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.
Chinaccelerator graduated 10 software startups from its three-month Fall 2014 programme (Batch VI) in Shanghai at the end of November, with around 200 in attendance on demo day. The startups range from those that can help find the closest happy hour, to 3D nail art designs, to a music platform.
Image: Chinaccelerator
NASA’s Curiosity rover has explored Gale Crater for 833 Martian days, or Sols. And it has found evidence, written in red rocks and sand, of lakes and streams on a warmer, wetter, habitable Mars.
Consider if you will the following quotations, each from executives at Philips, the global technology company—one in the late 1970s and one quite recently:
Canadian researchers have developed “smart textiles” able to monitor and transmit wearers’ biomedical information via wireless or cellular network by superimposing multiple layers of copper, polymers, glass, and silver.
“The fiber acts as both sensor and antenna. It is durable but malleable, and can be woven with wool or cotton, and signal quality is comparable to commercial antennas,” explained Professor Younes Messaddeq at Université Laval’s Faculty of Science and Engineering and Centre for Optics, Photonics and Lasers.
Image: Smart fabric is durable, malleable, and can be woven with cotton or wool. Horizontal lines are antennas. (Credit: Stepan Gorgutsa, Universite Laval)
Every company believes it is fostering innovation but not every company does. We talked to a panel of innovation experts for the approach a company needs to take to truly encourage new thinking. Here’s what they said:
Fix your mindset. Established companies are especially afraid to fail and can’t grow as a result. However, it’s the truly innovative companies that have learned to expect and manage failure who are able to pursue the freshest approaches.
Hang on to your hats, America.
And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.
There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.
I spend a lot of time with startups and thus hear many companies talk about their approach to sales and their interactions with customers. From these meetings you can really tell the leaders that care deeply about their customers and those the look down on them. Given customers & sales are the lifeblood of any organization you’d imagine everybody would respect their customers. You’d be very wrong.
Bamboo is one of the most amazing plants in the world. In fact, a single stalk of bamboo has more tensile strength than a steel cable of the same thickness! (In South America, it’s referred to as “vegetable steel”). A rope made of bamboo fibers can get up to 20% stronger when wet, as opposed to hemp, which weakens. And it grows. Fast. Some species of the plant can grow a staggering 3 feet in a 24 hour period and reach over 100 feet in height! It’s the most rapidly growing plant on earth. It’s used for everything from construction, to medicine, to cooking, to textiles. But if you were to plant a handful of bamboo seeds in the ground tomorrow, you’d be incredibly disappointed.
Urban America is often portrayed as a tale of two kinds of places, those that “have it” and those who do not. For the most part, the cities of the Midwest—with the exception of Chicago and Minneapolis—have been consigned to the second, and inferior, class. Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit or a host of smaller cities are rarely assessed, except as objects of pity whose only hope is to find a way, through new urbanist alchemy, to mimic the urban patterns of “superstar cities” like New York, San Francisco, Boston, or Portland.
Y
oung people get a reputation for job hopping, and it’s kind of deserved. A recent survey from Payscale and Millennial Branding found that about a quarter of people born between 1982 and 2002 believe you should start looking for a new job before you’ve been at another one for a year.
But not everyone switches jobs frequently. Indeed, some young people stay in jobs for many years. The reasons aren’t all positive; sometimes people stay because there aren’t other opportunities. However, job longevity is often a sign that organizations are doing something right. Generally, that "something" is on this list:
We can be quick to judge others in the workplace—bosses, coworkers, even ourselves—based on our ideas of personality.
But our preconceived notions about personality aren't just wrong, they can be downright dangerous to our health and relationships, says psychologist Brian Little, author of a new book on the science of personality Me, Myself, and Us.
Coming up with a technological breakthrough is a feather in a university researcher's cap.
But taking that brilliant notion, and forming a profitable business, involves another degree of difficulty. So professors and other researchers who want to turn their intellectual gifts into gold will probably need a little help along the way.
"It takes more than a great idea," said Paul Riser Jr., managing director of technology-based entrepreneurship for Detroit business incubator TechTown. "Professors sometimes are great technologists or great engineers and sometimes they don't have the know-how, from a business perspective."
Image: JOHN SOBCZAK A good idea isn't the only thing that is needed to create a business from a university research project, it's know-how that's needed as well, said Paul Riser Jr., managing director of technology-based entrepreneurship for Detroit business incubator TechTown.
The U.S. Census Bureau released a new tool today, “Young Adults Then and Now,” that mashes the info gathered about 18- to 34-year-olds in censuses from 1980, 1990, and 2000, and the 2009-2013 American Community Survey. The result is a robust, mapped-up, color-chartful presentation of numbers via dropdown menus and metro drilldowns that you could easily spend an afternoon eyeballing.
GSK has given its employees more control in how they deal with their caring responsibilities. Nick Martindale examines how the approach has worked.
For years, many declining industrial cities watched as a steady stream of residents packed up their bags and moved away. Over time, as few people moved in to replace them, these cities became dominated by residents who had grown up in the area or had lived there for most of their lives.
Places like these are marked by people who maintain strong local ties and are generally more civically active, making for distinct communities. To help gauge how deeply rooted residents are in cities, Governing analyzed data from the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey. Factors reviewed included length of housing tenure, whether people lived in the state where they were born and recent migration data. From these measures, several cities emerged as places where residents tend to have deep local roots.
Image: Cleveland has a large share of natives who have lived in their residences for a long time. FlickrCC/Tom Baker
How well run is your state? Assessing a state’s management quality is hardly easy. The current economic climate and standard of living in any given state are not only the results of policy choices and developments that occurred in the last few years, but can also be affected by decisions made decades ago, and by forces outside a state’s control.
Many of the estimated 50 million lithium-ion laptop batteries discarded every year could provide electricity storage sufficient to light homes in poor countries, researchers at IBM say.
In work being aired this week at a conference in San Jose, researchers at IBM Research India in Bangalore found that at least 70 percent of all discarded batteries have enough life left to power an LED light at least four hours a day for a year.
Image: http://www.technologyreview.com
Automation Alley is launching a new accelerator targeting Southeast Michigan's advanced manufacturing firms.
The 7Cs Program, as it is being called, will assist firms that are beyond the idea stage and can get to commercialization within the next 12 to 24 months. But what is most exciting about the program is that it promises to connect participating firms with their first customer. Already Automation Alley has the chief innovation officers of more than two dozen tier-one suppliers in Michigan signed on to review the participants when they are ready.
Image: GLENN TRIEST The first test company in Automation Alley's new accelerator for advanced manufacturing businesses is IMX Cosmetics LLC. Founder Julie Bartholomew already has found a customer interested in installing her automated cosmetics customization machine in department stores.
Collaboration is important for nonprofits because it is based on the idea that organizations attempting to change the world for the better create a unified vision and strive towards common goals. However, even in the most pure of endeavors, there are some who shy away from the idea of working together. So are there valid reasons for nonprofit organizations to begin collaborating with one and other?
Raising a large pool of money from many small contributions online, known as crowdfunding, was supposed to be an option for startup business to raise money when President Obama signed the 2012 JOBS Act into law. But today, that method of raising investment capital still remains out of reach for many entrepreneurs. NewsHour special correspondent Karla Murthy explores the support, concern and timeline of the crowdfunding provision's implementation.
