The One-to-One Business Partnering Program is a dedicated part of the Biotechnology & Human Health Program and gives you the opportunity to set up 20-minute pre-scheduled meetings. The program offers a great complement to your informal networking opportunities throughout the program. Access to the partnering program is included in a full-conference registration.

BY OPENING UP ITS NEST THERMOSTAT TO DEVELOPERS, GOOGLE JUST BRANDED THE INTERNET OF THINGS FOR ITSELF.

We’ve been told that an Internet of Things (IoT) is coming, and our salt shakers will soon be speaking to our light bulbs. But how? There’s no decided way for all of these devices to talk to one another.

In my article "Practice Incremental Innovation," I discussed the difference between radical and incremental innovation, and what that difference means to CAD managers' ability to implement change in the workplace. For another take on that concept, I recommend an interesting blog post by Vadim Kotelnikov, founder of the Ten3 Business e-Coaching training and Disruptive Innovation authority.

Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net

The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation today announced a new challenge grant of up to $1.435 million to support and enhance programming for Pipeline, an exclusive community of high-potential entrepreneurial leaders building high-growth companies throughout the Midwest region. The grant follows on a close relationship between the two organizations since Pipeline’s inception and will be matched dollar for dollar with private sector participation – including from its own entrepreneurs. 

Image: http://www.anderson.ucla.edu 

AusBiotech’s substantive submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Economics’ Australian Innovation System inquiry has called for tax reform, support for commercialisation, incentives for commercial thinking and clinical trial reform.

AusBiotech said that public policy plays a critical role in the development of the biotechnology industry: by incentivising desirable behaviours/choices to build Australia’s innovation ecosystem in a global context, such as providing globally competitive tax policy; and in providing support where the ecosystem currently has gaping holes.

It’s just another day in leadership paradise. An important project is languishing—like a bad houseguest, it’s going nowhere, but no one is calling it out. As the head of your team, do you take the matter into your own hands and get the job done, or continue to slough it off on an unfortunate subordinate?  

Image: Susan Cramm, leadership coach, author, and former CFO and CIO, is committed to the principle that the best leaders take care of business by taking care of the people entrusted to their care.  - http://www.strategy-business.com

When contemplating possible threats to their business, many executives worry about disruption. They see competitors with new technologies poised to capture their existing customers, and they know it’s better to be a disruptor than a disruptee. But disruption is often misunderstood. In fact, as New Yorker writer Jill Lepore points out (“The Disruption Machine,” June 23, 2014), many celebrated cases have been less disruptive than they were portrayed as being. What most industries experience as disruption is typically not a sudden change from one source, but the accumulated impact of a range of interacting factors. If you want to be prepared for disruption, it’s critical to understand the more gradual, prevalent, and multifaceted dynamic that underlies it: a phenomenon called dematurity.

Image: Illustration by Lars Leetaru - http://www.strategy-business.com

When the leaders of a major retail pharmacy chain set out to enhance customer satisfaction, market research told them that the number one determinant would be friendly and courteous service. This meant changing the organizational culture in hundreds of locations—creating an open, welcoming atmosphere where regular customers and employees knew one another’s names, and any question was quickly and cheerfully answered.

If you’re trying to instill this kind of organizational change in your company, then you face not just a logistical shift, but a cultural challenge as well.

Image: Illustration by Lars Leetaru - http://www.strategy-business.com/

Even if we cannot consciously see a person’s face, our brain is able to make a snap decision about how trustworthy they are.

According to a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the brain immediately determines how trustworthy a face is before it’s fully perceived, which supports the fact that we make very fast judgments about people.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

A few weeks ago on the CBC website there was an article called "Crowd funding: Why easy money doesn't always add up to a hit." Every now and then I come across a headline where the mere wording irks me, and this was one of them.

For anyone who's ever run a crowd funding campaign properly, and there's a lot of us, you know that this is by no means "easy" money.

image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Anyone who’s attended a South African startup event in the past few years is all too aware of the fact that there’s still a massive gender disparity in the space. A 2013 survey by the Silicon Cape initiative revealed that among tech startups, some 80% of people involved in the space are male.

That’s slightly worrying given that, on the whole, female entrepreneurs are closing the gap on their male counterparts. According to the most recent Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report, some 58% of South Africa’s entrepreneurs were men and 42% women.

Image: http://ventureburn.com 

What is an instance of happiness? 

That's a squishy question philosophers have discussed for millennia. According to Sparknotes, Aristotle said happiness is an end to itself. The poet Kahlil Galbraith wrote that happiness "is your sorrow unmasked," whatever that means.

Rhetoric aside, researchers at the University College London say happiness (or at least a discrete moment of it) is represented by the formula above, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The gist of that formula is this: Happiness spikes when we win and our expectations are low—but that happiness gradually fades over time.

Image: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 

Did you know that Bill Gates still uses a whiteboard to come up with complex high-tech ideas? Or that Yoshiro Nakamatsu, the inventor of the floppy disk, likes to chill out every evening in a 24-karat gold-plated ‘Calm Room?’ There are lots of quirky little things that the tech elite do to increase their productivity (and ward off insanity). Mark Zuckerberg is so busy with Facebook, he has to create exotic new challenges for himself every year to change things up, like learning Chinese or only eating meat he has personally killed.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com 

Unlike other electric cars, the new Quant e-Sportlimousine, now under development in Switzerland, never gets plugged in. Instead, the car uses two huge tanks full of electrolyte fluids that are pumped through cells to generate electricity. The advantage? If it works as the designers hope, it will be able to drive as far as 370 miles on a charge.

Compared to a traditional lead battery, the designers say their new flow cell battery system can store 20 times as much energy, so it can drive 20 times as far. That's also five times farther than the standard lithium ion batteries that many electric cars use now.

Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com 

"As the world urbanises and more megacities are created, some smaller, focused urban regions are becoming truly critical global hubs, unlike most larger cities, which are simply tied to their national economies. In a new ranking of global cities, CSC Senior Visiting Fellow Joel Kotkin argues that the truly global city is one that is uniquely situated to navigate the global transition to an information-based economy since the influence of industries such as media, culture or technology are the ones that will determine economic power in future. Kotkin also examines the fundamental challenge faced by cities as they achieve global status: the need to balance two identities, a global and a local one. "The world beckons, and must be accommodated, but a city must be more than a fancy theme park, or a collection of elite headquarters and expensive residential towers", he asserts."

The vast majority of respondents to the 2014 Future of the Internet canvassing anticipate that robotics and artificial intelligence will permeate wide segments of daily life by 2025, with huge implications for a range of industries such as health care, transport and logistics, customer service, and home maintenance. But even as they are largely consistent in their predictions for the evolution of technology itself, they are deeply divided on how advances in AI and robotics will impact the economic and employment picture over the next decade.

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Weight loss significantly improves physical health but effects on mental health are less straightforward, finds new UCL research funded by Cancer Research UK

Weight loss significantly improves physical health but effects on mental health are less straightforward, finds new UCL research funded by Cancer Research UK.

And then there were four. Many of today’s wireless companies started as offshoots from R&D labs in the 1980s, as landline companies were starting to take notice of the emerging technology. Over the years though, the wireless playing field has slowly been whittled down as acquisitions folded most wireless players into four major companies: Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

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Technology entrepreneurs will receive funding from a new $1 million program to commercialize innovation.

SBIR Advance, which stands for Small Business Innovation and Research, will be available across the state through the University of Wisconsin-Extension's Center for Technology Commercialization. The funding comes from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and is available to recipients of SBIR and Small Business Technology Transfer grants.

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