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.
Before long, 3D imaging—which requires a 3D camera to capture the 3D nature of the world—will be a core component of laptops, tablets and smartphones. While it’s easy to imagine how this technology might impact consumers, especially with Amazon’s Fire Phone, Google Tango, Microsoft Kinect and Oculus Rift making headlines, its usefulness for business isn't quite as straightforward.
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From living preferences to workforce needs, each generation of Americans has its own characteristics.
By most estimates, millennials recently surpassed baby boomers as the nation's largest generation. As of 2012, roughly 28 percent of Americans were millennials, while boomers accounted for about a quarter of the population.
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I know many entrepreneurs who feel that VCs have played them, gamed them, deceived them, or bullshitted them. But this doesn’t only happen to entrepreneurs. VCs play this game with VCs all the time.
One of our deeply held beliefs at Foundry Group is that there is no value in bullshitting anyone. We screw up a lot of things, make plenty of mistakes, and often look back and say some version of “oops.” But we never bullshit each other or bullshit anyone we work with.
S
yracuse, N.Y. — Faced with pressure from investors to move to California, one Syracuse startup company took a risk.
Instead of packing their bags, the firm's leaders fought to keep the business in Central New York. The company's potential backers could have easily walked away.
They didn't and the sides compromised.
Image: Density CEO Andrew Farah sits in his office at the Tech Garden in downtown Syracuse in a file photo. Density is winning national recognition for the new technology it is developing. (Gary Walts | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
Many American cities, described commonly as urban cores, are functionally more suburban and exurban, based on urban form, density, and travel behavior characteristics. Data from the 2010 census shows that 42.3 percent of the population of the historical core municipalities was functionally urban core (Figure 1). By comparison, 56.3 of the population lived in functional suburbs and another 1.3 percent in functionally exurban areas (generally outside the urban areas). Urban cores are defined as areas that have high population densities (7,500 or per square mile or 2,900 per square kilometer or more) and high transit, walking and cycling work trip market shares (20 percent or more). Urban cores also include non-exurban sectors with median house construction dates of 1945 or before. All of these areas are defined at the zip code tabulation area (ZCTA) level, rather than by municipal jurisdiction. This is described in further detail in the "City Sector Model" note below.
Image: http://www.newgeography.com
There are so many proponents out there for starting your day early, it’s kind of hard to ignore this advice--though for my entire life I’ve always preferred shrugging the idea off and hitting the snooze button more times than I can count.
“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Yeah, okay Ben Franklin, I’ll take that under advisement.
It seems like every company tries to tout their cool factor by playing up their ping-pong tables. But it's not just the Googles of the world offering nice-to-haves like free snacks and workout rooms.
While a lot of employee perks over the years have focused on how to make life at work as easy and pleasant as possible--from free lunches to concierge services to in-house doctors and gyms--the best of the best are figuring out ways to integrate people's personal lives into the mix, says China Gorman, CEO of Great Places to Work, a human resources consulting, research and training firm.
Image: http://www.fastcompany.com
I think that games have tremendous power in the business world –both for teaching and for thinking about how to motivate people (I even wrote a book about this). As someone who studies and teaches about startups, I decided to put these beliefs into action and figure out how to use a game to teach entrepreneurship.
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What does the car of the future look like? If you ask someone in the industry, they might start talking about what's next for self-driving cars. Ask a 10-year-old, on the other hand, and they might suggest cars that harvest drinking water from fog as they drive, or modular cars that join together to form public transportation.
Image: http://www.fastcoexist.com
Which are the top American cities today, how do they rank on a global scale, and what will they be like tomorrow? The answers to these questions can vary from one study to another, depending on the type of data being used. We looked at five studies conducted within the past three years; here, we list the 17 American cities that were included in at least one of the studies. The results, which follow, are sometimes predictable (New York and Los Angeles consistently take top slots, and each survey is dominated by Chinese cities) and often surprising (at home, San Diego and San Jose both hold much future promise; in the world, Lima, Dubai and Jakarta are all up-and-coming).
