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 largest volcano on Earth is not in Hawaii, but hidden beneath the western Pacific Ocean and covers an area the size of New Mexico, scientists announced on Thursday. The vast lump of lava is called the Tamu Massif and lies about 1,000 miles east of Japan. It is comparable, though somewhat less voluminous, than the enormous volcano Olympus Mons on Mars.
Image: for Discovery News
A new report shows that women startup founders are slowly gaining ground on their male peers when it comes to attracting venture capital investment but a huge gender gap remains.
That has led some female entrepreneurs to employ alternative financing structures to circumvent the enduring gender gap in VC funding. Meanwhile, other female founders and funders are focused on investing in women-led and adding to research in the field that illustrates why the gender gap matters.
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Sequoia Capital has decided to manage its activities in South America from its headquarters in California after its lone partner here, David Velez, left to start his own venture, people with direct knowledge of the firm’s plans said.
The move, which these people said had been in the works for several months, shows the difficulty the Silicon Valley venture capital firm has faced in finding attractive investments in the region, even as start-ups have proliferated in recent years.
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San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee and the White House launched a new initiative Friday aimed at getting entrepreneurs to create tech-based solutions for some of the city's gnarliest problems.
The program is a start-up accelerator, of sorts: the 16-week workshop--called Entrepreneur-in-Residence San Francisco--will select three to five teams of entrepreneurs and provide them with mentorship from private sector corporations, including McKinsey and GE. Their goal: solve a public sector problem.
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Kicking off the fall semester, the University of Maryland is giving the thousands of innovative minds across campus new ways to share and explore their fearless ideas. Starting today, the university is expanding its popular "Innovation Fridays," which give students the opportunity to meet with experienced innovators and entrepreneurs, get free and impartial advice, brainstorm strategies, and learn about available resources and funding.
This morning San Francisco mayor Edwin Lee is unveiling a new “entrepreneur-in-residence” program in collaboration with the White House to bring the innovative energy of startups to bear on a massive underserved market: the $142 billion public sector.
What can startups do for big city, state, and federal bureaucracies?
“Rather than someone building an app that tells you how late the buses are running, it’s a bit like an app that tells you how the entire Muni system is running,” a mayor’s office spokesperson told me this morning, referring to San Francisco’s municipal bus and train system.
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My posting of Business Plans are for Bureaucrats has attracted a fair amount of interest, so here’s some more to consider when it comes to planning and start-ups.
William Bygrave’s publication ‘Pre-start-up Formal Business Plans and Post-start-up Performance: A Study of 116 New Ventures’ published in Venture Capital in 2007 is worth a detailed read. For those that prefer the thirty second read, here are the two key quotes:
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Across the globe, reef-building corals live in symbiosis with algae, which provide the animals with food and their iconic brilliant color. But environmental stress — high temperatures, in particular — can kill corals by causing them to "bleach," a process in which they lose their vital algal friends and turn ghostly white.
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Sponsorship is incredibly reciprocal.
Protégés attract sponsors by delivering in exceptional ways and secure sponsorship by remaining utterly devoted, even as they distinguish themselves as stars in their own right. In return, sponsors invest in their protégés, not because they’re impelled to pay it forward but because they recognize the incredible benefit to their own careers of building a loyal cadre of outstanding performers who can extend their reach, build their legacy, and burnish their reputation. Over time, both parties win. Indeed, the win-win aspect of sponsorship is what accounts for its extraordinary leverage and durability.
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If you happen upon the offices of Buffer in San Francisco on a given afternoon looking for Leo Widrich, you'd better choose a time other than 3 p.m. Why? Because the cofounder and CMO is probably going to be napping, as he's done every day for two years.
That's because Widrich, himself a student of productivity, found that the mid-afternoon was the worst part of his workday. The post-lunch dip got him bad: He would get super tired and find that he detested whatever he was working on, regardless of what it was.
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If you're reading this while slumped over your smartphone or hunched in front of your laptop, chances are that you'll be less assertive with the next task you have to tackle.
Why? Because, as a growing body of research is finding, the way you hold your body shapes the way your mood will hold you. In other words, your posture predicts your feelings--and your work.
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Foundations increasingly are tapping into the unique skills of institutions of higher education by partnering with them to support entrepreneurial growth within their surrounding communities. These foundations view institutions of higher education as the ideal partners to provide education and business services necessary for entrepreneurs to reach their potential. Several foundations recently have announced funding to support entrepreneurship development activities at universities including the Ratcliffe Foundation and the Allstate Foundation. The Blackstone Charitable Foundation also announced that it is accepting applications from institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations to pilot, expand or replicate entrepreneurship initiatives.
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First Round Capital has made a big bet on students sourcing and making investments at colleges around the U.S. with its Dorm Room Fund. the idea behind the Dorm Room Fund is that if students are motivated enough and smart enough to start a company while in college, then they are capable to run a venture fund, and back the next big ideas. First Round originally launched the fund in Philadelphia and expanded the initiative to New York and San Francisco (and soon Boston). Today, the Dorm Room Fund has made 20 investments in startups, and the firm is announcing the addition of 60-plus mentors.
The ability to start a new business does not make an entrepreneur successful. In many ways starting the business is one of the easiest parts of the entrepreneurial process. Building and growing it into a sustainable venture is the hard part. But, it is also what determines true entrepreneurial success.
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The North Dakota Department of Commerce today announced details of the technology-based entrepreneurship grant (TBEG) program. The program is designed to grow technology based entrepreneurship in North Dakota by providing grants to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial centers in four main areas: access to capital, marketing assistance, entrepreneur infrastructure and entrepreneurial talent.
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The end of summer can sneak up on you. One week you're planning for day trips to the beach, and the next you're digging out your sweatpants. It's important that you prepare yourself emotionally for the temporary loss of outdoor movies and ice cream trucks.
Technically, you have until Sept. 22 to reach acceptance. But the earlier you start coming to terms with the start of fall, the happier you'll end up when it's too cold to go outside without a coat.
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In the United States, our higher education system is broken. Since 1980, we've seen a 400% increase in the cost of higher education, after adjustment for inflation — a higher cost escalation than any other industry, even health care. We have recently passed the trillion dollar mark in student loan debt in the United States.
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You have two main options for consideration, we have outlined below some of the pros and cons:-
1) serviced offices or
2) conventional lease.
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Instead of running around trying to find a job in this most challenging job-hunting season, some college grads in the city of Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, have decided to start their own companies and designed a business incubator to support the growth of micro-to-small-size companies, which officially began operation, on Aug 27.
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Dear Mayors, Community Leaders, and Visionaries,
I wanted to reach out to you all to remind you that nomination forms for the 2014 Awards Program are due by September 23. Through our awards program, we at ICF are able to salute your accomplishments in building prosperous economies, solving social problems, and enriching culture using broadband and information technology.
