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 methodology of the Harvard research that used secret cameras to study class attendance has concerned some faculty members. But putting aside the question of whether the methodology was ethical, what did the researchers learn about classroom-attendance patterns from their study, and what were the motives behind the experiment?
Image: Free Digital Photos
Swings are a childhood pastime, but when you add 250 feet of canyon between you and the ground, the stakes become a bit higher.
Daredevils Marshall Miller and Jesse Hall from GoPro's extreme "Bomb Squad" teamed up with Calvin Hecker of Sine Innovations to create an adult-sized rope swing in Utah that would terrify anyone.
We're pretty sure that umbrella didn't help much.
The U.S. economy has undergone a major shift in the past 50 years. Because of our involvement in World War II, the United States established a pre-eminent industrial base. We essentially produced everything the world wanted. By exporting our goods, our economy thrived and our people collected high wages. This created a huge disparity in wages of workers relative to those in less developed countries.
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U.S. venture-capital investment in Europe is increasing steadily, a new report by Germany’s Earlybird Venture Capital has found.
“The U.S. is slowly realizing the huge potential of European startups,” said Dörte Höppner, chief executive of the EVCA Venture Capital Forum in Berlin.
Europeans’ VC investments dropped to €3.2 billion ($4 billion) in 2012 from €3.8 billion in 2009, ticking up to €3.4 billion in 2013. Earlybird says U.S. VCs are stepping in and chasing European companies, steadily increasing their share of funding for early-stage startups
Image: King Digital Entertainment, maker of “Candy Crush Saga,” is one of Europe’s more successful recent venture exits. Bloomberg News/Simon Dawson
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n my time as a venture capitalist, I’ve received thousands – yes, thousands – of pitches from hopeful entrepreneurs, poised to change the world. Of those initial outreach asks, there’s a large percentage that gets immediately tossed and a whole bunch more that get nixed after our first call or meeting. For any interaction there’s always a series of “do’s” and “don’t’s” and the world of venture capital is no different. If you’re in front of any legitimate investor, there are a few things that should never come out of your mouth. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot – here are some pitfalls to avoid.
Google is approaching hospitals and universities with a new pitch. Have genomes? Store them with us.
The search giant’s first product for the DNA age is Google Genomics, a cloud computing service that it launched last March but went mostly unnoticed amid a barrage of high profile R&D announcements from Google, like one late last month about a far-fetched plan to battle cancer with nanoparticles (see “Can Google Use Nanoparticles to Search for Cancer?”).
Image: http://www.technologyreview.com
As economies fluctuate, so strategies need to adapt. This has always been the case. But as the world around us changes dramatically and certain elements, such as globalisation and the internet, are irreversible, some strategic changes need to be radical – and none more so than in the way suppliers engage with clients and other key stakeholders. Yet we see plenty of compainies merely tweaking what they did in good times in the hope that the good old days will return. They will not.
Image: http://ventureburn.com
The NBIA (National Business Incubation Association) seeks a dynamic new President and Chief Executive Officer. Our ideal candidate will be an exceptional leader with business expertise and a passion for entrepreneurship, as well as the drive, intellect, and professional presence to support and promote business incubation and acceleration.
The incoming President and CEO will report directly to the Board of Directors, and it is critical that this individual be well-versed in the broader national and international entrepreneur support ecosystem (including but not limited to business incubation, acceleration, coworking/emerging startup models, and economic environments – i.e. programs serving rural, urban, and developing economies).
Two senior female partners from Asia’s venture capital industry are giving their male peers a run for their money, having set up a new firm called Arbor Ventures.
Established by Melissa Guzy, previously a managing director of VantagePoint Asia, and Citi Ventures’ former head of Asia, Wei Hopeman, Arbor Ventures secured a first close for a $125 million debut fund on Wednesday.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Twenty years ago last month, a team of well-meaning designers, coders and magazine publishers inadvertently unleashed on an unsuspecting world one of the most misguided and destructive technologies of the Internet age: the web banner ad.
10 political priorities should lead the new European Commission and President Jean-Claude Juncker to improve the investment climate in Europe and encourage job creating entrepreneurship.
The European Union and Member States must put competitiveness first, if we want a brighter future for young generations, who are particularly hit by unemployment
Join us December 8th for a review of 16 exciting healthcare design projects at the Johns Hopkins Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design (CBID). CBID MSE and Undergraduate projects will be presented. This year we're honored to have as our Keynote Speaker Dr. John Kostuik. Dr. Kostuik is Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of K2M Inc, a world leading spine surgery company. The event will also have a Shark Tank competition with a panel of tough judges and real cash prizes. Refreshments will be provided.
