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.
Indonesia is the best place for entrepreneurs to start a business, a BBC survey has suggested.
The US, Canada, India and Australia are seen as among the next best countries at supporting new businesses.
At the other extreme, Colombia, Egypt, Turkey, Italy and Russia are among the least entrepreneur-friendly.
The survey for the BBC's Extreme World series found wide variations in perceptions of the support different cultures offer to start-ups.
Most early stage tech companies don’t think they have room for a chief operating officer.
There are several reasons behind that, of course. Sometimes, the CEO feels he/she needs to “be close to the business” and all aspects of the operation. Others feel strategy and execution shouldn’t be separated, while some feel early stage companies are too small to have a COO. The saddest of instances is when the CEO believes recruiting a COO would be an admission of failure.
While I’m sympathetic to those arguments, I do believe the role can be highly beneficial — and even necessary in certain situations – and shouldn’t be dismissed offhand due to a company’s size or the CEO’s ego getting in the way.
Two new reports released last week provide some of the most compelling evidence yet for the importance of federal investments in science and technology innovation.
Amid the bitter and protracted negotiations over this fiscal year’s federal budget, U.S. investments in science and innovation were largely spared from the deepest cuts some federal programs faced. But they may not be safe for long as Congress considers making further spending cuts in the fiscal year 2012 budget beginning in October against the backdrop of debate this summer over raising the national debt ceiling.
That’s why it is critically important that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle distinguish between federal “spending” and “investments.” What many fiscally conservative lawmakers omit in their zeal to slash spending is that many federal programs actually have positive rates of return, meaning they bring in more revenue—to the government, economy, or both—than they cost the taxpayer. To put it another way, some federal investments are profitable to the public balance sheet and save the taxpayers money in the long run.
This post is a summary of a 19 page white paper available here.
New market dynamics are emerging as social technology and the use of it proliferates. Making sense of the dynamics and the strategic implications is everyone’s goal. The goal is not an end rather a never-ending pursuit to learn, share and improve.
Learning and sharing is how people and organization can gain clarity of purpose on how to continuously improve. The real value in all things social is the sharing of knowledge with clarity for others to use. Imagine if an audience was focused on sharing of knowledge with clarity. What would be the outcomes? The answer: never-ending improvement and innovation.
Thanks to Jay Baer we received tons of positive feedback and questions about our earlier post titled “5X6 Social Media Revenue Matrix“. Subsequently we thought it would be helpful to discuss the method behind using the matrix.
Lets use a common story to try to make use of the matrix simple.
Brand X wants to either begin to use “all things social” or improve how they currently use it. So either before using social or attempting to improve how your using it needs to be thought out. A logical “map” for “thinking” about relevant and relative issues that create the most value would seem appropriate. That being said lets illustrate “thinking about the issues” and doing so thoroughly.
Lily McCauley could never find the remote in her home. Sick of looking, she created a way to track it and entered it into the Bendigo Inventor Awards, reports Bendigo Advertiser.
“I got sick of looking for the remote in the ironing basket or under the couch. When I want to watch TV I just want to flick the remote, I don’t want to have to look for the remote.”
Seen from a distance, this video is just three inhumanly rich guys sitting in comfy chairs and chatting for an hour about philanthropy, luck and comfort zones. But then you move in and focus on the players. And … wow.
Did you know, in Australia, it takes an average 51.8 days to get paid, according to Dunn & Bradstreet?
Frustration with tardy debtors was the obvious impetus behind this nifty invention from Belgium outfit ikki; an invoice with a voice-chip that begins to make weeping noises 20 seconds after the envelope is opened. (How? The chip reacts to light.)
However, what’s truly inventive about the ‘crying invoice’ is its other purpose. Why create a ‘crying invoice’?
The ‘crying invoice’ may well solve a real problem (with a smile) but the main reason for this product’s creation is the marketing buzz it’s likely to create.
You’re probably familiar with marketing doyen Seth Godin, who talks about this brand building tactic in his book Free Prize Inside!.
Barcoding seems to be the conservation concept of the day, and that goes for sparing trees from illegal logging. The latest country to use the technology is Liberia, and at least one expert thinks that barcoding trees to protect timber production could make the country a "poster child for a new green economy in Africa."
The rainforests of Liberia, like rainforests most everywhere, are under threat from illegal logging. However, implementing a new technology involving barcodes could save the day. Fred Pearce of Yale e360 reports on Liberia's new technique. He notes that Liberia's President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and the European Union have signed a deal to strengthen the country's timber industry by requiring every harvestable tree and every log to have a barcode that tracks it from its original location to its final destination.
North Carolina’s Research Triangle region saw $1.5 billion in capital investments and more than 6,600 new jobs announced in 2010, according to data compiled by an economic development group.
The Research Triangle Regional Partnership, or RTRP, is comprised of economic development agencies across the 13-county Research Triangle region radiating from Research Triangle Park. The group said that most of the new investments came specifically in life sciences and technology clusters.
