When you hear the word “innovation,” you probably don’t think of numbers. Instead, you might think of Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPod, the funky beanbags in Google’s unique office space or a building made of glass that defies the laws of gravity. The amazing world of innovation, it seems, is made of images, not numbers.

But then there's its mostly unknown and probably far superior rival called "silicene."

Like Us on Facebook Researchers from the University of Texas' Cockrell School of Engineering have just developed the first transistor made from silicene, said Extreme Tech. Silicene is recognized as an extremely difficult material to work with, and the development of a transistor made from the material so quickly is astonishing since silicene was only proven to exist in 2010.

Image: http://en.yibada.com

Success is something all career-driven individuals desire yet it eludes many people -- at least at the levels desired. Why are some businesspeople successful and others not?

It has everything to do with habits, beliefs, passion, flexibility and attitude.

Often there's nothing really different between one entrepreneur and another in terms of ability, as each person can do whatever he or she wants. What it all comes down to is having the frame of mind to set practical habits and keep a balance between attachment and commitment and letting things happen. 

Before they get started, some people worry if they have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. If this is you, stop worrying. We firmly believe anyone with the desire and the initiative can be an entrepreneur.

A fundamental desire to control their own destinies ranks very high on most entrepreneurs’ lists of reasons for starting their own businesses. This need is so strong that entrepreneurs will risk family, future and careers to be their own boss.

Your odds of living longer are higher than previous generations, mostly by virtue of being born in a time where advanced medical treatment is able to keep us healthier longer. To maximize your chances of seeing triple digits, there are a few things you can do. As you work hard to build your business and care for your family, it’s equally important that you put work into maintaining your body.

Business watchers in Michigan are heralding some good news in the start-up world. A new report released by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP finds venture capital investment in Michigan was up nearly 100-percent in 2014 from the previous year.

Y Combinator wants to make hardware easy.

The Silicon Valley accelerator, long known for helping launch software startups such as Airbnb Inc. and Dropbox Inc., has lined up a series of partnerships to assist its hardware entrepreneurs in handling everything from building prototypes to assembling circuit boards.

Recently, when one of our writers asked me about my thoughts on her article, I mentioned that it needed some more work. What I thought was a simple statement snowballed into a major issue.

She took my feedback personally, believing that I was questioning her skills as a writer. Far from it; she is a great writer, and the article was well-written—it just didn’t have a few points that were important to the argument.

In tracking life science investors worldwide, LSN’s research team has noticed that there are a growing number of Asia-based investors seeking global opportunities as well as investments in the U.S. and Asia. (See Figure 1.)

Also worth noting is the number of Asian countries where these investors are based. (See Figure 2.) Although the majority of Asia-based investors are in China, more than half hail from other countries in the region.

Image: http://blog.lifesciencenation.com

Just in a month, on March 3, the Latvian startup community platform Labs of Latvia is launching. In our region we have seen a trend of location-based startup community platforms of various kinds,  including #CPHFTW, Øresund Startups, #SthlmTech in the Nordics and Startup Lithuania and Startup Estonia in the Baltics. Community platforms are great uniters, storytellers and entry points to their scenes. And I joined building one for my home scene, for all the right reasons:

GW is looking to bring products created within its walls to a store near you.

From golf ball designs to water quality analysis, faculty have put their research to the test, seeing if it can be sold, licensed or even used to launch their own companies. And now that more researchers will be able to use the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps, inventions designed on campus could soon be fast-tracked to the market.

Image: Media Credit: Hatchet File Photo by Katie Causey | Hatchet Staff Photographer Steve Kubisen, the director of the Office of Technology Transfer, gives a presentation at last month's Faculty Senate meeting. His office is helping faculty obtain patents for their research and launch start-up companies.

"If you cure cancer and it stays in a test tube, it's an interesting cocktail party conversation, but nobody gets better. How do you get that to the bedside? The commercialization process is the vehicle for doing that."

Georgia Tech plans to develop an incubator aimed at nurturing the next generation of medical device companies. It is part of a broader expansion by the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), a 30-year-old business technology incubator that has produced several Atlanta tech companies including Suniva, CardioMEMS and Vendormate.

This paper uses the staggered changes of R&D tax credits across U.S. states and over time as a quasi- natural experiment to examine the impact of innovation on corporate liquidity. By generating plau- sibly independent variation in firms’ incentive to invest in R&D, we are able to assess the empirical importance of specific theories of the link between innovation and corporate liquidity. Firms increase (decrease) their cash to asset ratios by about one and a half percentage point when their home state increases (cuts) R&D tax credits. These baseline difference-in-differences estimates hold up to a bat- tery of validation, falsification, and robustness checks, which corroborate their internal and external validity. The treatment effect of R&D tax credits increases monotonically with several specific prox- ies for debt and equity financing frictions. Increases (cuts) in tax credits also lead to increases (de- creases) in the ratios of cash to bank lines of credit and to book equity, and to decreases (increases) in bank debt, secured debt, and overall net indebtness, supporting debt and equity financing channels through which innovation impacts the demand for cash. We also find support for a product market competition channel, and assess repatriation and agency explanations. Overall, our analysis offers endogeneity-free evidence that innovation is a first-order driver of corporate liquidity management decisions.

A couple of years ago, Mark Muro, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, noticed, along with some of his colleagues, that when politicians and businesspeople debated how the U.S. could be more economically competitive, the conversations tended to focus on promoting certain innovative industries. But, more often than not, the discussions said as much about who held the microphone as they did about what mattered for growth; that is, people kept talking about the industries in which they were involved, instead of figuring out what the most innovative industries had in common and how their successes could be replicated.

When people want to get more done at work, they double down on the time they put into their jobs. They adopt a new productivity approach, stay at the office late, work weekends, revamp to-do lists, and try to cram more into every day. But what if the secret to performing better at work, and feeling more satisfied, isn’t to put more effort and energy into work but less? Instead of working harder and longer, what if you better integrated the four domains of your life – work, home, community, and self?  My research has shown just that: By focusing more on the areas of life you care most about, even if those aren’t work, you’ll perform better at your job.

Image: https://hbr.org

I recently taught an MBA course at the University of San Francisco titled the “Big Data MBA.” In working with the students to apply Big Data concepts and techniques to their use cases, I came away with a few observations that could be applied by any entrepreneur.

Life teems all over our planet's exterior and even down into the lightless oceanic depths. But just how far underground might life be able to hack it?

New research offers evidence of bacteria living as deep as 12 miles (19 kilometers) underground — quite possibly the deepest life has ever been glimpsed. Learning biology's terrestrial limits, though important in its own right, is critical to understanding life's rise on other planets with far less forgiving climates and surface conditions than the Earth's.

As a lot of small business owners prepare their 2015 tax returns, it’s always good to hear some positive tax news. This week, Ohio Gov. John Kasich introduced his budget plan for the state for the next two years. In that budget was a call to eliminate income taxes for nearly all small businesses in the state.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com

LAWRENCE — University of Kansas researchers are invited to submit applications for the Proof of Concept Fund, which supports KU technologies that are near the commercialization stage and could become marketplace solutions in the near future.