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.
Meet the Raspberry Pi — a bare-bones computer the size of a flash drive that costs $25.
Yes, it's real. And it's coming out next month, according to a new blog post by its developers on the Raspberry Pi Foundation website.
This little guy runs a stripped down version of Linux, an open-source operating system. Here are the specs:
A huge health-care company like Johnson & Johnson requires a steady stream of innovation, but that's getting harder and harder to create. So the 125-year-old company is getting more aggressive at mining ideas from outside. It's seeking out very early ventures that it once would have considered far too risky and seeding them with money or dishing out advice on how to nudge untested ideas out of the laboratory.
Its accelerator program for small and high-risk startups, known as RedScript Ventures, was launched in 2009 and was named for J&J's red cursive logo. If J&J has invested in a startup or is considering buying it, RedScript tries to speed up its progress by consulting with the startup on anything from clinical trials to the economics of medical devices.
In a recent international conference in Istanbul, Usama Fayyad, Executive Chairman of the Jordan-based Oasis500 business accelerator, said: "It is not about creating jobs. It is about creating new companies." The simple concept and the explanation that followed made me realize: Usama, along with many others in the Middle East and North Africa facing a monumental challenge of unemployment, understands something that we in Washington are still struggling with: the solution to our unemployment challenge will not come from existing large companies hiring more employees. Rather, it will come from the creation of new small and medium businesses. While this concept seems obvious, it bears repeating.
Small and medium businesses (fewer than 500 employees) account for 52 percent of all U.S. workers. Small firms accounted for 65 percent (or 9.8 million) of the 15 million net new jobs created between 1993 and 2009 in the United States. No doubt, the sentiment expressed in Istanbul holds true throughout the rest of the world.
Using computer programs and mathematical formulas, Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and Steve H. Hanke, an applied economist in the Whiting School of Engineering, have created a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity.
Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, for instance, if Christmas fell on a Sunday in 2012 (and it would), it would also fall on a Sunday in 2013, 2014 and beyond. In addition, under the new calendar, the rhyme “30 days hath September, April, June and November,” would no longer apply, because September would have 31 days, as would March, June and December. All the rest would have 30. (Try creating a rhyme using that.)
I don’t read a lot of business books. (Actually, I never read them.) But I do read the lists of the best-selling business books. Those lists give you a lot of insight into the current trendy areas for leadership and strategy. That’s a good reason to run in the opposite direction. Fast.
These best-sellers all have jazzy titles like “What Would Lincoln Do” and “The Kindergarten Test: If A Five Year Old Can’t Understand Your Plan, Start Over.”
I made all those up, but you get the point. At Conduit, our 7-year-old Israeli startup, we don’t necessarily do things by the book.
We offer publishers mobile apps and web apps; social media connectors; toolbars and notification alerts--all designed to give publishers an ongoing presence in the digital lives of their users. Right now, publishers are reaching more than 250 million individual users through our products.
2011 was a huge year for infographic design. Large companies embraced data renderings as a business strategy like never before, whether it was to promote their brand (GE) or bolster their bottom line (the New York Times). Nowhere was that more evident than at Facebook. Timeline, the site’s most ambitious redesign to date, brought the central tenet of data viz--organizing unwieldy bits and bobs into a compelling, visual narrative--to millions of people around the world.
As infographics go mainstream, infographic designers grow bolder. Some of the most tantalizing projects we came across this past year stretched our understanding of what a data visualization can be: It can be a set of interactive commuter-train maps plotted not according to distance but time. It can be a metaphorical chart of how water flows from the source to the consumer. It can be the spikes and dips of the Dow Jones Industrial Average rendered as notes on a musical scale. Infographics have clearly evolved into something greater than just a way to make raw numbers more enticing. They’re a full-blown art form.
In this, our final Top Ten Newsletter of 2011, we've rounded up the most popular articles among readers this year. Read them today and join the conversation.
1. STRATEGY Have you tested your strategy lately? Ten timeless tests can help you kick the tires on your strategy, and kick up the level of strategic dialogue throughout your company.
2. STRATEGY Seven steps to better brainstorming Most attempts at brainstorming are doomed. To generate better ideas—and boost the odds that your organization will act on them—start by asking better questions.
Smaller regional and metro areas are emerging from amongst the field of usual big-city suspects as desirable locations for companies of all sizes. Our list brings these locations to light by showing how they stack up to the rest of the field when considering 14 highly regarded surveys.
We based our findings on 13 highly regarded location surveys from sources including Forbes, Newgeography, Brookings Metro Monitor, Fast Company, and CNNMoney. We used the findings of the Milken Institute's Best Performing Cities 2010 as the primary criterion. Each of the 100 Leading Locations on our list must appear within the top 100 rankings for large and small cities on Milken's report.
We also considered the results of our own Select Regionals Survey as a criterion to select the 100 locations that made the final cut. This survey, sent to nearly 300 U.S. regions and metros, considered the areas' top three greatest project investments of 2010, unemployment rates, and total capital investment pledged over the past year.