Steve Jobs may claim that the humanities are important for colleges, but Apple's not hiring philosophers to build iPhones. A new report from Georgetown University confirms much of what we already knew about the financial payoff of college majors: Hard-scientists swim in a Scrooge McDuck-size vault of gold, while literature majors panhandle with multi-syllabic signs. The report further confirms many of the unfortunate stereotypes of poor minorities and female caregivers that progressive Americans would sooner forget.
Science rules, social drools
Engineers are the king of the cash hill, raking in a median salary of $75K, while Psychology and Social Worker graduates beg for the trickle-down table scraps, amounting to $42K. The brightest light in the non-hard sciences is the Social Sciences, with economists earning $70K, using their savvy knowledge of money to rake in more than their compatriots in both finance and architecture.
Earlier this week, the X Prize Foundation announced the 10 finalists for its Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. Over the course of the summer, these 10 machines will be put into a large tank in New Jersey and challenged to remove 2,500 barrels of oil a minute from the water. The winner will take home $1 million and will most likely be used the next time there is a massive oil spill. In the slides ahead, take a look at the machines that will be competing for the title of best oil sucker.
Philadelphia-based media giant Comcast Corp., which this year took control of NBCUniversal, has combined two existing capital funds into a new entity called Comcast Ventures, which will manage about $750 million in investments.
The new fund, which unites former NBC parent General Electric Co.'s Peacock Equity Fund with Comcast Interactive Capital, intends to invest in "early to late-stage businesses that represent the next generation of entertainment, communications and digital technology," Comcast said.
The Wallace H. Coulter Foundation recently awarded Drexel University $10 million, which the University matched in order to endow the Coulter Translational Research Partnership program to support its development of biomedical innovations, as announced April 26.
According to Drexel’s press release, the now $20 million joint funding will “bring life saving solutions to clinical practice by moving promising biomedical discoveries to commercialization.”
Banu Onaral, H.H. Sun professor and director of the School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, stressed the impact this endowment has on the University as a whole.
Medicine and technology are converging at a faster pace than most people realize, says New Jersey Institute of Technology Professor Atam Dhawan, chair of the the IEEE emerging technology committee.
Here are the five “hot spots” of convergence identified by Professor Dhawan:
Point of care health care technologies — connecting patients with healthcare professionals via computers. This includes nursing engineering, health monitoring, e-health, and health care information management for disaster situations.
Optical imaging technologies — diagnosing and staging cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and other fibrotic diseases. This includes discovery and exploration of naturally existing molecular targets of diseases and the differences associated with the molecular targets between normal and diseased states, as well as diagnosis and treatment.
A new survey suggests Canada is one of the top three places in the world to start a business, with a culture that admires its entrepreneurs and the risks that they take.
Canada ranks just behind Indonesia and the United States, according to the newly released survey, which was conducted by GlobeScan and the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland for the BBC World Service in 24 countries around the world.
More than 24,000 survey participants were asked a series of questions about their perceptions of how hard it was to start a business and the way innovation was valued in their country.
The BBC survey said that Canadians generally took a favourable view of entrepreneurs, with 74 per cent of survey participants saying they believed people who started their own businesses were highly valued individuals.
Once upon a time, things didn't happen now, they happened later. Editing a document meant volleying back and forth over email or fax, meetings were something everyone had to be in the same place for and group communication on-the-go meant saying "hold on, let me call you right back" over and over. Then came the real-time Web.
If there's any one thing that the real-time Web has changed about the way we work, it's in communication and collaboration. Sure, we've had phones, faxes and even email for ages now, but the Web puts the full range of media into our hands and makes the office seem like a thing of the past.
In early May, a senior-level U.S. delegation representing US business and academia attended this year's "From Science to Business" Forum in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Forum, now in its fifth year, closely monitors current trends in cooperation on innovation between academe and the private sector and was co-organize this year by a Russian EURECA grantee institution, the St. Petersburg University for Information, Technology and Optics (ITMO).
Details of the agenda can be view in Russian at www.fs2b.ru.
This year's Forum was attended by 206 individuals, representing universities, governments, and private investors from 70 cities across 10 countries. Sessions took place over three days, with EURECA-sponsored sessions on "university innovation for social good" delivered by US EURECA delegates from UCLA, as well as additional presentations and an all-day workshop conducted by the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds and "Innovation America".
Every first-time entrepreneur, or even an experienced founder stepping into a new business area, needs a mentor. Nothing you have ever done raises so many questions, or has the potential to be so fulfilling, or so risky, as starting a new business for the first time. A mentor is a confidant who has been there and done that, and is willing to guide your steps.
In case you think mentors are only for “wimps,” you should know that most great entrepreneurs are quick to give credit to their mentors. Bill Gates always revered the early guidance he received from Dr. Ed Roberts, creator of the Altair 8800. Later, the great Warren Buffet became his mentor on many corporate matters.
In a reverse fashion, most of the recognized business gurus always found time to be a mentor. For a fortunate, surprisingly large club of CEOs, the late Peter F. Drucker was the single most lucid, eloquent, and encouraging force in their lives. With experts like this willing to help for free, why should you be the one to go it alone?
