Policymakers eager to drive economic growth and innovation have long talked about approaches to become “the next Silicon Valley” – many perhaps without fully understanding what that really means or takes.  While the understanding is growing that Silicon Valley can’t be copied, there is a growing interest in building local and regional ecosystems that empower entrepreneurs to help them start and scale new firms.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/40910201@N04/3894041468 

The National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will receive a top national award for the year’s most outstanding intellectual property licensing deal, for technology transfer of a pioneering, low-cost meningitis vaccine launched in sub-Saharan Africa. The 2014 Deals of Distinction Award will be presented to the two federal agencies and their collaborators by the Licensing Executives Society at the society’s 50th annual meeting, Oct. 5-8 in San Francisco.

Physicist Peter Eisenberger had expected colleagues to react to his idea with skepticism. He was claiming, after all, to have invented a machine that could clean the atmosphere of its excess carbon dioxide, making the gas into fuel or storing it underground. And the Columbia University scientist was aware that naming his two-year-old startup Global Thermostat hadn’t exactly been an exercise in humility.

Image: CTO and co-founder Peter Eisenberger in front of Global Thermostat’s air-capturing machine.  - http://www.technologyreview.com

It appears that breaking up is getting easier to do in Silicon Valley.

A report from Bloomberg says that security giant Symantec may be “exploring a breakup.” One of the Symantec companies would sell security programs, and the other would focus on data storage, Bloomberg says.

If true, it would be the third tech giant to pursue that option. Just this week, Hewlett-Packard announced it was splitting into two companies. And, of course, last week, eBay said it was planning to separate from PayPal next year.

Image: Jean-Daniel Echenard, via Flickr under CC license

The comment thread on my post Founder Suicides is vibrant and full of lots of different things, including plenty of challenging stuff to read and figure out how to respond to.

My inbox was also full of private notes over the past few days. Many of them were thank yous for writing about this, some were suggestions, and a few were angry reactions to what I wrote. Regardless, I read them all and thought about them, what they meant, and what I could continue to do to be helpful on the topic of mental health, especially around entrepreneurship.

Image: Kai Chan Vong/Flickr

Marc Andreessen kicked off another great debate on Twitter last night, one that I’ve been talking about incessantly in private circles for the past 2-3 years – what actually IS the definition of a seed vs. A-round.

This is something I think entrepreneurs don’t totally understand and it’s worthwhile they do. My view:

“Spending any time or energy trying to game the ‘definition’ of your round of fund raising is a total waste. Nobody cares. No VC will be so naive as not to see straight through it. And actually many will probably find the gamesmanship as a bad sign of lack of property priorities or perspective.”

 

A pilot program launched this week in four NIH institutes looks to speed up development and commercialization of new products and services generated by projects funded through the agency’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) awards.

The first class of 21 three-person teams of researchers and entrepreneurs gathered in Chevy Chase, MD, this week, concluding Wednesday, for the launch of the NIH Innovation Corps (I-Corps™) Team Training Pilot Program. The teams are all based at therapeutics, diagnostics, and medical devices companies funded with NIH SBIR Phase I grants, awarded to establish feasibility of proof of concept for commercializable technology.

While all The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People listed by Stephen Covey remain relevant and timeless, the one which resonates with me most is the seventh — sharpen the saw. In the life sciences industry, Covey’s concept of continuous improvement is more than just a habit, but a way of life. This is especially true for those who work in pharma and biopharma manufacturing — striving to maintain high quality, be on time with delivery, increase productivity (often with fewer resources) and so on. If you work in manufacturing, you are probably tempted to stop reading and get back to work. Though pharma and biopharma manufacturing executives most certainly work long and hard hours, I am sure the manufacturing executives I know would rank working smarter above working harder as a best business practice. Working smarter requires making the time to sharpen your saw. As we are just seven weeks away from a very unique saw sharpening continuous improvement conference for the pharma and biopharma manufacturing executive (Outsourced Pharma West), I thought it a good time to put together a list of the seven habits of the highly effective pharma and biomanufacturing executive — so you can sharpen your saw.

Image: http://www.outsourcedpharma.com

Former Indianapolis Mayor Bill Hudnut used to like to say that “you can’t be a suburb of nowhere.” This is the oft-repeated notion has been a rallying cry for investments to revitalize downtowns in America for three decades or so now. The idea being that you can’t have a smoking hole in your region where your downtown is supposed to be. This created a mental based on a donut. You can’t let downtown become an empty hole. For reason that will become apparent soon, I call this model “the old donut”.

As traditional donor budgets continue to dwindle, the search for innovative financing solutions is on, and crowdfunding seems to be on everyone’s mind.

While the tool “is no silver bullet,” NGOs and social enterprises are increasingly looking to crowdfunding platforms to help connect efficiently to aid agencies, foundations and other people that are willing to help and invest in their ideas, Kiva President Premal Shah told Devex’s Kelli Rogers in this video interview on the sidelines of the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting in New York.

