Increasing the odds that the fruits of federally funded R&D traverse the so-called “valley of death” between the lab and the market without spoiling has emerged as a top priority of the Trump administration.

Early on in his tenure, National Institute of Standards and Technology Director Walter Copan said he believes the time is ripe to conduct a comprehensive review of the practices and policies that underpin the federal technology transfer framework. Now it is clear that such an effort has the backing of the broader administration.

Image:  credit - Peter Cutts / NIST

An overwhelming majority of Americans are looking to research universities to be the foremost drivers of innovation at a time of anxiety over global competition, according to a new Innovation Indicator survey from the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago.

The Polsky Innovation Indicator found that 71 percent of Americans believe research universities are a “major force” in driving U.S. innovation, considerably more than the number who said that of large corporations, startup businesses or government.

Image: A Polsky Center survey finds a majority of Americans are looking to research universities to be the foremost drivers of innovation. Photo byJean Lachat

This series from The Stephen S. Fuller Institute and Ellen Harpel, President, Business Development Advisors, is considering the implications for the Washington Region of recent national economic research on the future of work and jobs. Specifically the series will examine how the gig and sharing economy, other contingent and independent work arrangements, and technology trends may affect employment and competitiveness in our region.

2018 Best & Worst States For Business

With a tight biotech real estate market, it's difficult for a fast-growing company to find space. But Twist Bioscience had inside information.

When venture capitalists (VCs) evaluate investment proposals, the language they use to describe the entrepreneurs who write them plays an important but often hidden role in shaping who is awarded funding and why. But it’s difficult to obtain VCs’ unvarnished comments, given that they are uttered behind closed doors. We were given access to government venture capital decision-making meetings in Sweden and were able to observe the types of language that VCs used over a two-year period. One major thing stuck out: The language used to describe male and female entrepreneurs was radically different. And these differences have very real consequences for those seeking funding — and for society in general.

Are the best entrepreneurs right-brain or left-brain, and which are you? Left-siders are the practical, logical thinkers, methodical, analytical problem solvers who pay attention to details. These list-making, number crunching types have traditionally been the gold standard for starting and running businesses for obvious reasons.

Image: Steve Wasterval, Worstofall Design - https://www.forbes.com

Beer has a lot of history to it, but maybe not all wrapped up in one drink.

Australian brewers are working to revive a 220-year old beer, made from the yeast found in a shipwreck discovered more than two decades ago.

SEE ALSO: This machine lets your beer do all the talking

The porter-style beer will be aptly named The Wreck - Preservation Ale, and is being produced by brewing company James Squire for a limited release in June. 

Image: QUEEN VICTORIA MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY

Controlling your gadgets by talking to them is so 2018. In the future, you won’t even have to move your lips.

A prototype device called AlterEgo, created by MIT Media Lab graduate student Arnav Kapur, is already making this possible. With Kapur’s device—a 3-D-printed plastic doodad that looks kind of like a skinny white banana attached to the side of his head—he can flip through TV channels, change the colors of lightbulbs, make expert chess moves, solve complicated arithmetic problems, and, as he recently showed a 60 Minutes crew, order a pizza, all without saying a word or lifting a finger. It can be used to let people communicate silently and unobtrusively with each other, too.

Image: MIT MEDIA LAB

April should be prime walrus hunting season for the native villages that dot Alaska’s remote western coast. In years past the winter sea ice where the animals rest would still be abundant, providing prime targets for subsistence hunters. But this year sea-ice coverage as of late April was more like what would be expected for mid-June, well into the melt season. These conditions are the continuation of a winter-long scarcity of sea ice in the Bering Sea—a decline so stark it has stunned researchers who have spent years watching Arctic sea ice dwindle due to climate change.

When it comes to generating reports on science and innovation policy, Canada is undoubtedly a powerhouse. Earlier this month, the Council of Canadian Academies released Competing in a Global Innovation Economy: The Current State of R&D in Canada, the latest installment in this tradition. The report was competently written, although predictable in its main conclusions.

That is because over the past half a century, we have perfected the art of telling ourselves basically the same story, albeit drawing on different assortments of evidence overtime as international datasets on things like R&D, publications, citations, and patents have become more readily available.

In the past, wrote historian Kevin Starr, California “was a final frontier: of geography and of expectation.” Today in the Trump era, California remains a frontier, but increasingly one that appeals largely to progressives. “California,” recently suggested progressive journalists Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, “today provides a model for America as a whole.”

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

Caveat Emptor, Caveat Venditor.  That is my official blog post foreshadowing.

The digital health rocket seems to have gotten supercharged lately, at least when it comes to fundraising.  Depending on who you ask, either $1.62 billion (Rock Health’s count) or $2.5 billion (Mercom) or $2.8 billion (Startup Health’s count) was plowed into digital health companies in just the first three months of 2018.  By any measure Q1 2018 was the most significant quarter yet for digital health funding.  This headline has been everywhere. 

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is looking for the public’s help in refreshing how it uses research and development funds to help bring new products to market.

NIST officials issued a request for information in the Federal Register on Tuesday, seeking insight on how it can use federal regulations to more effectively encourage technology innovation from government-sponsored R&D.

The Legislature is going to take a hard look at whether to continue the USTAR initiative, based in part at Utah State University, next month during an interim session, according to a local lawmaker.

Meanwhile, USU officials are strategizing over the eventual control the university will have over USTAR faculty and buildings in Cache Valley. Other USTAR facilities and professors are also housed at the University of Utah, the state’s other major research institution.

Sprawling across 366,000 square feet, Station F in France is the biggest startup incubator in the world.

But does that mean it’s the best?

“I think it might be a little early to judge,” says Director Roxanne Varza, who’s been running the Parisian innovation hub for 10 months now.

With 1,000 desks, chess boards and multi-million dollar art installations, the new French space looks more like a university campus than the shiny corporate or hipster coworking spaces so many young European businesses grow out of today.

There's a lot of venture capital money out there. And, take heed founder, creator, inventor or entrepreneur: there are plenty of ways to make sure you don't get a dime of it.  

Matt Murphy, a partner at Silicon Valley-based Menlo Ventures, still recalls an entrepreneur and CEO seeking an investment who did exactly the wrong thing during a presentation. The CEO set up the pitch, turned it over to his management team, and emailed for the entire meeting.

Image: (Photo: Courtesy Spark Capital)

Debates about "best" and "worst" cities elicit strong feelings. It's a tricky issue because such debates are largely subjective.

So Business Insider attempted to use data to definitively prove which are the most exciting and most boring cities in every state across America.

To do that, we took counts of the number of establishments for 66 different types of businesses — like breweries, art dealers, and museums — that can make a city more "interesting." We sourced data from the Census Bureau's 2015 County Business Patterns program and picked the metro areas with the highest and lowest count of these businesses for our interesting and boring cities.

In the startup world, the odds of a company achieving a valuation of $1 billion or more is considered so slim, it's named after a mythical beast — the unicorn.

In the entire US, there are just 135 private companies that are valued at over a billion dollars or more. Of those, only ten became so-called unicorns in less than three years, setting the speed record for all the rest.

One of the enduring mysteries of medicine is how individual genes, environment and lifestyle may combine to spark sickness or protect us from it. Unraveling this puzzle remains essential for scientists hoping to achieve the elusive goal of offering tailored treatments or personalized prevention plans.

That’s why Pres. Barack Obama in 2015 announced an ambitious plan to roll out a precision medicine initiative that would aim to enroll a diverse group of one million people.