Bring together a group of highly intelligent individuals who are passionate about their business and dedicated to finding solutions, and innovation is inevitable, right? Actually, no.

In working with C-level leaders who are struggling with organic growth, mergers and collaborations, I have seen their frustration and the frustration of their teams when innovation fails. The very ideas that would make growth, mergers and collaborations easier get trampled underfoot or never expressed.

Age is a predictor of entrepreneurial success – and not in the ways that many might expect – according to a new National Bureau of Economic Research article. While the venture capital community and the media sensationalize young entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg, the authors of Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship – Pierre Azoulay, J. Daniel Kim, Benjamin Jones, and Javier Miranda – find that older entrepreneurs have more success.

Across the nation, R&D at colleges and universities plays an important role in generating promising inventions, training our STEM talent pipeline, and supporting regional economic development. An SSTI analysis of National Science Foundation data finds that higher-education R&D (HERD) is a multi-billion dollar industry that directly employs nearly one million personnel on projects and grants in the United States. However, the locations of R&D projects and personnel differ greatly by state and region.

In recent years sensors stationed across the North Atlantic have picked up a potentially concerning signal: The grand northward progression of water along North America that moves heat from the tropics toward the Arctic has been sluggish. If that languidness continues and deepens, it could usher in drastic changes in sea level and weather around the ocean basin.

You can’t make any business work if your customers can’t find you, or don’t even know what you offer. Thus I was surprised to read recently that 30 percent of small businesses don’t even have a web site. As an advisor to new entrepreneurs, I’m also surprised at how many potential business owners tell me that they don’t know where to start in putting together an effective web presence.

Five companies have been selected to present to a panel of investor judges and an audience of industry leaders during the 2018 BioHealth Capital Region Forum, April 23-24, at the MedImmune campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Founded by BioHealth Innovation, Inc. (BHI) and MedImmune in 2016, the annual Crab Trap Competition highlights companies from throughout the region in varied stages of business development and industry sectors.  Open to applicants from Maryland, DC and Virginia, previous winners are Johns Hopkins University spinouts: LifeSprout (2017) developing the next-generation of synthetic soft tissue substitutes for aesthetic and reconstructive medicine, and Sonavex (2016), developer of a pipeline of novel ultrasound solutions to visualize and quantify critical clinical data for improved outcomes and reduced costs in new surgical applications.  The 3rd Annual Crab Trap Competition is sponsored by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The grand prize includes $10,000, incubation space in either Montgomery County, MD or Prince William County, VA, and business mentoring.

There’s a cautionary tale in this week’s BMJ Case Reports journal, and it’s frightening enough to make anyone think twice about downing super spicy foods. According to doctors at Bassett Medical Center in Cooperstown, New York, a patient there developed excruciatingly painful headaches—known as thunderclap headaches—after eating the world’s hottest chili pepper.

Getting the best people into the most important roles does not happen by chance; it requires a disciplined look at where the organization really creates value and how top talent contributes.

To understand how difficult it is for senior leaders to link their companies’ business and talent priorities, consider the blind spot of a CEO we know. When asked to identify the critical roles in his company, the CEO neglected to mention the account manager for a key customer, in part because the position was not prominent in any organization chart.

Image: https://www.mckinsey.com

LVMH, the world’s largest luxury conglomerate, has unveiled a startup incubator, like the ones that have nurtured countless young companies in Silicon Valley—only this one is based in Paris, and its focus is specifically on technology for the luxury world.

The program will support 50 international companies each year, LVMH said in its official announcement, and will host them at Station F, the enormous Paris facility supported by French president Emmanuel Macron and billed as the world’s largest startup campus. 

Image: https://quartzy.qz.com

We often think about our goals and aspirations. But what you would do if, after you achieved all the success you hope for, you lost it all and had to start from scratch?

It’s a question that can be a little scary to entertain, but it is one that some of the business world’s biggest leaders have answered. And what they would do in the event that they had to begin again might surprise you.

