Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
Many things happen to each of us beyond our control. Most of them are minor: the stoplight turns red as you approach and you’re stuck for 30 seconds. Some are major: the driver behind you doesn’t notice and rear ends you.
There’s nothing we can do about such things. What we can do is control how we deal with such random happenings.
If you are an aspiring entrepreneur or a founder and looking to raise pre-seed capital, then you are definitely stepping into the most attractive period of your entrepreneurial journey. Commonly known as the first stage of venture funding, pre-seed funding builds a strong foundation to kick-start a startup business. While some startups may not require this funding at all, however, others may end up going through several rounds.
So, what are the key things entrepreneurs should keep in mind before going ahead with a pre-seed fund? Answers to the below pointers can help solve the funding puzzle:
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Small Business Administration has granted $100,000 awards for fiscal year 2015 to 20 state and local economic development agencies, business development centers, and colleges and universities to support programs for innovative, technology-driven small businesses under SBA's Federal and State Technology (FAST) Partnership Program.
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In the recently released 2015 State of Innovation report it is noted that more unique inventions were filed in patent grants and patent applications during 2014 than any other year in history. However, a slowing pace of patenting activity in several critical industrial sectors may signal some developments affecting innovators around the globe.
Global innovation continued to climb during 2014 but at the slowest pace seen since the global economic recession hit in 2009. The Thomson Reuters report didn’t draw any specific conclusions as to why the innovation slowdown had occurred but did draw a correlation between published scientific literature and patenting activities, noting that the former typically precedes the latter by three to five years.
Founding a company or being one of the first employees at an early-stage startup is attractive for many reasons. It's exhilarating to build something from nothing, and there's always the hope for a large payout for your efforts.
But for many, the untold story is that starting a business comes at the sacrifice of your personal life. A startup demands grueling schedules and laser-focused dedication, making it easy to become separated from the people and things you care about.
When John A. Paulson gave $400 million to Harvard University last week, many people complained that he hadn’t picked the neediest recipient for his largess. Though the gift is Harvard’s biggest ever, it amounts to only about 1 percent of the institution’s endowment. But that amount would be truly transformational in other areas of higher education.
As an entrepreneur you have to wear a lot of hats. Working in a small organization means you often need to fill the duties of what in a bigger company would be several different people. For a long time, in addition to being CEO I was also acting CFO, COO, Head of Sales & Marketing, and Product Manager. None of that would have been at all possible without the use of some of these killer tools, many of whom turned out to be real life-savers. In this post I've highlighted 7 of my favorites. To keep it interesting, I've also tried to pick some less obvious ones you may not have heard of.
Today’s pace of life can make you feel like you are strapped to the top of a rocket. With more and more screaming for your attention, we barely have time to send that long forgotten birthday card, let alone to sit down and think about the long-term effects of our innovations. But what if your latest and greatest innovation turned out to damage the lives of millions instead of improve them as planed? What if your proudest moment was also your most heinous?
So here’s an interesting statistic from a 2014 labor survey by burning-glass.com: 65 percent of new job postings for executive secretaries and executive assistants now call for a bachelor’s degree, but “only 19 percent of those currently employed in these roles have a B.A.” So four-fifths of secretaries today would not be considered for two-thirds of the job postings in their own field because they do not have a four-year degree to do the job they are already doing! The study noted that an “increasing number of job seekers face being shut out of middle-skill, middle-class occupations by employers’ rising demand for a bachelor’s degree” as a job-qualifying badge — even though it may be irrelevant, or in no way capture someone’s true capabilities, or where perhaps two quick online courses would be sufficient.
Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal before founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, said yesterday he’s “not really a fan of disruption,” but is rather “just a fan of making things better.”
Those words, spoken Monday at the Edison Electric Institute, may come as surprising given Musk’s laundry list of achievements. SpaceX, for example, has forced its way into the space launch and exploration business in recent years, with its Falcon 9 rockets delivering satellites into orbit.
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I had drinks with one of the $1 billion "unicorn" CEOs last night, in a trendy Noho bar in London.
He told me he thinks we're in a tech bubble, and it's going to end badly for many companies.
Unicorn companies were so-named a few years ago because it was exceedingly rare for a tech startup in private hands to be worth as much as $1 billion.
For nearly eight hours last week, residents of San Francisco's Mission district stood in line and begged for a chance to save their neighborhood from the wave of tech-gentrification they believe is pricing them out.
In the end, the Board of Supervisors failed to approve a 45-day moratorium that would have paused development of new, high-priced apartments and condos in the Mission.
I believe we all have dreams to do the things that we love most—to feel alive and fulfilled in every way possible. We're here to find tasks that give meaning to our existence and make this mundane life livable. Philosopher Richard Taylor says our life is meaningless—what gives it meaning is a sense of purpose: the will to survive.
How many of us actually make those dreams a reality? The trouble is that before even beginning to achieve that dream, many of us have doubts about our ability to do what we love. We are apprehensive and hesitant to try out something different.
A British economist is calling on the world's leading pharmaceutical companies to set up a $2 billion fund to enable research into new antibiotics. A U.K. government-appointed review team into the issue of antibiotic resistance, headed by economist Jim O'Neill, has urged the global pharmaceutical industry to fund a $2 billion innovation fund to kick-start research into new antibiotics.
The creative economy is the UK’s GDP powerhouse, with related employment growing at three times the rate of the workforce as a whole. But we can’t sit back and relax: we need to encourage it by breaking out of the disciplinary silos imposed by this country’s education system – science, technology, engineering and maths education, or STEM – and adding arts, turning it into STEAM.
Take a poll of most of biotech’s venture capitalists—the ones that survived the financial crash, anyway—and you might find that just about all of them have reloaded with new funds over the past few years. Today, you can add Clarus Ventures to the list.
In my 15 years of executive coaching and running leadership development programs, I’ve worked with thousands of leaders charged with getting different results.
A number of scenarios can drive the demand for new results. How many of these apply to you?
In 1904, the great sociologist Max Weber visited the United States. As Moises Naim describes in The End of Power, travelling around the vast country for three months, he believed that it represented “the last time in the long-lasting history of mankind that so favourable conditions for a free and grand development will exist.”
Yet while Weber saw vast potential and boundless opportunities, he also noticed problems. The massive productive capacity that the industrial revolution had brought about was spinning out of control. Weber saw that traditional and charismatic leadership would have to give way to a more bureaucratic and rational model.
In 2011, right after Michael Murphree and I released a working paper on international technology standards, I got a call from the U.S. Senate. Shortly thereafter, I was called to testify on the subject in front of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The result was that the commission sponsored us to perform a larger research undertaking on our work. At the same time, the U.S. National Academies asked us to join a multicountry effort to look into national strategies of technology standard-setting bodies and their economic implications.
In the next decade, the world will need 600 million new jobs to employ the total eligible workforce. That’s according to Michael Dell, founder of the eponymous computer company, and one of the world’s leading entrepreneurs.
In May, Dell, of Round Rock, Texas, kicked off a campaign to gather 100,000 signatures from businesses and their employees to urge the United Nations to pass something called Goal 8, one of 17 sustainable development goals set forth by the UN at its Rio+20 conference in 2012. Michael Dell is the UN Foundation’s global advocate for entrepreneurship. The goals come up for a vote in mid-September.
