COLUMBUS, Ohio — It’s hard to travel in the Buckeye state without seeing the scarlet and gray of The Ohio State University.

On ball caps. License plates. T-shirts.

Nearly everywhere you look in Ohio, OSU’s presence is felt.

The arboretum where I completed a run and the golf course where I played a round last week in northeastern Ohio proudly displayed OSU flags and signage, while the pizza joint right outside my hotel in downtown Columbus is named OH Pizza and Brew — the OH presumably the first half of the famous Buckeye chant: OH-IO.

It’s no secret: innovation is difficult for well-established companies. By and large, they are better executors than innovators, and most succeed less through game-changing creativity than by optimizing their existing businesses.

Yet hard as it is for such organizations to innovate, large ones as diverse as Alcoa, the Discovery Group, and NASA’s Ames Research Center are actually doing so. What can other companies learn from their approaches and attributes? That question formed the core of a multiyear study comprising in-depth interviews, workshops, and surveys of more than 2,500 executives in over 300 companies, including both performance leaders and laggards, in a broad set of industries and countries.

Everyone in my family is sleep-deprived. My wife, who usually writes this column, is so overtaxed this month that she asked me to fill in for her. It's tempting to blame our sleep deprivation on nightly interruptions by our nine-month-old or our toddler. But it's my own fault, too: like 30 percent of my fellow Americans, my sleep habits are fairly wretched. Instead of treating my sleep as a valuable resource, I approach bedtime like folding the laundry: as a regular obligation that I'll get to, eventually.

A new report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lists four landmark scientific achievements of the last year: the first spacecraft landing on a comet; the discovery of a new fundamental particle, the Higgs boson; the development of the world's fastest supercomputer; and new research in plant biology pointing to new ways to meet global food needs.

Then comes the punchline: None of these were U.S.-led achievements. The first two were the products of European-led consortia and credit for the second two belongs to the Chinese.

WASHINGTON, May 5, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), Maria Contreras-Sweet announced during National Small Business Week 2015 that the SBA is crowdsourcing the official logo for the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs, "America's Seed Fund" and has made major improvements to the www.sbir.gov website.  

The SBA oversees the SBIR and the STTR programs, America's largest seed fund for small businesses in the STEM fields. These programs allocate $2.5 billion a year to small innovators. By reserving a specific percentage of federal R&D funds for smaller firms, this encourages domestic small businesses to engage in high-growth priorities and build a strong national economy.

David Cohen coined the phrase “do more faster” and then we made it popular when we published the book by the same name back in 2010.

We wrote the book because it was becoming clear that doing more faster was exactly what businesses were striving to do and it subsequently became the Techstars mantra. As technological advancements gave both the entrepreneur and businessperson a new framework for productivity, goals across industries and departments started taking a new shape, but singing a similar tune: fit more into the day, produce more results, better results, cheaper results, and all in a shorter time frame than ever before.

BY JIA JIANG Four days before my son was to be born, I walked away from my job at a Fortune 100 company to begin building my startup.

I built a team of engineers and we were four months into our venture when I was approached with a major investment opportunity. It was an investment that was going to take our company to the next level and allow me to live the life I had always dreamed of.

Then something unexpected happened.

Every venture firm’s looking for many multiples when it comes to returns – but in reality, they expect things to shake out a little differently. Seth DeGroot, a managing partner at boutique Minneapolis investment firm Brightstone Venture Capital, spoke on what the firm’s expectations in potential investment targets – and how startups can avoid pesky problems like, say, overinflated valuations.

The firm has $25 million under management in its current fund, and has deployed about 40 percent of that capital. The firm tends to invest about $250,000 on the low end, and $1 million on the high end – with up to $2.5 million into any one deal. The 25-year-old firm’s focus is in tech, energy and medtech – and of the eight deals its entered in this current fund, medtech startups account for three. It’s looking, in particular, at precision medicine, regenerative medicine, telemedicine and healthIT.

Image: Seth DeGroot of Brightstone Venture Capital

Kickstarter is the internet dream many have come to know and love. Someone invents a product, launches a campaign on the site, and goes on to raise millions of dollars.

Sometimes though, those ideas never materialize -- even after the money has rolled in, reports CBS News correspondent Michelle Miller.

