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.
U.S. President Barack Obama met with a gaggle of top tech industry executives on Tuesday, including representatives from Google, Apple, Facebook and more. The main purpose of the meeting was different depending on who you asked.
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How come that upper middle managers and entrepreneurs look at things in different ways? The answer lies partly in their personality types. It is known that certain personality types work better in certain situations than other. This is also valid for the innovation area, as Bengt Järrehult describes below.
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Are you freelancing, running a consulting or side business, or launching a startup? If you're self-employed, you’ll need to tackle your business structure at one time or another, and that decision can influence how you pay taxes, what happens if you get sued and how much paperwork you have to deal with.
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Do you have revenues of $5-$10MM and profits under $3MM a year? Are you a company looking to raise outside capital for the first time? If you answered yes to both of the preceeding questions, you are about to enter what I call “The Death Zone” for venture capital. And, as the name suggests, “The Death Zone”, much like its namesake in oxygen-starved environments north of 26,000 feet in elevation, can make for a suffocating experience when trying to raise capital.
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Investments in energy start-ups can count as charitable grants. Could this funding approach help get new technologies to market?
Just a few years ago, the conference rooms of the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square, just across the street from MIT, were abuzz with venture capitalists who were going to solve climate change by funding startups with novel solar cell and biofuel technologies. I remember John Doerr, of Kleiner Perkins, tearing up as he talked about the importance of investing in technology to stop global warming.
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Pregnant women and their partners can already peer at an unborn child’s chromosomes: with amniocentesis, they can learn about the presence or, more likely, absence of large-scale genetic defects, often gaining peace of mind. But only a small percentage of parents-to-be take the opportunity, because the procedure is invasive and uncomfortable—a large needle is inserted into the amniotic sac—and causes miscarriage in roughly one in 400 cases.
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Over the last decade innovation has been rapidly becoming a key driver to economic growth and job creation (Global Innovation Index report, 2011).
We are observing a growing trend in developing national policies and government initiatives to build knowledge-intensive economies. There have been an emergence of indicators and measures of knowledge economy, e.g. Knowledge Economy Index produced by the World Bank, Global Competitiveness Index developed by the World Economic Forum, all of which featuring innovation and technology adoption levels.
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The incubation centres at the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were set up for converting ideas to practical solutions. They are now churning out some real success stories. Take the case of IIT Bombay. It was among the first engineering institutions in the country to set up an incubation and innovation centre to support many bright sparks. “Incubation centres are a platform where ideas and crude prototypes can be turned into products that can be commercialised. We established the centre at out institute the year 2000 and have incubated 48 companies, of which about 20 have been funded,” says Poyni Bhatt, chief administrative officer at IIT Bombay’s Society for Incubation and Entrepreneurship (SINE).
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Further to my earlier post, Mentoring Startups: 10 Lessons We Have Learned, I want to also go over our learnings through running, what is today, the world’s only global virtual incubation program.
1. Reach & Scalability: We have successfully created a virtual incubation program that entrepreneurs all over the world are using. The self-service curriculum is quite rich now, which makes the program scalable. Also, the online mentoring roundtables have been extremely productive, as discussed in the earlier post. We’re also running an active content organization that helps our portfolio companies get coverage, as well as distribution for their messages through social media (reach over 100k currently).
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It was a frustrating situation for Americans. Healthcare.gov, the site launched in early October that was supposed to ease, educate and transition America into shopping for insurance plans. Good in theory. In application, a harshly criticized website burdened with bugs, errors and delays.
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Is your business metabolism a little low or sluggish? It takes a lot of energy to keep up. Technology, business, consumer and career trends continue to change and develop at lightning speed. Not to mention the changing demographics of people you market to. Are you targeting the right people? Is your branding and visual marketing fresh and engaging? Are you using the best practices, tactics and technology for who you need to reach?
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The National Institutes of Health is releasing funding opportunities to build a new arsenal of tools and technologies for unlocking the mysteries of the brain. The NIH action is in support of President Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.
The six opportunities announced today were developed in response to high priority areas(PDF – 536KB) identified by the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director’s BRAIN Working Group in September 2013. Awards are expected to be announced in September 2014 and will constitute NIH’s initial investment of $40 million in the initiative.
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There is a lot to consider when launching a startup — typically first comes the idea and then excitement ensues and a rush to get it up and running. Deciding whether or not to launch your product/idea in more than just your native country sometimes doesn’t even come up. But here’s why it should.
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I was having a conversation the other day with an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, California who has hired coaches before, has regrets about his lack of success or rather limited belief that he lacks success and his inability to resonate with or see value in coaching because he’s invested and been burned one too many times. Now, while I wouldn’t take him on as a client I wanted to write this for him because he asked a question that needs to be answered by someone who not only has results but can prove their results. His question was “How do you know a good coach from a bad?”
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Life as an under 30 can be a mixture of things. Yes, we’ve got youth on our side but there is also a myriad of temptations that come up along the way to distract us from our goals.
I believe, your twenties are the best time to set you up for the rest of your life. I read a quote recently that said “Do something each day that your future self will thank you for”
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IBM revealed its predictions for five big innovations that will change our lives within five years.
The IBM 5 in 5 is the eighth year in a row that IBM has made predictions about technology, and this year’s prognostications are sure to get people talking. We discussed them with Bernie Meyerson, vice president of innovation at IBM, and he told us that the goal of the predictions is to better marshal the company’s resources in order to make them come true.
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As 2013 winds down, we asked several venture capital investors to reflect on the past year and give us their outlook for 2014. Next up in our series is Aileen Lee, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and founding partner at Cowboy Ventures.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Aileen Lee Ms. Lee speaks about Zulily’s performance in its initial public offering, how technology companies have appreciated in the public market and how venture needs to show it can deliver better returns.
A 220 mph High Speed Rail Preliminary Feasibility Study — prepared for the State of Illinois Department of Transportation by the University of Illinois in collaboration with three private-sector engineering firms — cites in its introduction Gov. Quinn’s “vision to more closely connect the University of Illinois to Chicago” as the animating idea behind an interest in the southbound O’Hare-Chicago-Champaign1 route as a priority for further study, evaluation, and development.
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There's nothing quite so delicious as clean, simple answers for messy, complex things--like, say, our how our brains work and how they relate to our personalities. Loads of books will tell you about how the left side of your brain is cold, analytical, and logical while the right ride is effusive, creative, and unruly, an odd couple co-habitating in your cranium, with your personality and team dynamics following suit.
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When I was a student at Penn many years ago, a couple of friends and I had an idea to create a customized candy bar business. We would make unique candy bars and allow people to create their own combinations from a long list of inclusion options. Our friends loved the concept, but when we talked to “experts” in the industry, we were met with a great deal of skepticism around our ability to take it from idea to actual product. We had no advanced equipment and we knew next to nothing about the confectionery industry and the candy bar making process. Even more worrying was that the experts from whom we sought guidance didn’t have the answers we were looking for themselves. Many thought it would be impossible to design a customized bar-making process.
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