For a country aspiring to global economic leadership, the 2014 Global Innovation Index (GII) brings bad news for India. For the Index saw the country drop 10 places compared to last year. The Index — published by Cornell University, INSEAD, and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) — measures innovation. If the measure provided by the Index is anything to go by, then India ought to close its innovation gap. This is crucial if it is to prosper as it can and should. The world’s top economies are driven by innovation, and India is falling behind. An important part of bridging the innovation gap is for India to improve its intellectual property systems.

Image: India’s R&D spending remains low when compared to most other countries that aspire to economic leadership. Picture shows the research laboratory of a private pharmaceutical firm in Mumbai. Photo: Reuters

The city has long been a source of inspiration for artists, who have throughout history flocked to cultural meccas like Paris, London, and New York. A eye-catching new book of art and photography called Imagine Architecture probes the way architecture and the urban realm have influenced visual artists in almost all mediums, whether it's digitally altered photographs, large-scale sculptures, black-and-white sketches, or folded paper. The works that appear in the book are no ordinary cityscapes. These buildings bend, twist, flip, and float in impossible ways--architectural reveries rendered in uncanny contexts.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

Isolated, the words all sound so cliché. Organic. Flowing. Curvy. But set to the backdrop of Chicago's blocky skyline, they assemble a brash thesis on the city's future: The new George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a low-slung knoll inside a landscape of towering Lego, an Egyptian pyramid reimagined for the year 2020.

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

Growth is awesome.  This is true in any business setting, but particularly so in an early-stage environment. For entrepreneurs, growth is a wonder drug that cures most visible ailments, and countless hidden ones.  But, like anything, too much growth (too aggressive, overextending operations) can also create problems for our evolving organizations.  As a result, we focus a lot on how to manage growth – how to tame the same wild beast that we strive tirelessly to unleash.  We obsess about how to prepare our organizations to perform successfully as they grow – in short, how to “scale” a business.  Conversations about scale tend to focus on systems, processes, people, and business models…each of which is important.  But, in my experience, one thing rises above them all as far as criticality in scaling: mindset.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia M. Burwell today named a new member to the Health Information Technology Policy Committee (HITPC) and renewed appointments for three members of the Health IT Standards Committee (HITSC). The committees are charged with recommending policies and technologies needed to implement a nationwide health information technology infrastructure and strategic plan. 

Intel Capital, the venture arm of the world’s biggest chipmaker, is unveiling it has invested $62 million in 16 tech startups today. The investments show that Intel is still bullish about funding new tech companies that could one day spur lots of purchases of its microprocessors and other gear.

Image: Shubham Banerjee, the 13-year-old founder of Braigo Labs, which is one of 16 companies Intel Capital is investing in. Image Credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

After Clark Benson sold his company eCrush in 2007, he had two choices: He could either take a sabbatical or he could jump right in and start building his fifth company, Ranker, a site that would crowdsource rankings of everything from movies to athletes. Feeling self-inflicted pressure, he chose the latter — and, in his words, it turned out to be a colossal mistake.

Image: Free Digital Photos

The Chinese regime is getting into the patent trolling business, having set up a company that will start suing American companies for patent fraud. Experts believe the new Chinese company, which the regime seeded with $50 billion in fluff patents, could be detrimental to American innovation.

Image: White House press secretaryJay Carney holds up a folder with an image of a troll and the words "innovation, not litigation" during the daily press briefing at the White House in Washington, Tuesday, June 4, 2013. Efforts to reform U.S. patent law are likely to be revived during the next U.S. administration, given the efforts by a new Chinese-state-funded company to make money off U.S. patents though questionable lawsuits. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

For the past four decades the Nikon Small World competition has placed photography under the microscope, with eye-catching results. This year’s 20 finalists, announced Thursday, are no exception, zooming in on microorganisms, minerals and even electronic circuitry to find beauty hidden from the naked eye.

Image: Larval stage of the acorn worm Balanoglossus misakiensis, dorsal view, showing cell borders, muscles and apical eyespots Credit: Sabrina Kaul; University of Vienna, Austria

Venture capital performance slipped in the second quarter of this year but the 10-year return continued its climb, outperforming public market indexes. The Cambridge Associates benchmark for the three months ended June 30 was 3%, down from 4.9% in the first quarter, according to data issued Friday by the advisory firm and the National Venture Capital Association.

