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.
Manufacturing is a tough, competitive business. Shipping across oceans has become cheap, as has international communication, so offshoring, reshoring or never changing are vital decisions. The outlook for manufacturing activity in the United States depends on many factors, including the overall state of the economy. In this article, though, I focus on the offshoring/reshoring issue: where will manufacturing activity take place in the coming years?
The internet’s promise of instant global communication was supposed to free businesses from the constraints of geography. But judging from a new survey of the tech real-estate market, the industry that birthed the internet is still very much tied to its place of origin: Silicon Valley.
Image: Google’s Mountain View Campus. Ariel Zambelich / WIRED
Balancing work and personal life is a known crapshoot. Even if you're ahead of schedule on one project, you've gotten behind on others, and the hamster wheel spins faster.
All the while, we're wearing how busy we are like a badge of honor, while wondering where the time goes.
Janet Choi, productivity writer and CCO of to do list app iDoneThis calls this feeling of time scarcity a wheel-spinning state: the poverty line of your productivity. Just enough gets done to stay afloat, but not as much as you'd like to reach your full potential. The more energy you spend trying to recover from time scarcity, the harder it gets. Tunnel vision closes your focus in on the immediate tasks and blocks out everything else, to the detriment of your relationships and health.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
From fostering character to keeping things simple, it’s often words of wisdom that teachers offer during casual conversations or informational sidebars that have the biggest impact on students.
With back-to-school season upon us, a dozen entrepreneurs shared the best advice they ever received from a teacher:
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
"Why would I ever pay $250 for a shirt?” A highly-respected fellow VC asked me this rhetorical question soon after my firm invested in Trunk Club’s Series A round and I joined the company’s board of directors.
In the three years since, Trunk Club CEO Brian Spaly and his team built Trunk Club into a category-defining brand and business in “assisted commerce” for men’s apparel. It recently was announced that Nordstrom has acquired Trunk Club, enhancing Nordstrom’s core business with Trunk Club’s stylist-based personalized service that combines online and high-touch commerce.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
When you need funding, angel investors can seem like a godsend. However, raising money from angels isn’t as easy, or as simple, as it might seem.
To learn more, I asked 12 successful founders from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) the following question:
I’m thinking of raising money from angels. What is one thing I should know?
By the time Dave Brussin co-founded Monetate in 2008, he had experience running three other companies. One of his biggest lessons: Things change fast. Even faster than you might think. At the same time, in order to grow, you need to be able to set targets that make sense. In a lot of ways, these are opposing forces. So how can you plan effectively when your business is constantly evolving?
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
A report published today by the European Court of Auditors (ECA) reveals that the EU has made a significant financial contribution to the creation of business incubator infrastructure, particularly in Member States in which this type of business support is relatively rare. However, the performance of audited incubators was modest.
Image: http://www.eca.europa.eu
An extra helping of leafy-greens is good for your heart
Eating fruit every day can lower risk of heart disease by up to 40%, new research suggests.
A new study that looked at more than 451,680 participants over seven years asked the group to report their fruit consumption, whether it be never, monthly, 1-3 days per week, 4-6 days per week, or daily.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
“So,” the executive sponsor of the new growth effort said. “What do we do now?”
It was the end of a meeting reviewing progress on a promising initiative to bring a new health service to apartment dwellers in crowded, emerging-market cities. A significant portion of customers who had been shown a brochure describing the service had expressed interest in it. But would they actually buy it? To find out, the company decided to test market the service in three roughly comparable apartment complexes over a 90-day period.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Sep 03, 2014 (ACCESSWIRE via COMTEX) -- WHITEFISH, MT / September 3, 2014 / Venture capitalists are experts at playing the odds. Without their early financial support, companies like Twitter Inc. TWTR, +2.94% and Facebook Inc. FB, +1.36% might have never taken off. These investments paid off handsomely for early investors.
