Looking for a deal in your backyard? The NIH is the world's largest investor in early stage life sciences companies. Over 1000 companies annually tap into NIH’s SBIR and STTR program for nondilutive funding to the tune of $980M in FY17. Did you know the NIH maintains RePORTER, an online database, of all funded companies and projects? This link will take you to what's been funded this fiscal year, but you can query the database yourself to look for companies specific to your interests. There are over 25 different ways to search and visualize the data with built in analytics (click on the Data & Visualize to create graphs and more you can export directly to PowerPoint and Excel).

Steve Case-led venture capital firm Revolution continues to advance its Rise of the Rest seed fund, announcing nine of the fund’s first investments and adding more big names as investors, including prominent entrepreneurs Michael Bloomberg and Reid Hoffman.

The moves come just two months after Case announced the $150 million seed fund, which aims to invest in startups outside of Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston. The fund’s limited partners already include an array of notable Silicon Valley investors and other tech executives.

Image: Above: Revolution's Steve Case (second from left) and J.D. Vance (fourth from left) during a 'Rise of the Rest' stop in York, Pennsylvania Image Credit: Courtesy Revolution

Diane Mulcahy has spent much of her career as an independent contractor, working as a writer and speaker, an adjunct professor at universities, and advising and consulting with Fortune 500 companies. About five years ago, she read an article that described the type of work that she and others did as part of the “gig economy” movement.

“I had one of those moments where I got goosebumps on my arms,” says Mulcahy, who was then working as an adjunct at Babson College teaching a core curriculum MBA course. “I’d been thinking about different ways of working for a long time, and now I realized there was a name for it.”

Image: https://poetsandquants.com

Around the world, including the United States, senior populations are rising much faster than those of other ages, as fertility rates have plummeted. Since the 2010 Census, the share of US population 65 years of age and older has risen 3.3 percent annually, more than four times the overall average of 0.7 percent and more than ten times the 0.3 percent average growth rate for people under 65 years of age (Figure 1).

Image: http://www.newgeography.com

New private equity firm Think3 has $1B to take over companies that don’t quite reach “unicorn status,” but aren’t crashing and burning either — so founders can “stop wasting their lives.”

The fund targets middle-of-the-pack businesses in the “sweet spot” of $5m-30m in revenue, paying out 1-2x annual revenue in exchange for the company. 

They then give those companies’ founders either $500k of backing with no equity, or $1m with equity, for their next venture.

Image: https://thehustle.co

Breakthrough innovation is the Holy Grail of business. Everyone wants it, yet it remains frustratingly elusive. 

When I was in the corporate world, we had no shortage of methods to try to coax more innovation out of employees: incubators, innovation centers, brainstorming sessions... yet acutal creative innovation was inevitably challenging to find. It's hard to be "innovative on demand."

Taking a plunge in cold water paid off for a 28-year-old man with chronic nerve pain.

A case study published Monday in The BMJ tells the plight of a man who was debilitated by chronic pain 10 weeks after a successful surgery to curtail chronic facial flushing. (The procedure involves cutting the nerves responsible for blushing, which are found in the chest.) Drugs weren’t working, the researchers write, and exercise seemed to make things worse, rendering his prescribed physical therapy program all but impossible.

How far has the Tri-State region's startup community come, and how far does it have to go?

One way to answer those questions is to take a look at "Accelerating the Development of an Innovation Economy in Cincinnati," a report prepared five years ago by New York City-based McKinsey & Company. 

One of the most common questions I get asked by senior managers is “How can we find more innovative people?” I know the type they have in mind — someone energetic and dynamic, full of ideas and able to present them powerfully. It seems like everybody these days is looking for an early version of Steve Jobs.

Yet in researching my book, Mapping Innovation, I found that most great innovators were nothing like the mercurial stereotype. In fact, almost all of them were kind, generous, and interested in what I was doing. Many were soft-spoken and modest. You would notice very few of them in a crowded room.

When was the last time you were lost on your smartphone? Because for me, it was just this morning. Whether on Facebook, Twitter, or email itself, I end up tapping something that takes me to a web page stuck inside an app, and I’m left scratching my head, wait, aren’t I just on the web? What app am I in again?

