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.
As kids we all had dreams. Some of us wanted to be firefighters while others planned to become teachers, veterinarians, or even President. I wanted to be Nancy Drew. Along the way, however, most dreams get derailed. It could be because we form new dreams or outgrow the idea. Often it’s because we’re told that our dreams aren’t realistic.
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In early drug discovery, you need a starting point, says Northeastern University associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology Michael Pollastri.
In a new research paper published Thursday in the journal PLOS-Neglected Tropical Diseases, Pollastri and his colleagues present hundreds of such starting points for potentially treating Human African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, a deadly disease that affects thousands of people annually.
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The technology for creating new tissues from stem cells has taken a giant leap forward. Two tablespoons of blood are all that is needed to grow a brand new blood vessel in just seven days. This is shown in a new study from Sahlgrenska Acadedmy and Sahlgrenska University Hospital published in EBioMedicine. Just three years ago, a patient at Sahlgrenska University Hospital received a blood vessel transplant grown from her own stem cells.
Suchitra Sumitran-Holgersson, Professor of Transplantation Biology at Sahlgrenska Academy, and Michael Olausson, Surgeon/Medical Director of the Transplant Center and Professor at Sahlgrenska Academy, came up with the idea, planned and carried out the procedure.
A friend of mine reviews screenplays for a major movie studio. To be clear, she’s not the person who decides whether her studio will make your movie. She’s the person who decides what the person who makes that decision will review.
She was telling me the other day that many of the movie ideas she sees are just that – ideas. Someone may have an interesting premise for a movie but it’s not a plot. And a plot isn’t a screenplay.
A record number of startup companies being founded in 2013 has led to a dire need for more angel investors in St. Louis, says Jerome Katz, director of Saint Louis University's Billiken Angels Network. Katz said as more startups are lured to St. Louis via accelerators like SixThirty, The Yield Lab and Capital Innovators, more angel capital will be needed to support the growing community.
Image: Jerome Katz, director of the Billiken Angels Network
Regression models, Monte Carlo simulations, and other methods for predicting what’s around the corner have been in use for decades. It’s only recently, though, that advances in information technology have made it possible for predictive tools to access and manipulate big data, and to do so continuously — accelerating the generation of insights, and opening up opportunities to anticipate issues with unprecedented precision. Think of the colleges that are increasingly able to identify students at risk of dropping out and intervene before they do. Or lenders’ enhanced abilities to gauge credit risk. Energy, agriculture, insurance, retail, human resources — no industry is unaffected. But nowhere is the potential of this new era of opportunity more apparent and exciting than it is in health care.
Most commentary about the Internet of Things assumes that we sacrifice privacy and security for huge efficiency gains. But what if the notion underlying that tradeoff — the idea that more connectivity always means greater efficiency — is flawed? What if indiscriminate information sharing has the same drawbacks with devices as it does with people?
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Storied baseball pitchers are renowned for consistently throwing strike after strike, even under the pressure of the World Series.
But even the seasoned pros are actually continually relearning their machine-like throwing movements, according to a new study by UC San Francisco neuroscientist Philip Sabes, PhD, about how the brain integrates motor learning.
When Amy Norman and Stella Ma started pitching investors in 2009 on their geography-oriented startup, Little Passports, both had young children and Norman was pregnant. The majority of the investors they met were men, several of whom asked whether the business would be profit-focused or a lifestyle company—read: a glorified hobby. All of them passed, and word got around Silicon Valley that “there’s no way women like these could grow a company fast enough” to satisfy venture capitalists, Norman says.
Image: Photograph by Chris Goodney/Bloomberg From left: Golden Seeds’ Jo Ann Corkran, managing director; Stephanie Hanbury-Brown, founder; and Peggy Wallace, managing director
WASHINGTON, D.C.-- U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) recently awarded more than $18 million in grants to small businesses for high quality, advanced research and development that will lead to technological innovations and solutions for American agriculture. NIFA awarded 100 grants through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.
