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innovation DAILY

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.

scott shane

Policymakers often look to entrepreneurship as a way to boost the income of their residents, proposing policies designed to stimulate entrepreneurial activity. While different elected officials make subtly different arguments, at the most basic level, their common position is this: boosting the rate of business formation will cause the economy to grow and per capita income to rise.

 

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Small business owners get out of practice. They spend so much time in their offices and online that they sometimes forget how to act when they come face to face with a prospect or customer. While many professionals spend time practicing what they will say in a meeting, few focus on what their body language looks like. This is unfortunate since studies show over half of how we communicate comes from our facial expression and body positions.

Image: Free Digital Photos

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BHI-EIR

BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI), a Montgomery County innovation intermediary which translates market-relevant research into commercial success by bringing together among other things management, funding, and markets, is seeking an experienced life science professional with entrepreneurial experience to serve as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR).

The EIR will lead in the evaluation of early-stage technologies and corporations with a priority focus on those associated with Funding Partners and those that best fit with the strategic direction as set by BHI's CEO and Director of EIR Programs. The EIR will perform any reasonable task which will forward the goals of BHI. Further specifics and responsibilities include:

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Over the years, I have become quite a student of anti-procrastination techniques. There’s the work-on-something else method (I’m writing this article because I don’t feel like editing a different project). There’s bribery (I can read a magazine afterwards!) Then there’s my favorite method: starting in the middle. I write an easy paragraph, then write a little bit above, and a little bit below, and so on, until, miraculously, I have a draft.

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NewImage

The Bureau of Economic Analysis is out with the preliminary numbers for 2013 metro area GDP (see the press release). Here is a spreadsheet with per capita GDP data for all large metros.

We’ve now got enough data that it’s worthwhile to start tracking the trend vs. a 2010 base instead of 2010. With that, here are the top ten large metros by real per capita GDP:

Image: http://www.newgeography.com 

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It happens all the time. A founder surrounds him or herself with a skilled group of advisors — maybe one or two from investors, a trusted mentor from their past, perhaps someone influential who can open doors. But as the company grows and pivots, it becomes clear this is not the best team to create long-term value. Can this situation be avoided by choosing advisors more wisely? Can it be turned around once things aren't great? 

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Currently prevailing practices will not deliver the number or quality of jobs that city residents need.

Even as U.S. unemployment numbers drop and GDP rises, job creation remains an issue. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the United States still lags behind its 2007 levels, and labor force participation is at its lowest point in more than 30 years. The picture is even bleaker for less-educated workers, with unemployment among Americans without a college diploma (7%) at more than twice the rate of unemployment among college graduates (3%). Meanwhile, the unemployment rate among African Americans (12.1% as of January 2014) more than doubles that of whites (5.7%).

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Geirgia

In the 24 years since the founding of the Georgia Research Alliance, federally-funded research and development grants to Georgia’s universities has increased five-fold.

The state’s total share of federal research funding increased to nearly 3 percent, ranking 12th and one of only five of the top 16 states that is increasing its market share.

These are the findings in new report prepared by consultants for the Georgia Research Alliance that was presented to the board at its recent meeting.

 

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Leading management consultancy McKinsey joined with a number of other prominent companies to announce an effort to improve employee health this week. But McKinsey is unusual because its employees join and leave the firm young. The average age is 35, and over 80% of the staff are under 40. The firm has much lower rates of chronic conditions like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease than other companies. So its wellness efforts as described in the report, released by Bipartisan Policy Center’s CEO Council on Health and Innovation, don’t focus on biometric data or fitness, but on the notoriously poor work-life balance of its consultants.

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upward graph

For 75 years, the rules in this country governing capital formation for high growth enterprises have not changed. There are two categories ... (i) public companies which float equity securities, e.g., common stock in public offerings with shares publicly traded on various exchanges; and (ii) private companies financed by placements to a limited group of investors pursuant to exemptions from federal and state registration requirements, the shares changing hands infrequently until and unless the company goes public.