There are a few major life events that most of us go through. Get married. Start a family. Maybe even move to a new city. But some of us — those crazy Type-A’ers, if you will — have another major life event that, more often than not, gets thrown on top of the rest. While starting a business can be one of the most fulfilling things you can do, if you’re also working to raise kids and manage your young family, balancing the two can be more of a challenge. Here are some tips to balance business and family that will make you come out a success in both.

The advent of connected devices and M2M is offering a tremendous opportunity for healthcare professionals. Near-ubiquitous mobile networks are allowing carers to diagnose, monitor, and communicate with patients with unprecedented speed and efficacy.

MHealth (https://www.visiongain.com/Report/1418/Top-20-Mobile-Health-%28mHealth%29-Companies-2015 ) is a term used for the practice of medicine and health services, through mobile devices. In its most common form, it refers to using mobile communication devices, such as smartphones and tablets, for health services and information mHealth applications include the use of mobile devices in collecting community and clinical health data, delivery of healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vital signs, and direct provision of care, via mobile telemedicine.

It's a revolution in food technology that could deliver your food fantasy to your plate in less than a minute.

The Genie, similar in size and appearance to a coffee maker, can produce an unlimited variety of meals using pods, that contain natural dehydrated ingredients. So whether salty or sweet, an appetizer or a dessert, the device can create the food you crave in 30 seconds.

May 5, 2015 On Tuesday, the Senate Health committee held a hearing on the promise of precision medicine. Last week, the House released draft legislation to support biomedical innovation. And following President Obama's State of the Union in January, the White House unveiled the Precision Medicine Initiative, meant to provide funding to accelerate biomedical research.

What none of these things do directly is to curb the price of speciality drugs—including precision drugs—which cost Americans more than $80 billion in 2013, according to the Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing.

All startups are hard. At the Ivy Oasis How to Build a Strong Start-Up event at Columbia University several speakers made this clear. Despite the sex appeal many attach to being the founder of a tech startup, the reality is that it's stressful and exhausting. I spoke at two International Business Classes this week at the University of Colorado's Leeds School of Business on what it takes to be a successful global entrepreneur. Here is what I said.

COLUMBUS, Ohio — As a startup veteran, Tanisha Robinson likes to meet aspiring entrepreneurs over coffee or drinks.

Her advice is almost always the same: Don’t do it.

While there’s a perception today that startups are fun and that nerds are cool, the truth is that building a business is just incredibly challenging with twists, turns and the constant fear of “public failure.”

Image: Tanisha Robinson

Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Larry Page. Sergey Brin. They share more than a few enviable accomplishments. They’re billionaires, they made their fortunes in tech and they started their businesses while they were still students. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re seriously smart cookies.

However you slice it, they’re all living proof that you don’t have to wait until after graduation to launch your own business. And, as was the case for Gates and Zuckerberg, you might not have to graduate at all (though, to be clear, we’re not advocating for dropping out).  

In this chapter excerpt from The Innovation Formula Langdon Morris explains how to use a map to help you locate your company in the market, to see clearly how it compares with the competition, and then to use this assessment to chart a future path toward success. The goal is to find the very best high reward, low-risk ideas that will change the market, amplify your profits, increase your relevance, and sustain your organization’s viability over the long term.

Not every company can imitate Google’s practice of giving employees 20% of their work time to pursue passion projects, but there are other ways to foster a culture of innovation.

by Steve McPhilliamy

Today, the medtech industry is more dynamic than ever, with companies facing a growing number of competitive forces, including emerging technologies that impact core products, new user experiences that draw customers away from current offerings, and new startups that will change the competitive landscape. All of these threats have one thing in common: They are driven by innovation.

Healthcare-focused startup incubator HealthStart is setting up a new sector-focused angel network, founder of the business told VCCircle.

“We were approached by many companies which have crossed the stage of being a part of an accelerator programme but wanted funding; so we decided to set up an angle network,” said Pradeep K Jaisingh, founder and chairman of HealthStart.

The hit show “House of Cards” highlights a remarkable journey for its owner Netflix. The company that once desperately offered itself to the now-bankrupt Blockbuster Video for $50 million—and was rejected—is now a profitable $5 billion company growing at about 20 percent per year. Few would have imagined that a company built around the distribution of CDs by mail could, in just a few years, migrate its business model to streaming content on the Internet and eventually to producing its own content, moving Netflix towards being the next-generation equivalent of a television station. By the same token, who would have imagined that Amazon would enter the storage and IT services business with great success? And who would have expected to see Apple in the phone—and now luxury wearables—business?

Image: https://hbr.org