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
The internet has changed all aspects of our lives. From how we bank, get around, or communicate with friends, or even — as I hear — date. From a business perspective, however, it has radically altered the ways in which businesses communicate with consumers. But did you know it has also changed the very ways in which business owners run businesses? There’re a slew of applications — both mobile and on desktops — which can be used to simplify task, account, and HR management which often prove to be time-consuming.
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In An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope famously wrote, “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” I think of this quote often when observing executives with a “little learning” of emotional intelligence (also called “EQ”).
Don’t get me wrong; the beneficial insights and managerial advances derived from research on emotional intelligence have been game changing. But appreciating a powerful concept is not the same as understanding it well enough to use it productively. Sometimes, “a little knowledge” about EQ abets the delusion that you know people better than you actually do.
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I
ncubators are facilities where entrepreneurs can develop a business plan for an idea they have identified.
As the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India develops, translators, incubators and accelerators are the topic of much public attention.
Given that these terms are yet to diffuse widely into the common business professional’s daily lexicon, it is useful to start by briefly describing what they stand for.
Massdrop launched in 2012 based on one idea: To use bulk buying to help people get lower prices on products they love. This idea became a platform, letting people band together across the internet to place large orders and unlock bargains on products no one needs in bulk: cameras, speakers, headphones, etc. Today, the company calls it “Community Commerce.” But Founder and CEO Steve El-Hage couldn’t have predicted how active that community would be in shaping the way Massdrop would work.
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A few weeks ago, we were asked to analyze a competency model for leadership development that a client had created. Its was based on the idea that at different points in their development, potential leaders need to focus on excelling at different skills. For example, in their model they proposed that a lower level manager should focus on driving for results while top executives should focus on developing a strategic perspective.
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Organization as machine – this imagery from our industrial past continues to cast a long shadow over the way we think about management today. It isn’t the only deeply-held and rarely examined notion that affects how organizations are run. Managers still assume that stability is the normal state of affairs and change is the unusual state (a point I particularly challenge in The End of Competitive Advantage). Organizations still emphasize exploitation of existing advantages, driving a short-term orientation that many bemoan. (Short-term thinking has been charged with no less than a chronic decline in innovation capability by Clayton Christensen who termed it “the Capitalist’s Dilemma.”) Corporations continue to focus too narrowly on shareholders, with terrible consequences – even at great companies like IBM.
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Last week I was at a conference on Sand Hill Road, which is in Menlo Park, Calif. The highway is nothing special, kind of rustic looking. But Sand Hill Road is the nerve center of venture capital in Silicon Valley. Some of the firms located there include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Battery Ventures and Greylock Partners. It reminded me of the importance that venture capital firms have in the current business landscape.
His mind told him Palo Alto. His heart called him to La Jolla.
The year was 1959. Jonas Salk was looking for the right place to launch a research institute that would build on his historic work in vaccines. Palo Alto, Calif., had Stanford. La Jolla, a suburb of San Diego, had an astounding view of the ocean.
But from that view, Salk could see the future. Months later, the people of San Diego would vote to give him 27 acres of public land on Torrey Pines Mesa, free. And Salk would move his pioneering work westward.
The desire for better display technology is insatiable. Foldable, bendable displays have been in our collective conscious for nearly a decade, but things are heating up and speeding up. A few months ago Apple acquired a stealth-mode startup called LuxVue that is working on new types of information displays. While we don’t know the exact rationale for Apple’s acquisition, another startup called X-Celeprint may have superior technology and is really the company to watch.
Crowdfunding is on the calendar.
A measure that would allow North Carolina companies to crowdfund equity raises faces a crucial committee vote today - and some controversy.
But the controversy's not really the fault of crowdfunding.
While in the Senate, the measure was lumped into a bil l that would cap the sales tax.
