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.
Whenever Baltimore-area companies sell themselves to out-of-state firms, economists and local leaders alike bemoan the loss. Another headquarters gone. Fewer corporate decision-makers here. Possible job cuts.
But Silicon Valley's deals for two Columbia firms — the planned Micros Systems acquisition, announced last week, and Sourcefire last year — strike local entrepreneurs in an entirely different way
Image: http://articles.baltimoresun.com/
Luck, teamwork, discipline and America. Those are my takeaways about key factors that contribute to entrepreneurial success after attending a major entrepreneurship competition in Florida.
Each November for decades now, the accounting firm EY announces the winner of its Entrepreneur Of The Year competition at its Strategic Growth Forum. Leading up to that announcement, a series of regional competitions takes place throughout the country. Regional winners in each industry category proceed to the national competition.
India needs to build an effective innovation ecosystem to realise its full potential in the field of research and development particularly in the biopharma and health sector, a report said today.
"In order to bridge the gap between the current state and desired future and to realise the huge potential of India in biopharma innovation will require building an effective innovation ecosystem," said the report titled 'Re-imagining India's role in delivering affordable biopharma innovation’.
Image: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
Walter Frick has a good post at Harvard Business Review on how dangerous software patents can be, even after the Supreme Court placed some limits on their use.
Image: http://betaboston.com/
The critical success factors for a product business are well known, starting with selling every unit with a gross margin of 50 percent or more, building a patent and other intellectual property, and continuous product improvement. If your forte is a service, like consulting or web site design, it’s harder to find guidance on what will get you funded, and how you can scale your business.
On the product side, once you have a proven product and business model, all you need is money to build inventory, and a sales and marketing operation to drive the business.
One common characteristic of successful entrepreneurs, small business owners, and innovative thinkers is the drive to continue to educate themselves about any and all facets of business, marketing, economics, and personal development.
With that in mind, Travel Out There put together a list of the 10 books that are ‘must-reads’ for aspiring entrepreneurs, spanning the genres from biographies to social media to management:
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If you’re an entrepreneur you have heard the million reasons not to go into business: It’s too risky, you might go into debt, you’ll probably lose sleep, your social life is kaput, and the list goes on. But even with all these uncertainties, people are still attracted to the startup world. There are just as many, if not more reasons to take the leap and go into business for yourself. Here are just a few:
Niall O’Donnell fancies himself an archaeologist of the pharmaceutical persuasion. His firm, RiverVest Ventures, is scoping out the failed and forgotten drugs of big pharma, building companies to repurpose these benched meds for new indications. The aim is to find drugs that have passed for safety in clinical trials, but may have shown limited efficacy in the initial disease they aimed to treat.
Image: Niall O’Donnell - http://medcitynews.com/
The business development agency Ann Arbor SPARK said on Wednesday that it has been awarded $500,000 from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) to continue the Michigan Angel Fund and to raise the group’s second fund, called Michigan Angel Fund II.
“The whole idea behind the Michigan Angel Fund is to allow qualified investors to participate in the growth of the tech startup economy in the state,” says Skip Simms, Ann Arbor SPARK’s senior vice president and the Michigan Angel Fund’s managing director. “Angel investing is critical to retaining companies in Michigan so they don’t have to leave to find capital.”
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Academic technology transfer – the process of moving research from the lab to the market – provides intrinsic benefits to universities that go far beyond any potential revenues from licenses and royalties. So say the authors, from five universities across the country and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), in a new article from the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) that appears in the current issue of Technology and Innovation and is available Open Access.
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Corporate venture capital has been quietly reborn over the last ten years. Corporate VCs were dinged, justifiably at times in my experience, for naive investments, narrow agendas, passivity, and fickle decisions. For this reason entrepreneurs often look on them as opportunistic money, not true investment partners.
Things have changed.
Image: http://www.forbes.com/
It’s been a busy month for intellectual property. In late May, the U.S. Senate failed to pass a reform bill aimed at curbing the influence of patent trolls. In early June, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would not initiate lawsuits with any firm that used its patents “in good faith.” Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling limiting the scope of software patents.
Image: http://blogs.hbr.org/
If you work with a team, chances are your inbox is often flooded with invitations. Internal meetings, client conference calls, the occasional lunch request. Assuming you have some control over your calendar, how you respond to these offers generally depends on two factors: the value of attending the meeting and your availability.
Most of us associate the word currency with money. But informal nonmonetary currencies are still flourishing. Exchanges of this kind have taken place for centuries. Probably most cultures across the globe incorporate favor exchange in their trading practices.
Nowhere is this more useful than in the business world, where a favor from the right individual can completely change the trajectory of a company.
As an entrepreneur, every single minute of your day is extremely valuable because of limited resources: time, talent and treasure.
Sometimes your work environment and personal habits can waste precious time without you knowing. Here are seven common distractions that kill productivity:
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This appeared at inc.com and was written by Michael Dell.
People ask me all the time, “How can I become a successful entrepreneur?” And I have to be honest: It’s one of my least favorite questions, because if you’re waiting for someone else’s advice to become an entrepreneur, chances are you’re not one.
If I’d listened to everyone who told me what I could and couldn’t do and why, I’d be writing this column on an IBM PC. For the record, IBM doesn’t make PCs any more. I’m using a Dell XPS 15.
But there are a few things that distinguish real entrepreneurs, and if you have them, you’re starting in the right place.
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Continuous learning, lifelong learning, learning organizations, and constant learning – terms we hear every day about the changing nature of the workplace. We don’t even know what skills to prepare for, but most people agree that we all need to keep on learning if we wish to remain relevant at work, in our professions, or in life. Just watch how new technology is adopted by people of my age. It can be painful.
The big announcements at Google’s I/O event in San Francisco Wednesday didn’t mention Web search, the technology that got the company started and made it so successful. But in a small session later that day, the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil talked confidently about making Google’s current search technology obsolete.
Selfies are all the rage… but it is tempting to dismiss them as a passing fad, or worse, yet another example of a narcissistic society obsessed with instant gratification and instantaneous fame. But the selfie is important because it is not just a portrait of our selves, but a portrait of our times as well. Over the past fifteen years technology has changed our world. It has yanked power out of the hands of media owners and governments, and placed it in the hands of the general public. It is democratising everything. The selfie is a product of this shifting dynamic and it is symbolic of our new, empowered citizenry. Today, almost everyone has access to a camera-phone and the ability to share their photographs with a global audience.
Image: http://memeburn.com/
For the new business that is just starting out, a common question is, “When is the right time to file a trademark application?” Should business owners bother registering before their product or service is ready, or just wait until they’re ready to officially launch to the marketplace?
In the U.S., a business gets common law rights to a name as soon as it is used in commerce. That means that as soon as you start selling a product or service, you can claim common law ownership of that trademark without formally registering it with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