Three years is a short time, but perhaps enough to give a sense of what is happening to US metropolitan areas. For both reasons of less uncertainty (and less work for me), I look at just the 107 US metro areas with 500,000 or more people in 2013. These regions house 213 million, two-thirds of the population. I look at the populations of core cities and their suburbs, comparing amounts and rates of change, with further comparison by population size and by region. One definitional problem is what I mean by “core” central city: not the multi-names given by OMB, but rather the historic cities by which we know the places. These can sometimes be a pair, for example, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Francisco-Oakland and San Bernardino-Riverside. Another problem I do not try to deal with is whether there were annexations to the core cities in these 3 years.
Image: http://www.newgeography.com
Spark Capital Growth, a new $375 million late-stage fund formed by Boston-based Spark Capital, was created with one goal in mind–to make sure that one of the venture industry’s most successful early-stage investors can replicate that success with more mature companies.
Nine-year-old Spark Capital hit the jackpot with early-stage deals in Twitter, Tumblr and Oculus, among other startups. But even the best of firms regret the ones that got away.
Image: Spark Capital has brought on Jeremy Philips to manage its growth fund, Spark Capital Growth. Spark Capital
It has been a busy year here at Fourth Economy. Many projects have kept us hard at work, traveling across the country and meeting great folks. A theme among these projects has been a growing desire and recognition for all places, communities and towns to reinvent themselves – transform, reimagine, pivot – all in order to attract new investment and the talent that fuels it. And within this theme is a common recognition that without quality options to live, sleep and interact, it is tough to attract that talent. Housing and the context that surrounds a community’s housing stock is (or should be) a cornerstone to any competitive and sustainable economic development strategy.
We might've been introduced to the concept of a hoverboard way back in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II, but decades later scientists are still struggling to bring the technology to reality. The difficulty is linked to what’s known as Earnshaw’s theorem, which basically states that when magnets are repelling each other, they’re going to be super-tough to balance.
Image: Arx Pax
Over the past five years, the Democratic Party has tried to add class warfare to its pre-existing focus on racial and gender grievances, and environmental angst. Shortly after his re-election in 2012, President Obama claimed to have “one mandate . . . to help middle-class families and families that are working hard to try to get into the middle class.”
Image: http://www.newgeography.com
The odds are pretty low that you’ll like everyone you have to manage. And while you may think that disliking an employee or two isn’t something to be concerned about (after all, making friends isn’t the point of being a manager), it can actually interfere with your job. A caring manager is key to employee engagement. When you have negative feelings toward an employee, chances are that person will feel less motivated. That disengagement can, in turn, affect your entire team and the outcome of important projects – which ultimately reflects badly upon you.
INVITATION
Welcome & Opening Remarks by:
Ambassador Claudio Bisogniero
Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet, SBA
There is growing interest for enabling Transatlantic Collaborations via STEM-Driven Research & Innovation. This half-day summit’s purpose is to enable technology development and deployment between the U.S. and Europe for research and small businesses that have benefited from the government’s innovation and funding pipeline. Through dynamic conversations with thought leaders, policy makers and doers from the private and public sectors, attendees will leave with a better understanding of how entrepreneurs can take their ideas from the lab and expand to a borderless market.
This event is organized on occasion of the Italian Presidency of the Council of the European Union. Italy will be hosting the next Global Entrepreneurship Congress in Milan in March 2015.
Brain science is taking a hit, according to a recent series of papers published in a special issue of the Cell Press journal Neuron.
MORE Can Neuroscience Debunk Free Will? Gamblers Get Less Of a Buzz From Pleasure, Study Finds Who Shot Bin Laden? A Tale of Two SEALs NBC News Boehner Warns Obama After Midterms: Don't 'Poison the Well' NBC News The Hate Boat: Jihadis Using Pleasure Cruises to Get to Syria NBC News “While the disease burden and economic impacts are on the rise, progress in the development of new therapeutics and treatment approaches has appeared to have stalled,” reads an editorial introducing the issue. “Approval for new therapeutics (whether drugs, devices, or other treatment approaches) for nervous system disorders have been declining and most of the treatments we currently have are not disease modifying.”
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