Now Google is taking aim at just this problem with a new initiative called AMP for Email. Instead of an email from Pinterest just kicking you to some in-app browser or an external app as soon as you tap one of its links, a new AMP-infused Pinterest email is the web. So you can pin to your heart’s content, right inside the email window. With AMP for Email, you never need to leave the message itself to browse web content.

Our annual private markets review showed the market scaling in 2017. The way limited partners and general partners respond to the opportunities that arise will be critical to their success.

The year just past was, once again, strong for private markets.1 Even as public markets rose worldwide—the S&P 500 shot up about 20 percent, as did other major indices—investors continued to show interest and confidence in private markets. Private asset managers raised a record of nearly $750 billion globally, extending a cycle that began eight years ago.

Image: https://www.mckinsey.com

One of the Erasmus student exchange programme’s latest enrollees is Miguel Castillo, an 80-year-old Spaniard from Valencia who will next week go to the Italian city of Verona as part of his university studies.

The retired notary, who is married with three children and six grandchildren, studies history at the University of Valencia. Shortly after retiring, Castillo suffered a heart attack and underwent a quadruple bypass. Ever since he has had a new lease on life.

Image: 80-year-old Manuel Castillo in class at the University of Valencia. (Manuel Bruque / EPA)

Sens. Chris Coons, D-Delaware, and Cory Gardner, R-Colorado, reintroduced the Support Startup Businesses Act, which would allow awardees of federal research and development grants to use a portion of that funding to create a startup business.

Specifically, the bill authorizes Small Business Innovation Research program awardees to allocate up to 5 percent of their awards for activities that are critical to building businesses, including services such as market validation, intellectual property protection, market research and business model development. Currently, the SBIR program offers very limited financial support to awardees for commercialization activities.

Finding a work-life balance, no pun intended, is a work in progress. And in a world where your work can follow you anywhere, finding this balance is becoming increasingly more difficult. The new infographic from Family Living Today and Now Sourcing looks at why it is especially hard for workers in the US.

Compared to the 38 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the US comes in at number 30 for work-life balance. A couple of the reasons it is so low is because 11.4 percent of Americans work 50 or more hours per week, while they spend 11.4 hours for leisure and personal care daily.

Image: https://smallbiztrends.com

Software giant Oracle has chosen Austin for its first U.S. startup accelerator program.

The Startup Cloud Accelerator announced today follows the recent completion of Oracle’s 560,000-square-foot campus southeast of downtown Austin. 

Oracle, the second-largest software company in the world, will pick five to six startups focused on cloud technology to take part in the six month program, which it will run twice a year.

Image: Shonda Novak/American-StatesmanOracle says its new campus near downtown Austin will ultimately house several thousand employees in two phases.

“It’s in moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.”

Such is the wisdom I obtained the other day from a fortune cookie.

It’s a familiar message, one stated more notably by Martin Luther King Jr.:

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

And Abraham Lincoln:

“If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Top economies around the world are affirming innovation as key to unlocking economic growth and more economies have developed capacity for innovation as highlighted by the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report.

Global spending on R&D reached a record high of almost US$ 1.7 trillion (S$2.25 trillion) in 2016.

US military officials were recently caught off guard by revelations that servicemembers' digital fitness trackers were storing the locations of their workouts - including at or near military bases and clandestine sites around the world. But this threat is not limited to Fitbits and similar devices.

My group's recent research has shown how mobile phones can also track their users through stores and cities and around the world - even when users turn off their phones' location-tracking services.

A wealth of psychological research shows that mental downtime is vital for productivity and health. Some progressive companies are finally starting to listen

One of the most pressing challenges we are facing in the startup ecosystem today is the staggeringly low number of diverse founders receiving VC funding. In the last year, investors awarded women a quarter of the investment they were seeking– male founders, in turn, received half. The numbers are even shockingly lower for founders of color. To challenge this, several VC firms have been working through these issues and coming up with innovative ways to reach and invest in diverse teams.

Image: Credit: Village Capital - Victoria Fram, co-founder and Managing Director of Village Capital, on her passion for creating a more equitable playing field in VC investments