Innovation America
Accelerating the growth of the GLOBAL entrepreneurial innovation economy
Founded by Rich Bendis
innovation DAILY
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.
Creative Entrepreneurs Protect their Future One Idea at a Time
Those creative entrepreneurs who are not only willing to go out on a limb and invest in the next big thing, but to actually develop a project from start to finish can sometimes face a unique conundrum. These entrepreneurs want to spread the word about their business like fire through a forest, but know they must keep their new applications, unique innovations, and brilliant ideas from their rivals or potential pirates.
Morgantown, WV (Bluehost/PRWEB ) December 23, 2009 -- Virtual Global, a leading provider of cloud-enabled enterprise solutions and the TeamHost™ online platform for creating SaaS applications, released its "Top ten cloud computing predictions for 2010" as part of its "Cloud Computing Made Easy" eBook available for download at www.cloudipedia.com.
"Cloud computing's time has come," said Cary Landis, CEO of Virtual Global. "In today's economy, smaller businesses see it as an economic necessity. The market demands it."
Many small business owners start a blog as a way to connect with their audience, grow authority and help educate their little corner of the world. But even the best content goes nowhere without an audience. As a small business blogger, building your audience means finding ways to continually bring new subscribers and eyeballs to your blog. But how do you do that?
I’m no stranger to blogging for business and have found there are many low intensity ways for bloggers to increase and encourage people to subscribe to their blog. Below are some suggestions.
Small, economical cars have satisfied a niche of the auto market for decades.
The guys pictured are pushing a BMW Isetta, one of the first ever produced. It premiered in 1955, but only lasted a couple years. After making around 160,000 units, BMW ceased production of the original and started coming out with new and improved versions, which it continued to do until the early 1960s when the Isetta was retired for good.
There is no doubt that these are tough economic times. Unemployment is high and credit is tight. Key indicates show that is the worse economy in a generation. Many technology transfer offices have seen potential business partners reduce their innovation portfolios and expenditures. This coupled with a reduction in funding sources, from grants and investors to university sources are blowing the technology transfer research commercialization efforts into the perfect storm.
There are difficulties and challenges, but these times also create opportunities. Here are seven tips to help your technology transfer office succeed in these tough economic times.
Going into next year, venture capitalists are feeling more optimistic about the chances of exiting their portfolio companies. Much of this optimism comes from the successful, albeit few, public offerings of venture-backed companies this year.
Investment bankers are now giving a clear green light for new offerings and the number of companies to file has increased dramatically from the first half of the year. The number of companies making plans to go public next year has increased even more.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said on Wednesday that the country will be launching a National Innovation Center (MyNIC) in the first quarter of 2010. In his latest blog's posting on Wednesday, Najib said the MyNIC, supported by a network of innovation excellence centers, was tasked to advance the country's scientific and technological capabilities.
Readers may see the video in English in this entry or by clicking here. To see an interview in English to the author of the "story of a frog", the philosopher from Switzeralnd, Olivier Clerc, click here. There are other versions in French, Spanish and Italian in our Spanish Blog. The Video of the "Story of a Frog" tell us about the importance of Citizens Voice in Government Quality. Education usually contributes to foster Citizens Voice and Government Effectiveness. Econometrics research also shows those positive effects. Educate population has an important role to avoid manipulation of public opinion and to foster good quality of life for all.
With the new-year upon us, this is a time for family, fun and food! Having family members that love to cook (and are quite good at it) I’m always anticipating the next iteration of quiche or curry, hopefully not combined. Cooking is something many of us enjoy doing, so it was with great pleasure I stumbled upon an article about the Food52 website and decided to share it with our Solvers.
Food52 is a crowdsourcing website for people who love to cook: it is made up of a community of cooks initially signed up for the chance to contribute to the next cookbook by New York Times food critic and author Amanda Hesser and freelance food writer Merrill Stubbs’s by way of weekly, themed contests. Hesser and Stubbs will choose a list of finalists in each culinary category, but it is the community who will vote on the final selection of recipes to be included in the cookbook. In addition, the community will also choose the title, cover design and photos.
Don Norman, a rare intellect and a major godfather of Design, has launched a provocative broadside against Design that has enormous implications for building an innovative society. Norman tells designers to get over themselves. It is science and technology that drive truly disruptive innovation, not Design’s focus on the needs and wants of people. Ethnographic research, Norman says, can generate small, incremental innovations but the blockbuster game-changing stuff, comes from the lab, not the village or the mall. Norman states: “I’ve come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs.” In short, tech trumps culture. New technology comes first. Inventing new products comes second. Finding new needs for those products comes third.