For the second year in a row, Area Development has conducted a survey of a select group of highly respected location consultants who work with a nationwide client base. We asked the consultants to name their top-5 state choices in 12 site selection categories. Here are the top overall states:
States were ranked in each of the 12 site selection categories based on the number of times they were named as a "top-5" choice by the responding consultants. Next, a top-5 state's ranking in each of the 12 categories was assigned a weight in accordance with its position in these individual categories. Based on these total weighted scores, Texas is far and away the consultants' #1 choice for doing business, followed by Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina (with weighted scores only a point apart), and finally Indiana in the #5 spot. Taking the #6–#10 rankings based on weighted scores are Louisiana, North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, and — surprisingly — California, in that order.
In 2011, the tech world saw the release of game-changing gadgets including the iPhone 4s, Kindle Fire and iPad 2. But along with the good (and, yes, sometimes, the bad) came the bizarre.
And by bizarre, we mean the weird gadget creations and unexpected Internet sensations that went viral (cue Rebecca Black's "Friday").
Nonetheless, the strangest of the strange in the tech world made headlines by pushing the limits of technology, and this year it felt like there were more than ever.
One of the holy Internet startup commandments lately seems to be “Thou shalt not launch.” But I launch all the time, and I love it. Why? Because my startup’s most valuable commodity is time. I need to get as much user feedback on my product as I can get – and I need it fast. There are half a dozen legitimate, well-funded competitors in my space with teams that are two to 10 times bigger than mine. If I want to succeed, I don’t have the time to mess around.
Here’s an example. Earlier this year, we launched our Android app and got lots of negative reviews because our pricing strategy didn’t work for the mobile app world. What did we do? We quickly changed our pricing, updated our app and (drumroll, please. . .) turned a lot of those unhappy users into engaged customers.
Venture capital investments saw a revival in 2011, with e-commerce taking off in a big way. Of the top five deals in the venture space, four happened in the e-commerce space as these companies started investing in marketing and supply chain logistics. Mobile value-added services and technology companies also continued to attract venture funds.
The year 2011 also saw increasing emergence of nearly half a dozen seed-stage funds which are looking to raise $20 million-$25 million to plug the gap between angel funding and series A round. On the backdrop of a few successful exits in Indian VC space, Limited Partners are now increasingly looking at this asset class. Here are the top five VC deals of 2011, according to VCCedge, the financial research arm of VCCircle.
When viewed through the lens of funding for startups, 2011 was a fickle, back-and-forth, hot-and-cold kind of year that could never quite make up its mind.
And by that we mean, confusingly: The state of the venture capital industry was good, but it was also bad. Or, in other words, it was the Year of the Mixed Signal.
"It's becoming like a sport to predict what will happen," said Anand Sanwal, the chief executive of research firm CB Insights.
There’s an unpleasant moment that occurs for entrepreneurs more often than it should. Someone asks for your business card, and you hand it over. They say, “Great, I’ll check out your site!” You say, “Excellent, but ignore the ‘Shop’ section — it’s out of date. And, oh yeah, the email newsletter link isn’t working, but I can add you manually to the list if you want. And … well the design is a little embarrassing …”
By this point, the person who was excited about your product just moments ago has finished the drink they were sipping and is looking for a polite way to exit the conversation — immediately.
In their desperation to be innovative, companies often brainstorm themselves into idea overload, generating ideas that ultimately are failures. But what if companies could focus those brainstorming efforts and develop an efficient, targeted process for creativity? InnovationManagement asked Tony Ulwick to share his thoughts on how to leverage the creativity and get a better outcome.
There are countless inventions throughout the year, but only a few have the capacity to change the world.
From a sassy digital personal assistant to a mirror of the future, here are our picks for the most impressive breakthroughs in science, technology and medicine.
Forget the standard, "Tell me about yourself," question. Some interviewers go above and beyond to test their prospective employees.
Before they were banned, Google asked interviewees some of the most ridiculous questions we've ever heard of, including how much it would cost to wash all the windows in Seattle and why manhole covers are round.
Go-to people get things done. As an entrepreneur, you need these people, and you need to be one, if you expect your startup to be successful. That may be easier said than done, since resumes do not tell the story, and without real nurturing, they won’t stay around long.
To highlight how rare this breed is, Jeffrey Gandz of the Richard Ivey School of Business relates a quote from a new CEO in a large company, "I have more than 1000 people in my head office organization, 900 can tell me something’s gone wrong, 90 can tell me what’s gone wrong, 9 can tell me why it went wrong, and one can actually fix it!"
With none of Wilbur Wright’s humility, here are my predictions for some significant business developments in 2012.
1. Social business will take off in 2012, but companies will struggle to adopt. Management consultants will champion ‘digital transformation’ initiatives ala Y2K in order to help companies change business processes and worker behavior. But the real gains will be made where companies can find ways to adopt social and collaboration tools without making workers change their daily work habits. This evolutionary approach to social business adoption will trump ‘rip and replace’ methodologies being promoted by some social business software vendors…including one that recently went public.