A $1 billion valuation was until recently a significant badge of honor for a technology company, marking it as an unusually successful outlier. Now, though, as membership of the club has swollen to as many as 200 globally (with an aggregate valuation in excess of $600 billion), the “unicorn” epithet given to these billion-dollar companies on account of their rarity has become less apt and attracted considerable skepticism as to whether they can justify their sky-high price tags.

A new expert panel report, released today by the Council of Canadian Academies (CCA), provides the latest data and information on Canada's track record in fundamental research, applied research and experimental development, industrial R&D, and the relationship of these research efforts to wealth creation and prosperity through innovation.

The report underscores that while Canada benefits from high levels of educational attainment, is a leading global contributor to research, and has significant areas of research strength, other countries are outpacing Canada in terms of R&D investment, ultimately putting the country's prosperity at risk.

Image: COUNCIL OF CANADIAN ACADEMIES

Arizona’s bioscience sector is adding jobs at a rate outpacing the biosciences nationally and the state’s overall private sector, while Arizona’s public universities are seeing increases in bioscience research funding, expenditures and tech transfer, a new report shows.

However, the $40 million in bioscience venture capital raised in both 2017 and 2016 was a sharp decline from the last data report released two years ago, despite capital funding increasing nationally.

Hoping to give Europe’s surging startup ecosystem a shot of adrenaline, the European Union today announced the creation of a massive new fund-of-funds program dubbed VentureEU.

So far, the EU has committed $505 million of its own budget to the project, which now faces the challenge of raising the balance of the $2.6 billion fund from private investors.

Dean for research sounds like a big job at a research university with as much clout as Princeton.

It is.

Pablo Debenedetti, who was named the prestigious university’s dean for research five years ago, handles a great deal.

It’s just not a job that comes with a lot of publicity or notoriety.

But even though Debenedetti is scarcely quoted in media, he’s busy behind the scenes — working directly with Princeton’s provost and other senior leaders in encouraging the sort of innovation that has long made Princeton a world-renown campus for research.

Image: Princeton University

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 10, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Chrysalix Venture Capital, one of the most active industrial innovation venture capital firms, and Carnegie Mellon University, a leading global institute for intelligent systems research, today announced a strategic partnership as part of Chrysalix’s global academic network and innovation ecosystem. This partnership is an important step towards developing a proprietary brain trust to solve some of the biggest challenges facing resource intensive industries in transition where Chrysalix specializes, including: oil and gas, electric power and utilities, mining, chemicals and materials, manufacturing, agriculture, and transportation and mobility.

Forget those miserly folk who hoard their best for the last — TED believes in starting strong. Kicking off TED2018 is Session 1 of the TED Fellows, who count among their ranks artists, activists, scientists, researchers, conservationists, thinkers and changemakers of all kinds. The Fellows program now total 453 individuals from 96 countries. In this session, the 10 newest Fellows, and 4 Senior Fellows, took the stage in the Community Theater.

Image: https://blog.ted.com

Mark Zuckerberg likes to project himself as the all-conquering Silicon Valley entrepreneur, a smart young man whose tech-savvy skills have allowed him to build the Facebook “community” whose main aim is “connecting people”.

On Tuesday, he was anything but.

Watching Zuckerberg testify in a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees about Cambridge Analytica and all the other privacy scandal affecting the 2.2-billion-strong social network is an edifying experience.

How many of us have participated in icebreakers during which thoughtful, but surface-level recommendations are offered up? Once Anita Hossain, who leads the Knowledge program at First Round, heard a similar list begin to rattle off during introductions. Then one entrepreneur, who had attended a few of her events before, said: “Being a founder has been an emotional rollercoaster for me.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed with the crush of email. In fact, one study showed the average professional spends 4.1 hours per day responding to work messages. During a recent time tracking exercise, I discovered I’m actually at the low end of the spectrum, spending about 1.35 hours per day on email. But psychologically, it carried a disproportionate weight: regardless of how much time I spent, it seemed like I was always stressed about the unanswered messages in my inbox.

Image: ANDREW NGUYEN/HBR STAFF/THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY