With little to risk and a lot to gain, PepsiCo is the latest CPG company to get into the incubator game. Already, many of its peers in the food space, including Kraft Heinz, Kellogg, Campbell Soup, Nestlé and Conagra have already undertaken similar initiatives. 

PepsiCo's decision to enter the incubator space signals that small, nimble food startups have made inroads into interesting, unique and healthy products that food and beverage companies need more of in the face of growing competition and slumping sales. Statistically, this trend is backed by data showing that the share of retail sales held by the top 25 food manufacturers in U.S. food and beverages declined from 66% in 2012 to 63% in 2015, according to a study from A.T. Kearney and The Hartman Group. 

Image: https://www.fooddive.com

A guiding principle for startup success, as well as the long-term health of a mature business, is a liberal dose of innovation at the beginning, with additions of the same on a regular basis. Unfortunately, innovation means change, and most business professionals and existing customers, by default, hate change. Thus without thinking, every company becomes more static.

In fact, innovation needs to be an integral part of the company culture and every process from the beginning. This takes leadership from the top, and an ongoing focus on market change, customer feedback, and internal measurement and rewards. For example, Google has institutionalized innovation through a manifesto initiated by Marissa Mayer in her early days as a VP there.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Hummus, the chickpea-based dip that’s a staple in many Middle Eastern cuisines, is on the rise in the U.S. Multiple factors are fueling its growing popularity, according to the USDA: Hummus is naturally gluten-free, and Americans now have bigger appetites for healthier snacks. But how healthy is hummus? Here’s what the experts say.

SINGAPORE (July 11): Singapore has moved up two notches to be the fifth most innovative country amongst 126 nations in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2018 report.

Retaining its top spot as the most innovative country in Asia, the Republic is ranked just behind European innovation powerhouses Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

Propelled by a strong fundraising environment and increased participation from nontraditional investors and corporate VCs, capital availability hit record levels in the first half of 2018. The datagraphic below illustrates how the excess in available capital is affecting the venture landscape; click on the graphic to see an expanded version of the image.

Image: https://pitchbook.com

Regulation is one of the more important influences on entrepreneurship around the world, and modern scholars have explored what the see as key conceptual and empirical relationships between regulation and entrepreneurship.

Like the country and industry characteristics so much under analysis by the academic community as they relate to enterprise creation, characteristics of the entrepreneur him or herself also influence the association between regulation and entrepreneurial activity.

Every entrepreneur knows that good demand generation marketing is the key to growth these days, but very few have the discipline or know-how to measure return in a world of a thousand tools and techniques. Even those things that worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, as the market matures, the culture changes, and competitors appear with new solutions.

Business success is all about meeting the needs of the modern buyer, who is more informed, has access to more choices, and is ever smarter about making purchasing decisions. In fact, we now live in a buyer-led digital age, where the traditional media push-marketing efforts just don’t work. Peter Drucker’s old comment that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is more true now than ever.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

LES HERBIERS, France — This year's Tour de France has seen an extraordinary number of new-bike launches, including from Specialized, Trek, and BMC, but perhaps the most discussed has been the SystemSix from Cannondale. It's the company's first aero bike, and the Connecticut-based manufacturer claims it to be "the world's fastest road-race bike."

That's great news for the US's Taylor Phinney, who rides for the EF Education-Drapac p/b Cannondale team. Over the next three weeks the 6-foot-5, 187-pound Coloradan will spend a lot of time in the saddle on his big 60 mm machine, so good thing for him that Cannondale data suggests it's freaky fast. The company claims it will save a rider the most energy and time of any bike in the peloton.

Image: Taylor Phinney's Cannondale SystemSix at the Tour de France.Daniel McMahon/Business Insider

In Quirky, NYU Stern professor Melissa Schilling embraces what you might call the “great person” view of innovation. Many recent studies of innovation have focused on the importance of collaboration and social setting, and emphasized the ways in which good ideas are typically the product of many minds, rather than one. Schilling looks instead at eight individuals whom she calls “serial breakthrough innovators”: Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Dean Kamen, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.

Image: https://www.strategy-business.com

Jeff Bezos’s wealth has reached an incredible new milestone.

As of Tuesday, according to a Forbes estimate, the Amazon founder and CEO has a net worth of $143.1 billion—making him at least $50 billion richer than any other person on Earth.

Bezos became the world’s richest man last summer, when his net worth (then around $90 billion) surpassed that of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Gates, who has given much of his fortune to philanthropic efforts, now has a net worth of about $93.3 billion, Forbes reports.

Maybe more than ever before, the first half of 2018 embodied the high level of capital availability throughout the US venture industry. $57.5 billion was invested across 4,000 deals, pacing the year to surpass 2017's decade-high total for capital invested by the end of next quarter. Never since the dot-com era has so much capital flowed into every stage. Continued strength of the VC fundraising ecosystem will continue to fuel the fire, but the activity of large nontraditional investors is adding further opportunities for entrepreneurs and established startups to raise money. 

Image: https://pitchbook.com

Entrepreneurship is more about the journey than the destination. It takes a certain kind of spirit to succeed in the startup world, and while many different types of people make good founders, the best ones tend to share a few key qualities.

There's no such thing as the “right” personality type to start and run a business, but the entrepreneurial spirit is real. Those who don’t come by those beneficial traits naturally can still cultivate them — they just have to work a little harder than the rest. Fortunately, entrepreneurs aren't strangers to hard work.

All 12 boys and their soccer coach have been rescued from a Thai cave complex after a two-week ordeal that gripped the world.

Because the team was trapped in an underground tunnel, 2 1/2 miles from the mouth of the cave, getting them out was difficult. The boys had to travel that entire distance tethered to two cave divers with oxygen tanks.

Image: Royal Thai Navy via AP

Humans are the most populous large mammal on Earth today, and probably in all of geological history. This World Population Day, humans number in the vicinity of 7.5 to 7.6 billion individuals.

Can the Earth support this many people indefinitely? What will happen if we do nothing to manage future population growth and total resource use? These complex questions are ecological, political, ethical — and urgent. Simple mathematics shows why, shedding light on our species' ecological footprint.

Innovation investment is crucial for Brazilian organizations wanting to gain a competitive advantage - or at least survive in the current climate of socio-economic instability. But the country still lags behind in innovation when compared to other countries of comparable size and development stage.

At the start of the last decade, there was an increase in government investments in science and technology and a legal framework inspired by the French innovation law was introduced.

Imagine rolling out of bed in the morning and, rather than racing to get out the door and into morning traffic, you could go for a run or make yourself breakfast. It’s the kind of daydream every chained-to-his-desk office worker has now and then. And for many, that daydream has become a reality.

Following the Great Recession and the rise of the app-driven gig economy, more and more American workers have found themselves jettisoned from traditional office spaces and thrust into jobs that require them to work remotely, at least some of the time.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has held a coming-out party for its nonprofit biotech startup. Equipped with plans to build a 120-person team and spend $100 million a year, the Gates Medical Research Institute (MRI) will turn drug industry expertise and processes on intractable diseases that kill millions of people annually in low- and middle-income countries.

Image: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Jack at Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Montgomery County companies may soon apply online for the County’s new Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Matching Grant Program. Applications will be accepted beginning at 10 a.m. on Monday, July 16.

Eligible companies must have been awarded a SBIR or STTR Phase I or Phase II grant during the current calendar year by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and must conduct at least 51 percent of research and development operations in Montgomery County.

A family of five in Nantes, France, is the first to move into a 3D printed home. The 3D printing method used to create this house was developed by the University of Nantes. According to BBC, this construction method is 20% less expensive than traditional building methods.

Image: https://mashable.com

The National Institute of Standards and Technology issued a request for information seeking ideas for improving the public’s return on investment from federally supported R&D. Here’s my submission.

Thank you for providing an opportunity to make recommendations for increasing the commercialization of federally-funded R&D.  I was the Senate staffer involved in enacting the Bayh-Dole Act, oversaw its implementation and helped create the Federal Technology Transfer Act at the Department of Commerce, was Executive Director of Intellectual Property Owners, Inc., and served as President of the National Technology Transfer Center, created by Congress to assist in the development of inventions arising from government research.

Image: Left: Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Right: Senator Robert Dole (R-KS). Dole Photograph Collection, University of Kansas - http://www.ipwatchdog.com