In an attempt to appeal to design-conscious consumers, major athletic shoe brands like Nike and Adidas have been investing heavily in 3-D printing. Now, New Balance is aiming to beat both Nike and Adidas to the finish line.

Today, the company announces a new running shoe model that incorporates a 3-D printed midsole. The shoe will be available in April in Boston as a limited edition collection, with the release timed to coincide with the Boston Marathon. New Balance will sell "a couple hundred" of them in 2016 and intends to expand their retail operations to more global metropolitan locations thereafter.

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Corporate R&D has become overwhelmingly global. According to the 2015 Global Innovation 1000 study, 94 percent of the world’s biggest innovators now conduct parts of their R&D programs abroad. But where they spend their R&D money has changed dramatically. Asia is now the top destination for corporate R&D spending, followed by North America and Europe. In 2007, the three regions were ranked in reverse order.

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Nations have long striven to advance to the next technology frontier and raise their economic well-being. In today’s highly dynamic environment, advanced technologies have become even more essential in improving economic competitiveness and national prosperity. The manufacturing industry, propelled by advanced technologies and innovation, plays a key role in enhancing economic prosperity through increased productivity, higher GDP output, and creates higher-income jobs.

The biggest difference I cite is that Venture Capital often feels like an “individual sport” while startups are a “team sport.” The reason is that at a VC you have a group of partners who often have different focus areas of excellence, each pursues deals in their respective field, each makes investments and sits on boards and each spends their most difficult hours tackling problems at portfolio companies vs. solving the challenges at the VC itself. You come together as a team one day per week (the “Partner Meeting,” which for most firms is on Mondays) and mostly share the news & information from your portfolio companies or evaluate new deals.

Misstatements about early-stage investing have been proliferated for far too long.  Unchecked, they take on a life of their own and create confusion that can hurt entrepreneurs and the startup economy. Here’s an example:  a recent article by Forbes contributor Dileep Rao suggesting that Minnesota and other states dump angel tax credits essentially because they don’t have robust Venture Capital communities or billion-dollar entrepreneurs.  While I think well-crafted angel tax credits are effective in increasing angel investment in good companies and there is data to back that up –my purpose here is to address myopic views about venture capital, angel investors, entrepreneurs and unicorns that are much bigger than the tax credit issue.

Canada’s technology scene is so hot that investors are going to startup boot camp to learn how to get a piece of it.

About 150 wannabe angel investors last month attended a three-day conference in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, learning about crowd funding, exit strategies and term sheets. The National Angel Capital Organization put together the event across the Niagara River from Lewiston, New York, for Canadians eager to get in on the burgeoning industry while supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs.

It seems so easy doesn’t it?

Getting an influx of capital is easy if you can just get small pledges from a lot of people. In that way, it’s possible to spread the burden, gain a wide platform for your message, eliminate the need to prepare and present detailed presentations multiple times, minimize the risk and meet goals for a specific project or plan on a (hopefully) timely basis.

All of the above tools include full documentation, sample cases, the ability to create a private account and save your data, with information presented in complete tabular form, as well as in charts.

These tools were developed by Arthur Lipper, and are currently made available at no cost by British Far East Holdings. Pacific Royalties, a company of which Mr. Lipper is co-founder, holds licenses to use the complete Revenue Royalties System.

A handy PDF guide, with links to all of these tools, may be downloaded here.

With the financial aid of a biotechnology executive whose daughter may need a lung transplant, U.S. researchers have beenshattering records in xenotransplantation, or between-species organ transplants.

The researchers say they have kept a pig heart alive in a baboon for 945 days and also reported the longest-ever kidney swap between these species, lasting 136 days. The experiments used organs from pigs “humanized” with the addition of as many as five human genes, a strategy designed to stop organ rejection.

As the boss, your goal is to have all your employees operating at their peak level of energy, efficiency, and motivation—which can be a challenge when it comes to leading a team comprised of introverts and extroverts. How do you manage these vastly different personalities and work preferences? How do you draw out your introverts and get your extroverts to listen? What’s the best way to adapt your management style so that it works for everyone?

Virtual reality is here, and brands of all stripes are embracing the tech. The New York Times and Google newly partnered to send more than 1 million cardboard VR viewers to Times subscribers at the beginning of November so they could watch the paper’s first VR documentaries on a smartphone. Magic Leap published video of its augmented reality system online in October, causing more buzz around VR’s potential. Even Tommy Hilfiger now offers VR sets to its in-store customers so they can watch its recent New York Fashion Week show.

Image: http://www.fastcompany.com

When we want to share information on the web today, we typically pick up our smartphones and tap out a few words. Almost magically, our knowledge bits get hurled into the ether for the entire Internet to read.

Twenty years ago, publishing on the web felt less like slinging knowledge and more like building a house, brick by brick.

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As an entrepreneur raising capital, you have many options on what type of round to pursue: equity, safe, or even convertible debt. Especially in the seed stage, convertible debt can be an appealing option. If you do decide to go that route — we’ll cover the pro’s and con’s of debt in a future post — use a model convertible debt term sheet, like this Techstars document to help ensure best practices and simplicity in your current and future rounds. More importantly, make sure you understand the terms in the agreement and have a good lawyer to work with throughout the funding process.

There’s a reason for that, when somebody is intro’ing a company, this person already filtered the quality of the startup — which makes the life of a lazy VC easier ;-) Since not everybody has connections into the VC world — here are some recommendations to connect, the next tips are about increasing the chances of getting a reply when cold calling/emailing.

American Innovation Matters (AIM), a coalition of companies that includes Cisco, Boeing, Intel, Oracle and Facebook, has released a statement pushing for the introduction of a US patent box, or an "innovation box" as it is known in the United States.

The statement looks at the endorsement on November 16 by Group of Twenty (G-20) leaders of the overhaul to international tax rules developed by the OECD, and confirms that it will result in many US companies facing "new pressures to relocate key investments and jobs unless Congress takes swift action to reform the US approach to international taxation."

The first annual R&D 100 Awards & Technology Conference was held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, Nevada, November 12-13, 2015. Industry leaders were in attendance at this thought-provoking science and technology educational program, the first of its kind for Advantage Business Media, the parent company of R&D Magazine. Hundreds of conference attendees from a wide range of industries in research and development gathered to hear cutting-edge presentations and exchange ideas about the process of innovation in a collaborative, cross-industry environment.

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The linkage of education and income couldn't be clearer in new data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The typical worker with a master's degree earns 20 percent more than a colleague who holds a bachelor's degree and 98 percent more than somebody who never went beyond high school.

Late last month, the SEC kept its word from late 2014 when it said it would issue final rules for Regulation Crowdfunding under the JOBS Act by October 2015.

Todd Crosland, CEO and Founder of Seed Equity Ventures, a broker dealer already operating and doing crowdfunding type equity raises under the SEC’s Regulation D 506(c) rules for general solicitations, says, “ I believe the SEC passing Title III will be a watershed event for both startups and investors. Startups and the general investing public will be forever changed.”

Under a sunset stroked sky in front of the University of Central Florida’s main administration building, university leaders celebrated the common traits of tenacity, collaborative spirit, and commitment to excellence that UCF’s top grant earning researchers share.

Twenty-nine researchers earned $1 million or more earning a bid into UCF’s Millionaires Club, which hosted the celebration earlier this month.

Image: https://today.ucf.edu

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen wrote in 2011 that “software is eating the world.” Now, his firm Andreessen Horowitz wants software to heal the world.

The Silicon Valley venture capital firm announced Wednesday it plans to invest $US200 million in software companies involved in biology and healthcare. The firm also announced Vijay Pande as its newest general partner.