Presentation Tips – 4 Ideas for Successful, Last-Minute Speeches If you have just a few moments to set the stage, get your point across, and get off stage, all with high impact, here are four ideas on how to make that happen:

1. If the speech topic feels off, redirect it to something that works better for you. You want to be up on stage talking about something that you can relate to well, even if it isn’t exactly what the organizers planned. Look for how you can twist the topic more toward your strengths. If you deliver a great message, no one is going to remember you twisted the topic around a bit.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Building a winning strategy begins with recognizing that strategy is too important to be delegated to a strategy department. It can certainly be valuable to have the help of strategy officers or teams on refining and implementing strategy, but the strategy itself needs to be conceived and owned by the CEO (or equivalent for a division). Otherwise, strategy often becomes a diffuse product of group thinking and compromises among multiple stakeholders in the organization.

Image: Free Digital Photos

Since the venture business started in a big way, in the late 1950's, conventional wisdom amongst the pundits and VC's suggested that the game is all about building "portfolio makers." To be successful, VC's had to master the art of investing only in those little acorns that grow into towering oaks, a.k.a. companies with market capitalizations in excess of a billion dollars. The notion that a few huge winners make up for the inevitable losers was based on General Doriot's experience at American Research & Development. In Doriot's case, Digital Equipment and High Voltage Engineering were the home runs that secured his legacy and delivered high portfolio returns. Absent those home runs with the bases loaded, a venture portfolio will fail to be competitive.

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This study explored the importance of financial satisfaction versus postmaterialist needs for subjective well-being (SWB). Using the Gallup World Poll, we examined whether financial satisfaction and postmaterialist needs (pertaining to autonomy, social support, and respect) were universal predictors of the different components of SWB across the world, and whether their effects were moderated by national affluence. Results showed that financial satisfaction was the strongest predictor of life evaluation, whereas respect was the strongest predictor of positive feelings. Both measures predicted negative feelings to some extent. Multilevel analyses also revealed moderating effects of societal wealth. The association between financial satisfaction and SWB and that between postmaterialist needs and SWB were stronger in richer nations compared with poorer ones. This suggests that developed economies should continue to focus on both material and psychological aspects, and not disregard economic gains, as both measures are essential to well-being. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)

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Andrew Laver has long worked with life science startups through his work as an angel investor, venture capitalist and investment banking. Now he’s getting that perspective from one of Healthbox’s newest accelerators in Salt Lake City.

As I mentioned in another post, it’s interesting that an accelerator would take on so many medical device companies (four). But as Laver points out, it goes with the territory because there are so many in the region. Salt Lake City has the biggest concentration of medical device manufacturers in the country, according to Utah’s economic development corporation. It has more than 100 medical device companies.

http://medcitynews.com

Is the technology investor Peter Thiel brilliant, or is he just strange? He is nothing if not industrious. Since he cofounded PayPal, in 1998, Thiel has had a hand in some of the most important and unexpected tech companies of our era. His success has made him an oracular presence in Silicon Valley.

Image: Free Digital Photos

The struggles that come along with being an entrepreneur are real. There is an endless supply of positivity and pride that accompany the world of self-starters, but the stress and the barriers we face are concrete, re-occurring and can honest-to-God be the demise of our success. After becoming entrenched in stress and clouded by my inability to navigate some of my own work issues, I started to divide and conquer. I wrote down my daily stresses. You know, the things that make your stomach clench up or that make you break out into cold sweat? They're pretty terrible feelings but they kept me on my toes and they allowed me to acknowledge and change for the better. I explained to myself WHY these things stressed me out and why they shouldn't. I literally coached myself as I began to understand why these things wouldn't break me, unless of course I let them. I started to internalize that at the end of the day, no matter what I was facing, my family loved me, I was healthy and I was fortunate enough to come out ahead of most problems that came my way. These were such powerful moments in my life; I felt compelled to share my experiences with you, as well as "aha!" moments that may help turn that light bulb on for you!

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Policymakers eager to drive economic growth and innovation have long talked about approaches to become “the next Silicon Valley” – many perhaps without fully understanding what that really means or takes.  While the understanding is growing that Silicon Valley can’t be copied, there is a growing interest in building local and regional ecosystems that empower entrepreneurs to help them start and scale new firms.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/40910201@N04/3894041468

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Ohio's success at entrepreneurship has created a venture capital gap that existing resources cannot fill, according to a first-of-its kind study of venture funding in the state.

Experts fear the shortfall imperils young companies poised to create a new generation of jobs.

OhioVenture Report 2013 echoes the fears of many economic development specialists in Northeast Ohio. The state's emerging startup scene, stoked by talented inventors and entrepreneurs, lacks the capital needed to take young companies to the next job-creating stage in their evolution.

Image: Potential investors visit with startup founders at the recent Demo Day at FlashStarts. Plenty of companies are getting started in Ohio, but they may not find the capital they need to grow. Lynn Ischay/The Plain Dealer