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.
The majority of Internet users in the United States are going online to search for government information and access government services, according to a survey unveiled this week.
The findings of the survey by Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project lend support to the Open Government Directive, which calls for the federal government to use the Internet and other technology to better engage with the public.
The survey found that 82% of Internet users -- or 61% of all American adults -- looked for information online or completed a transaction on a government Web site in the year preceding the survey.
The report surveyed 2,258 adults aged 18 or older in the United States between Nov. 30 and Dec. 27, 2009 in telephone interviews. This particular Pew project gathers information on the cultural, political, and societal effects of the Internet.
The process of "creative destruction," whereby entrepreneurs with new ideas and methods of production displace less efficient incumbents, is believed to play a critical role in driving productivity growth in the economy. High-profile entrepreneurs create and commercialise new technologies such as automobiles and semiconductors--major innovations that spawn new industries. Although clearly important, such start-ups only represent a tiny proportion of overall entry in the economy. Perhaps 0.1%-0.2% of U.S. start-ups receive venture capital funding each year--the predominant source of finance for such high-growth ventures.
A less visible channel is the enhanced productivity growth arising from increased efficiency in existing methods of production. A substantial share of the productivity growth in the economy is believed to arise from through the birth of more productive firms and the closure of unproductive firms rather than just through existing firms becoming more productive. Foster et al. (2008) show the productivity advantages of new entrants in a variety of manufacturing industries, including traditional products such as concrete. A number of related studies further point to the vital role of this general entrepreneurship for economic growth. Policymakers should thus pay as close attention to these attempts to "build better mousetraps" as they do to venture capital-backed start-ups.
Two themes tend to stand out when you look at the portfolio of venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
One, the firm likes to plunge into relatively new markets before others do, which in turn arguably makes the firm's portfolio something of an indicator for the direction of the market. It was an early investor in energy and was an investor in Hotmail when the idea of free email seemed like crazy talk.
Two, it is not afraid to go international. "We think it is going to become an imperative," said Steve Jurvetson, managing director of the firm during a talk at Nordic Green II, which took place this week in Menlo Park.
A newborn horse 14 inches tall weighing just six pounds could be the world's smallest.
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MADISON – If you listen to some of the bill’s supporters, the Legislature’s failure to pass the Clean Energy Jobs Act means the polar ice cap will melt away within a year and we’ll all be indebted forever to OPEC.
Conversely, some of the bill’s opponents predicted Wisconsin’s economy would run out of gas overnight if the state tried to better position itself as a player in the “green economy.”
Fortunately, neither doomsday scenario is true. That’s because the immense market forces at work will continue to transform Wisconsin’s energy economy, even without more legislation right now to prod things along.
A recent survey of 1,400 company executives by Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls Inc. found that most businesses are investing heavily in energy efficiency, either to save money over time, to reduce their carbon footprint or both. Nearly one-third of the execs who responded to the survey said they increased energy efficiency spending in 2009, despite the recession.
“Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.” That’s the conclusion of a long (for the Internet) post by Steve Jobs himself on Apple’s website. Jobs takes on critics who don’t like it that on iPhone and iPad products, Apple has refused to support Adobe’s widely-used Flash technology for video, games and user interfaces.
In an essay titled “Thoughts on Flash,” Jobs tries to reverse the claim that the iPhone and iPad are are “closed” to third-party software, rather than open, because only Apple-approved apps can win placement in Apple’s App Store. You’ve got it backwards, he says. Apple is open, Adobe is closed.
The post comes one day after bloggers noticed that Apple’s annual software design awards will be restricted this year to only iPhone/iPad apps. Software for the more open and freewheeling Mac OS X platform, which ships on Apple’s Mac-branded desktop, notebook and server gear, will be excluded from the awards. “This is because Apple’s secret plans for OS X rolling over to the closed ’shop’ model of software distribution,” one VentureBeat reader speculated.
In our annual TIME 100 issue we name the people who most affect our world
Colors are probably the most obvious way that design varies across cultures (a theme that came up in our interview with Frog Design about designing for China). But the funny thing is that for most designers and companies, those color sensibilities often don't rise past "Red is lucky in China; blue is soothing in the West." That's naive, as this superb infographic by David McCandless and Always With Honor shows.
The chart
encompasses 10 different cultures, and 62 emotions (!!!). The cultures
are represented by concentric rings, and the emotions are represented by
slices of the circle. Thus, if you want to understand about Japanese
color sensibilities, you read around the graph. And if you want to learn
what colors mean "danger" across cultures, you just read vertically,
down section 15:
Every social enterprise startup knows the drill: pitch + plan + powerpoint = profit.
But what if that's just a mirage?
That's the question raised by this must-read TechCrunch post by Vivek Wadhwa. As Wadhwa observes, in the real world of mainstream commercial funding relatively few startups get funding from venture capital firms or even angel investors--most successful startups attract substantial outside support only after building a workable product and "selling for survival." Instead of encouraging people to focus on elevator pitches and five-year plans, Wadhwa offers essential advice for bootstrapping a venture to the point that it might attract funders' attention.
However, there's another important lesson here for budding social entrepreneurs: pitch contests and business plan competitions do not accurately model the most likely path to profit. Rather, they are a relic of the dot-com boom, which fostered the myth of venture capital as a veritable ATM for people with an idea and a slide deck. It's an alluring myth to be sure, but despite recent efforts to develop a vibrant social venture capital markets, the brutal reality is that outside investment for budding social entrepreneurs--especially the seven-to-nine figure deals that make headlines in the business world--is even less available for social ventures than it is for wholly commercial tech startups.
