovationmanagement.se

Many cars now come with voice control, but you can’t really talk normally to such systems, and you often have to repeat a phrase to get the job done. That could change, however, with the introduction of voice interfaces that allow for a more natural back-and-forth between driver and dashboard.

“What we’re going to see in the very near future is the ability to have a dialogue,” says Charlie Ortiz, who is senior principal manager of the artificial intelligence and reasoning group at Nuance, a voice recognition technology company based in Burlington, Massachusetts. “You might say I want to listen to some Latin jazz, or suggest a particular musician.”

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

All those leftover pizza crusts you snatch from your kids’ plates add up. Men gain weight after they become fathers for the first time whether or not they live with their children, reports a large, new Northwestern Medicine study that tracked the weight of more than 10,000 men from adolescence to young adulthood.

Jobs in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) represent some of the best opportunities for workers in today’s economy. The work can be rewarding as well as coming with high pay and good benefits (like a 401(k) and health insurance). Diversity in STEM, however is a problem, one that has captured the attention of CEOs like Jeff Bezos and policymakers including the president himself.

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwired - July 21, 2015) - Networks of Centres of Excellence

Three commercialization centres will receive additional support from the Government of Canada to continue their work in bringing telecommunications, environmental monitoring and micro-electronics products and technologies to market faster.

I’m a huge fan of R&D collaborations between pharma and academia, so I should be thrilled by Sanofi’s latest tie-up with seven top-tier centers – so why do I have mixed feelings?

On first glance, there’s a lot to like: Sanofi has committed $2.4M per year to seven top centers, including Johns Hopkins, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Columbia, to fund about 20-25 seed projects annually, with no strings attached and a wide-open scope. Who knows what will emerge – but it won’t take much for this to look like a pretty good investment for Sanofi.

Psychologists call it "thin slicing." Within seconds of meeting you, people decide all sorts of things about you, from status to intelligence to promiscuity. 

Citing a range of scientific studies, we created the below graphic to highlight just how important a first impression can be. 

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com 

We keep to-do lists and try to stay on top of our schedules, yet no matter how hard we try, tasks continue to evade us. The to-do list gets longer and it feels like time is slipping away by the hour. In a recent survey by the online time-tracking tool Toggl, the following five mistakes were identified by customers as the top things that were standing in their way of time management success.