A successful change isn't just a dream (or nightmare). It requires creative, energetic leaders who can engage a diverse workforce in taking on health-care challenges
Because no one can predict the final outcome of health-care reform, providers of all shapes and sizes are preparing for a wide array of possibilities. Health care has seen this uncertainty before, and we believe that looking to the past for insight helps to illustrate what the future could hold for health-care providers.
While the Clintons' reform efforts in the mid-1990s didn't even make it to the floor of the House or the Senate, providers anticipating reform unleashed a wave of proactive innovations including formations of large regional and multistate health-care systems, investments in financial and clinical information systems, radical changes in supply chains, and leveraging of scale to negotiate rates with commercial insurance companies.
U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu today outlined the department’s plans to invest up to $366 million to establish and operate three new Energy Innovation Hubs focused on accelerating research and development in three key energy areas. Each hub, to be funded at up to $122 million over five years, will bring together a multidisciplinary team of researchers in an effort to speed research and shorten the path from scientific discovery to technological development and commercial deployment of highly promising energy-related technologies.
With concerns about sales, unemployment, access to credit, and health care reform paramount on the economic scene, accounting and taxes may not be on your radar screen. Still, these factors have a direct impact on your bottom line—the more of your earnings that you keep after tax, the better.
Looking ahead, taxes will continue to be used for social engineering—to encourage job creation, help the unemployed, provide incentives for going green, assist U.S. companies going global, and ensure that most Americans have health coverage. Taxes will also be used to serve its traditional function as a revenue raiser to pay for the war in Afghanistan. Within this context, here are the top 10 trends in accounting and taxes for 2010.
“FESTIVALS,” to adapt an anthropological adage, “are good to think with.” An especially salient festival like Christmas is abundantly thought-provoking. Take one aspect of behavior at Christmas: gift-giving.
Our culture divides the world into the public and the private. The public is for business, impersonality, contracts, cold reason, politics, officialdom, money and legal obligation. The private is everything the public is not — warm emotional involvement with family and friends, love, the unofficial, the uncalculating. We place the giving and receiving of personal gifts in the private sphere. Obligatory giving is for us a contradiction in terms.
As I [THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN] listened to Denmark’s minister of economic and business affairs describe how her country used higher energy taxes to stimulate innovation in green power and then recycled the tax revenues back to Danish industry and consumers to make it easier for them to make and buy the new clean technologies, it all sounded so, well, intelligent. It sounded as if the Danes looked at themselves after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, found that they were totally dependent on Middle East oil and put in place a long-term strategy to make Denmark energy-secure and start a new industry at the same time.
The more I listened to the Danish minister, Lene Espersen, the more I thought of my own country, where I’ve been told time and again by U.S. politicians that proposing even a 10-cent-a-gallon increase in gasoline taxes to make America more energy independent and to stimulate fuel efficiency is “off the table,” an act of sure political suicide.
What is Technology Transfer? Generally speaking, it’s the process of transmitting research, technology or scientific findings from research labs to commercial users i.e. ‘Technology Commercialization’. Many companies, universities and government organizations have an “Office of Tech Transfer” dedicated to identifying research which has potential commercial interest and strategies on how to exploit it. The process of commercially exploiting research varies widely. Tech transfer models and techniques can involve licensing, joint ventures or partnerships. The classic model was to develop a license to transfer new technology or research to an existing company. But a very few existing companies will take the risk of commercializing ‘premature’ technology findings. This is where startups come in and facilitate tech transfer. Startups have an opportunity to bring technology from the research labs to the commercial end users and companies. They can either work on the technology and build it in-house completely or further research on a technology provided by the researchers. A new model of tech transfer is being evolved and startups have a major role to play! Brian Darmody talks more about this topic in an interview with venturehype. Have a look: http://venturehype.com/startups-creation-and-tech-transfer/
There's no sugarcoating it: Raising money for your startup won't get much easier in 2010, since the capital market for early-stage investments is still reeling from the effects of the recession.
But there is still money out there and there are better (and worse) ways to pursue it. Here's how to make the best of the leading trends for 2010:
1.Remember: Angels didn't stop investing--they're just writing smaller checks. There will always be high-net-worth individuals and former entrepreneurs who like to invest in startups, and next year should be no different. But as long as the stock market remains rocky and liquidating stock to make investments remains painful, angels will be investing less. As an entrepreneur, you should plan to get a smaller portion of your money from angel investors, or approach more investors per round.