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Here’s the scariest thing about burnout: It’s easy not to see it coming when you’re doing something you’re passionate about.

After several years of head-down-focused work, day in and day out, you’ll start to feel the rigorous training you’ve forced your body to adopt has taken a toll. You’ll either push through or hit the wall hard. The most successful people have all dealt with this life-work challenge at some point. Below, seven of them share what they did to reset and recover.

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Every once and a while you get a reminder that lives are literally at stake in some R&D partnerships. Last Wednesday was one of those days. I was privileged to moderate a panel for the Congressional Technology Transfer Caucus on innovative partnerships fostered by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) the newest center/institute at the National Institutes of Health. It was anything but a run of the mill tech transfer session.

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The San Francisco-based digital health accelerator Rock Health has raised a large third round of funding and says it will boost its investments in new portfolio companies to (up to) $250,000 each.

The new funding round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Kaiser Permanente Ventures, with participation from KPCB, Mayo Clinic, Montreux Equity Partners, and Great Oaks Ventures.

Image: http://venturebeat.com

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Yes, it’s true that some data scientists have left LinkedIn following a recent reorganization of these highly prized workers inside the company. But a few people holding these roles believe the moves have sped up decision-making, benefited the hiring process, and brought together people who perform similar functions.

Image: LinkedIn employees work at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. Image Credit: Jordan Novet/VentureBeat

AT&T today announced that the Nokia Lumia 830 with Windows Phone 8.1 will be available exclusively with the U.S. carrier starting on November 7. At first glance, this seems like a standard deal, except that early adopters will get a free Fitbit Flex (normally $99.99), while supplies last.

Marc Andreessen, the Web pioneer who co-founded Netscape Communications more than two decades ago, has become one of the most prominent investors in Silicon Valley.

His venture-capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, was among the early investors in Twitter Inc. and Facebook Inc., bet on Skype ahead of its acquisition by Microsoft Corp. and more recently has become a leading evangelist for bitcoin, investing in the digital-currency arena and tweeting and blogging about its potential.

Image: http://online.wsj.com

Light-bulb moments don’t happen on command, and brainstorming sessions rarely produce extraordinary results. More often it’s a random remark, event, or memory that sends an entrepreneur down the rabbit hole of innovation. From Airbnb to Yelp, here are the surprising origin stories to eight of today’s hottest companies:

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The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat, according to neuroscientist Gregory Berns. But take the body attached to it on a brisk walk or jog and suddenly your meat-brain is lighting up like a Lite-Brite.

WHAT EXACTLY IS GOING ON IN THERE? "When we exercise, blood pressure and blood flow increase everywhere in the body, including the brain," Justin Rhodes, associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign writes in Scientific American. "More blood means more energy and oxygen, which makes our brain perform better."

This weekend I was reading the NY Times online and I came across this excellent piece about ADHD written by Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry. In the article the author talks about the condition of the brain – which affects up to 11% of American children in which people with ADHD (or ADD, which doesn’t have hyperactivity) – in which people with ADD have a low tolerance for routine tasks and thus they seek out “novelty”.

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New Delhi, Nov 3 (IANS): Entrepreneurship and innovation are intrinsically linked with growth and development of any economy. Newer ways of competing define not just innovation but are also intrinsic to the very idea of capitalism. India of late is realizing this paradigm of innovation. How real is it? There are several organizations (the likes of ISRO, DRDO, various CSIR labs, L&T) that are engaged in and are doing path-breaking work. These are in several areas like space science (the Mangalyaan mission which has been described by China as the Pride of Asia) amd technological innovations (weapon systems co-developed by L&T and Indian Navy). A grassroots innovation movement has also taken strong shape in India. Newer frameworks like ‘jugaad innovation’ have become buzzwords. There is also a paradigm of ‘Reverse Innovation’ in which companies are innovating in India or a developing world context and once the innovation has taken proper shape, introducing it to the developed market.

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