The IPO pipeline fattened considerably in the first quarter, especially among smaller companies, according to a quarterly report from Ernst & Young LLP.
In the first quarter there were 49 new IPO registrants, leading to a backlog of 80 deals seeking $11.4 billion. That compares with a pipeline of 54 deals seeking $10.3 billion in the fourth quarter. Also in the first quarter, 27 issues went effective, with 20 of those deals in the pipeline for less than six months.
The IPO activity is tilting toward smaller companies, Ernst & Young said. Of the deals in the pipeline, 26 of them seek $100 million or less. That’s a bright sign for the venture capital industry, which has found it hard in the past decade to get smaller high-tech companies to the public markets.
Celebrating a “new beginning” with Muslim nations, this week the White House hosted 275 entrepreneurs from over 50 Muslim-majority countries. The purpose of the summit was to reach out to Muslim counterparts with a new collaborative approach.
This is good foreign policy, but what about U.S. entrepreneurs at home? Silicon Valley start-ups, venture capitalists, and U.S. small business owners were noticeably missing from the event. A Lebanese entrepreneur described the new business contacts he had made as all Muslim entrepreneurs. He had hoped to partner with Americans, but few were in the room.
Still, President Obama claimed that “together, we’ve sparked a new era of entrepreneurship” and went on to outline the administration’s plans to launch new exchange programs for Muslim entrepreneurs to come to the United States and for their American counterparts to share best practices overseas.
An Exploratory Study of University Entrepreneurship Centres i
Because syncing with Twitter wasn’t enough, professional social network LinkedIn has taken further steps to increase the site’s social sharing aspect for SMBs and business professionals. As of yesterday, sharing news on LinkedIn got a whole lot easier with the adoption of a bunch of new site features. Here’s a look at the best of what’s new.
Better Controls
One of the most useful parts of Facebook has always been the ability to control which members of your network have access to which information. For example, you could set your filters so that your family and professional contacts were seeing different items and updates. LinkedIn has finally adopted this feature, giving users’ complete control over who sees which updates – whether it’s everyone, specific connections, a group you belong to or a specific user. Depending on how you use your LinkedIn statuses, this can be a really powerful way to target individual pieces of content toward the right audience. It gets rid of that firehouse effect that we often get trying to share information in social networking and ciphers directly into the group you’re most interested in reaching. This is a nice add from LinkedIn.
Thursday was a good PR day for the social buying site Blippy. They
were featured in two New
York Times articles.
But Friday wasn't so great, as the major technology
blogs reported that credit card information from its users were
found on Google. An hour later, Blippy responded with a
post on its blog, explaining that the leak was months old and
affected only four beta users, not current Blippy users. Later, they
amended the
blog post to include an apology. News
of more credit card leaks continued on Saturday. Of course, Blippy is
by no means the only startups to suffer from potential public relations
disasters, and it remains to be seen what, if any, impact this has on
the site.
Blippy's response, including the need to re-edit its official announcement, demonstrates the importance in responding quickly and correctly to a crisis.
Starting in the summer of 2009, Russian holding firm Digital Sky Technologies (DST) began taking huge stakes in successful American startups.
First it plowed $200 million into Facebook at a $10 billion valuation. Then it dropped $180 million into Farmville-maker Zynga, setting its value between $1.5 billion and $3 billion. Finally, last week, DST invested $135 million in discounts-for-group-buyers site Groupon, setting a $1.2 billion valuation.
So what the hell is going on, right?
It's all part of DST CEO (and billionaire) Yuri Milner's clever strategy that's changing the way tech companies grow up.
In response to Google's recent Fiber for Communities project, a group of entrepreneurs in Philadelphia have decided to conduct their own broadband stimulus experiment.
The Philly Startup Leaders are offering a Gigabit Genius Grant, and they plan to award $10,000 to the person who submits the best idea for using super high-speed Internet to improve their community.
According to Philly Startup Leaders founder Blake Jenelle, "Our contest is showcasing dozens of ways that ultra-fast broadband will change communities. There are projects that will change how we deliver medicine, protect neighborhoods, perform art, educate children, experience history, connect with each other and more." The projects will be available to view on the Startup Leaders' website.
Welcome to our April Update on what’s new at Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal. In this update …
1. PLEASE JOIN US! May 11th, 2010 for our SPRING EDITION Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal LAUNCH at The Union League of Philadelphia, 140 South Broad St., Philadelphia, from 4-7 PM
2. GET YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED by the most well-known expert on innovations!
3. YOU’RE INVITED: An Education Forum facilitated by authors Clayton Christensen and Michael B. Horn on "What Our Education System Will Look Like When Transformation Is Complete"…join us for this exciting event at The Union League of Philadelphia, 140 South Broad St., Philadelphia, from 10 AM - 4 PM!
4. NEW BLOGS on socially relevant business trends and seniors in healthcare!
5. SNEAK A PEEK at the upcoming spring edition of the Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal
6. SOCIAL INNOVATOR NOMINATIONS
7. NEW Op-Ed from co-founders Tine Hansen-Turton and Nicholas Torres: “Back to the Basics and Good Ideas; Let the Spirit of Innovation Prevail”
8. How to GET INVOLVED …
Boulder, Bend, or Boca Raton? ZoomProspector.com, a business location Web site, says smaller cities have become the best places to start new companies. ZoomProspector weighed 11 factors—including the number of startups, quality of the workforce, and resources like universities and venture capital—to compile a list of the top places to build the next Apple (AAPL) or Google (GOOG).