The division between public companies and private companies is no longer a bright line. A new entrant … HPPOs (hybrid public private companies)… has approved HPPO shares are not listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ but are traded on secondary exchanges. Companies, holding shareholders "of record" to under 2000 (up from 500), can remain HPPOs.

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Last year, we launched a program called the 1M/1M Incubator-in-a-Box. Part of its goal has been to stimulate corporate innovation and intrapreneurship. It has exposed us to a broad range of technology companies and their innovation goals, strategies, and processes. While most of what we have learned is confidential, I will synthesize some trends we’re seeing in this domain.

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NewImage

For your next home to be a good deal, it must be priced right today and show potential for appreciation tomorrow. Plus—oh, yeah—you have to want to live there.

To create this list of best-value big-city neighborhoods, we ranked places with over 500,000 in population on housing affordability, economic strength, home price forecasts, and livability using data from NeighborhoodScout, OnBoard Informatics, and CoreLogic. Then we looked for promising, well-priced neighborhoods in our top 10 locales.

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leader

I’ve been a new manager five times in my career: once as a first-time manager at Google going from being a teammate to leading peers, three times as I was promoted within Google, and most recently as the new Chief Revenue Officer for UberConference, a teleconferencing startup in San Francisco. What I’ve found is that success out of the gate is normally tied to being truly open to learning, communicating openly and honestly, and ultimately being prepared to take action when you know where the team needs to head.

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Can we afford to shut the door on bright, motivated would-be entrepreneurs whose ideas could one day change the world? I don’t think so, but that’s exactly what’s happening all around the globe.

Young people with the potential to become business leaders are too often unable to get past the disadvantages of poverty and a lack of access to knowledge and support.

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Collaboration has been a recurring theme in science and technology in recent years. The life of the mind is increasingly transnational in nature. It roams centers of excellence from every continent, linked by communications of great speed and breadth.Twice we have looked at collaboration in our State of the World's Science reports, last year with a focus on innovation, the year before on basic research. Here we address it again, from the standpoint of the individual.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com 

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Most employees are going through the motions at their jobs. To re-engage them, leaders must translate organisational objectives into meaningful aims.

At a quarry, outside a village, worked twenty stone cutters supervised by a foreman. The foreman shouted at and abused them all day, forcing them to cut more stones. Even during lunchtime, he would keep an eagle eye, not allowing them an extra minute. 

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Catherine Clifford

Failure is part of entrepreneurship.

Only about a third of all new companies last a decade, according to this infographic generated Intuit, a tax preparation software company. About 6 in 10 startups last the first three years.

Despite a steep failure curve, entrepreneurship is a job-creation goliath in the U.S. economy. That’s because lots of people -- almost half a million each month in 2013 -- launched their own business. And of all new jobs generated in the U.S., 70 percent come from those upstart businesses.

 

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trend

While the number of sole proprietorships has exploded over the past three decades, their revenues and income have remained largely constant in inflation-adjusted terms. The end result has been a decline in real sales and income at the average sole proprietorship, Internal Revenue Service (IRS) statistics reveal. Between 1980 and 2007, Americans dramatically increased the rate at which they run sole proprietorships, moving from 39.2 for every thousand people in 1980 to 76.7 in 2007. While the per capita number of Schedule C filers declined slightly during the Great Recession and then increased slightly during the recovery that followed, the overall pattern remains one of an upward trend in the per capita number of sole proprietorships over the past 31 years.

 

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NewImage

Some entrepreneurs forget that they can’t use people the same way they use technology to build a startup. Inventors, for example, are skilled in manipulating technology, but may have little interest or experience engaging people to make an effective team. Unfortunately, startups are not one-man shows, so entrepreneurs need to study leadership as much as they study technology.

 

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Gabrielle Karol

Sand Hill Road might not be as famous as Madison Avenue or Rodeo Drive – unless you’re an entrepreneur.

Home to Silicon Valley’s most celebrated venture-capital firms, Sand Hill Road is where ideas get turned into reality. FBN’s Liz Claman has an exclusive look inside Greylock Partners, the VC firm behind astronomical success stories like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

 

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