"Small businesses are adept at finding solutions that can advance agriculture, create new jobs and grow our economy. These grants will provide resources so small businesses can innovate and create new breakthroughs," said USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack.
You are invited to DreamIt Health Philadelphia Demo Day 2014; a first-look at the promising health care startups from this year's DreamIt Health Philadelphia accelerator program. Brought to you by Independence Blue Cross, Penn Medicine, and DreamIt Ventures.
Through good times and bad, the churning of businesses and jobs is a hallmark of any dynamic capitalist economy. This “creative destruction,” where some firms enter the market or expand while others contract or close, is the cause of much debate among policymakers and anxiety throughout the workforce. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Business Employment Dynamics (BDM) data series to determine the 10-year survival rates of establishments born in 2003, this article assesses the states in which these new businesses were most likely to survive. Overall, California had by far the highest survival rate between 2003 and 2013 while Northern Plains states such as the Dakotas also fared quite well. Establishments born in 2003 in the Southeastern U.S. and in smaller New England states comparatively struggled to survive this 10-year period.
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I raise here the prospect of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) around the world and across industries becoming collateral damage in the Innovation Wars or, to put it more mildly, Global Innovation Rat Race.
SMEs are helplessly squeezed between technology start-ups and global corporations in this battle. The stakes are high because the digital world follows "the winner takes all" economics.
Image: ST ILLUSTRATION: MANNY FRANCISCO
The European Union still lags behind South Korea, the United States and Japan in the global innovation performance, but the European Commission's Innovation Scoreboard shows that the EU and its 28 Member States have become more innovative in recent years. As a result, the EU has closed half of the innovation gap towards the US.
And the biggest innovation increase is taking place in some of the EU's Member States which joined in 2004 and thereafter, making them the EU's biggest innovation potential. "There is great untapped potential for innovation in the Central and Eastern European Member States! We should use it to further enhance Europe's competitiveness and our position in the global innovation performance." says Martin Kern, the EIT Interim Director.
You could spend all day reading and thinking about how to be a more successful person, or you could actually start making some changes in your life. When I first started my journey as an entrepreneur I did more of the former until I released action is the only real way to actually get ahead. Every successful entrepreneur from the past and present has followed a different path that ultimately led to their success, but they all have one thing in common: they all adopted certain habits along the way that made it possible for them to reach their goals and succeed.
Researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, University of Kentucky, and University of Maryland found that for people 60 and older who do not have dementia, light alcohol consumption during late life is associated with higher episodic memory — the ability to recall memories of events.
As more devices become connected to the internet, safety and security considerations often seem like an afterthought — which could be fatal in the case of connected cars or industrial controllers. “If it’s got software, it’s vulnerable, and if it’s connected, it’s exposed,” said Joshua Corman, founder of I Am The Cavalry, at Gigaom’s Structure Connect conference in San Francisco on Wednesday and was joined onstage by Hugo Fiennes, CEO of Electric Imp.
Image: https://gigaom.com
For 6 years of my professional life, I worked only at startups. I saw myself as “the coder” — the guy that the brave hired to turn their ideas into real businesses. I never had the inclination to start my own… why would I risk a fairly comfortable life to pursue an idea that may not work?
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When Carly Guthrie was running HR for Per Se, one of the hottest restaurants in New York, the General Manager gave her a piece of advice: “You know, Carly,” he said. “If we’re doing our job as leaders, a performance review should only be two columns: Column A is what you do great and Column B is what you do not-so-great. Now, here’s how we move things from Column B to Column A.”
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Before they set a toe into the concrete-walled isolation room, the doctors and nurses become fortresses unto themselves: face shields, of course, but respirators, too, plus three layers of gloves on each hand, duct-taped to their sleeves. Nurses watch over a webcam to keep them on protocol, and Bluetooth stethoscopes relay heart data directly to a remote location — no ear canal exposure required.
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