While the success stories make headlines, the National Venture Capital Association estimates that 25% to 30% of venture-backed businesses fail. The majority of the surviving businesses simply return the money and only a small fraction end up producing substantial returns. According to Shikhar Ghosh of Harvard Business School, three-quarters of venture capitalists fail to return investor capital.
Image: http://www.marketwatch.com
T
he StarTribune noted recently that the University of Minnesota is rethinking its venture capital strategy. Is this smart?
I don’t mean to single out one university, because I find similar thinking at some other universities. So it might be useful to bring this into the open and see if the above strategy makes sense. Essentially the StarTribune article noted the following key points.
Much ink—both liquid and digital—has been spilled lately about the question of whether the recent efflorescence of massive online open courses (MOOCs) constitutes a truly "disruptive" innovation in higher education.
But that issue begs a more fundamental question: If MOOCs are disruptive, what exactly are they disrupting?
Academia as an institution serves multiple purposes. Some of those are explicit and others are implicit or tacit. The explicit agendas are trumpeted in universities' catalogs, ads, and other publicity. Those overt messages generally speak of the services institutions promise to students, alumni, communities, business, and so on. The tacit agendas are largely focused on the enrichment and aggrandizement of the institution itself.
Entrepreneurs waste a lot of time soliciting professionally managed venture funds. Venture capitalists operate according to their own largely unwritten rules. In order to play the funding game, you must learn these rules. Below, I've listed some of the most-common mistakes. They won't tell you everything you'll need to know, but these simple rules should help you understand the VC process and avoid an enormous waste of time, energy, and opportunity.
Mentor Foundation USA has had an incredible summer of Mentor recruitment in the greater Washington D.C. area. We have welcomed professionals from a variety of industries to our offices for Open House events and we have been all over town visiting with companies and organization who want to learn more about getting involved. Many people have stepped up and welcomed this opportunity to impact a young students life. It is time now for you to apply to become a mentor as we prepare to welcome the students back to school.
image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
What makes you smile the more at the end of the day, a big sale or your child’s laugh when you toss him or her up in the air?
When my two children were born, I thought I could easily enjoy and succeed at being a dad and an entrepreneur. But I quickly realized a fact that most people don’t like to talk about: You have to make sacrifices, prioritizing each role over the other at different times.
Entrepreneurship is all the rage in global business nowadays. A question that I’m being asked all the time is: “Does the MBA teach me entrepreneurship?” I think the question you should be asking is: “Does the MBA teach me to be an entrepreneur.”
The answer is yes! Entrepreneurship is not just about starting your own business. In today’s global economy, we all need to have an entrepreneurial mind-set to survive. Anyone who can grab opportunities, take risks, think innovatively, and make things happen can be classed as an entrepreneur.
Image: Submitted by Maryke Luijendijk-Steenkamp, director of MBA Marketing & Admissions, Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. http://www.mba.com
Like this wtf.
Hahahaha. I’m not sure how much of the above picture is accurate la but while there is some accuracy, there are also misconceptions.
So although I only have limited experience (being married to only ONE entrepreneur wtf), I thought it’d be an interesting topic to write about. Keep in mind that due to my limited experience wtf that this is not “what it’s like being married to all entrepreneurs” but more “what it’s like being married to this entrepreneur”.
The employee landscape is changing, and with it has come new needs, desires and areas of importance for employees. This means employee development is no longer just about career development, but also goal alignment, non-monetary offerings, and simply, opportunities to prove themselves.
A quarter of employees would be more satisfied at work if they were given more opportunities to do what they do best, according to a 2013 study by BlessingWhite, and 5 percent directly said career development opportunities and training would increase their satisfaction.
Entities as diverse as the U.S. Department of Commerce and Forbes magazine have made efforts to quantify what qualities make successful entrepreneurs, especially serial entrepreneurs, different from everyone else.
While there is no single answer to this question, certain traits pop up again and again when studying this class of person.
As a successful entrepreneur, author and CEO of Sqeeqee, the first-of-its-kind social networthing ® site, I have narrowed it down to the six most common traits successful entrepreneurs embody.
