A 4-year-old entrepreneurship program is getting a D.C. twist.

The Innovation Corps, a program that helps researchers commercialize products, will expand its Accelerate D.C. program this month, which will give $25,000 grants to eight startup teams from the D.C. community and mid-Atlantic region that are not involved with GW. Officials said the new venture will widen the focus of I-Corps, a program that has traditionally helped faculty researchers market products from golf ball designs to water quality tests in regional sites around the country.

In a new study, a team of U.K. researchers found a surprising health risk associated with surfing: a higher likelihood of carrying antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Past research has shown that surfers swallow much more sea water than swimmers and other water lovers. “The big question for us was, well, so what?” says Anne Leonard, an epidemiologist at the University of Exeter Medical School and the researcher behind that 2015 research and the new study.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Forty percent of recent associate degree graduates who had a relevant job or internship while in school had a good job waiting for them after graduation. By comparison, only 16% of those with a job or internship that was not relevant to their field of study had a good job waiting for them. Those without a job or internship fared worst of all, with only 6% saying they had a good job upon graduation.

The conventional wisdom is clear and–on its face–totally sensible: If you’re trying to make a name for yourself in your company, you need to contribute during team meetings. Speaking up and sharing your opinions is a surefire way to get noticed. You don’t want to disappear and give the impression you’ve got nothing meaningful to add.

That much is basically true. You really do need to contribute often enough that people realize you’re there and bring something useful to the table. But there’s a chance you’re overdoing it.

Managing the decision-making process in a company is a crucial part of maintaining a well-functioning organization—which is why much more attention needs to be directed at how decisions are being made. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, senior partner Aaron De Smet and senior expert Leigh Weiss speak with McKinsey’s Simon London about how organizations can make better decisions and execute on them in a clearer, more efficient way.

Alongside common New Year's resolutions like fitness and wellness goals, professional development is probably one area of your life you're looking to improve in 2018.

Even if you're not currently looking for a job, it's always a good idea to keep your résumé updated and make sure you don't fall behind on the always-evolving skill sets needed in your industry. 

The conventional wisdom sees tech concentrating in a handful of places, many dense urban cores that offer the best jobs and draw talented young people. These places are seen as so powerful that, as The New York Times recently put it, they have little need to relate to other, less fashionable cities.

To a considerable extent, that was true – until it wasn’t. The most recent data on STEM jobs – in science, technology, engineering or mathematics – suggests that tech jobs, with some exceptions, are shifting to smaller, generally more affordable places.

In my experience, the initial idea for a new product usually comes from a single entrepreneur, but the implementation plan for a new business requires a team, or at least a co-founder. The reason is that any one person rarely has the bandwidth, interest, or skills to manage all the tasks required to build a business. Thus I find that two heads are usually better than one in a startup.

Way back in the early eighties, I had the privilege of working with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, when Microsoft was still a startup. I realize now that these two were near-perfect co-founders, with Bill having the technical passion, and Steve bringing the business experience from his prior stint at Procter and Gamble. Their skills and interests were complementary, and their trust in each other was palpable.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Looking for venture capital? You better cruise the streets of San Francisco and the boulevards of Silicon Valley.

California remains the number one place for venture capital activity with $8.9 billion invested in the state during the fourth quarter, according to the MoneyTree report released this month by CB Insights and PwC. In fact, the San Francisco region saw a whopping $5.1 billion invested into startups, a 23 percent increase in dollars invested. Nearby Silicon Valley — home to tech giants like Apple and Google and venture capital powerhouses like Benchmark and Andreessen Horowitz — saw investment totals increase to $2.6 billion, up 18 percent.

Ten tips to navigate the opportunities and uncertainties of this great wave of technological change. For more insight, read “10 Principles for Leading the Next Industrial Revolution.”

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

“We make ourselves according to the ideas we have of our possibilities.” V. S. Naipaul

In this time of goal and resolution setting, thoughts turn to the subject of the targets organizations set. When I am working with clients I often hear myself asking, with not very subtle disgust: “That’s your ten-year target?”

This leads to several different reactions from leadership teams. Sheepish chagrin. Defensive explanations about why it really is a big target. Puzzled faces asking how they can justify a larger target. And occasionally a bit of anger at my pushing them so hard.

Over the past year, Widener University has avoided controversies over speech or activism: It hasn’t played host to a major student protest or to a speaker who’s been shouted down. Julie E. Wollman, the university’s president, doesn’t believe colleges are suppressing free speech, as some Trump-administration officials and others do.

But Ms. Wollman says she has observed how discourse has broken down on other campuses — and has seen an opportunity for her institution, which has campuses in Pennsylvania and Delaware, to show how to do it better. Last fall Widener kicked off a new “common ground” initiative, in which students and faculty members work to create spaces for people of opposing viewpoints to have productive conversations, both inside and outside the classroom. Ms. Wollman discussed that effort with The Chronicle.

Image: https://www.chronicle.com

OYSTER BAY, New York, Jan. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Blockchain technology is most often associated with cryptocurrencies and financial services applications.  But, it's the very decentralized nature and cryptographic anchor of blockchain that makes it a prime foundation for cybersecurity solutions, particularly considering the continued mass-scale data breaches and identity theft happening on a worldwide scale and within the most well-guarded corporate perimeters.  The race is on for blockchain-based cybersecurity. ABI Research, a market-foresight advisory firm providing strategic guidance on the most compelling transformative technologies, has identified the fifteen startups in the blockchain-based cybersecurity space who are driving these unprecedented security solutions.

Nearly a decade after the Copyright Policy was approved in May 2007, an amendment has been proposed by Professor Vivek Goel, Vice-President Research and Innovation, to provide consistency in the handling of copyright revenues. The amendment calls for harmonizing their distribution with the Inventions Policy, which governs the commercialization of inventions through the university.

Image: https://thevarsity.ca

Everybody enjoys a success story. Vicariously living out our fantasies through those who achieved success gives us hope it will happen to us. But, listening to these stories doesn't do us any favors because those tales aren't the whole picture: the struggles, the tough breaks, the defeats that set the stage for the eventual big win.

Venture capitalists’ money is flowing into U.S. technology companies at the highest rate since the dot-com boom, aimed at finding the next big thing — yet there doesn’t seem to be a bubble in sight, say VCs and research firm PitchBook.

Venture capital firms in the United States dished out $84 billion to 8,000 technology startups and companies in 2017, the highest amount of capital seen since the early 2000s, according to an annual industry report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.

The amount of invested venture capital has seen a near-consistent rise since 2009 and more than doubled since 2012 — though venture capital dipped in 2016 to $72.4 billion from $79.3 billion in 2015, according to Bloomberg.

Life is an endless blur of work, commuting, parenting and laundry. But there are those rare and delightful moments that stick in our memories and define our lives. It could be a delicious dessert you ate in a Parisian cafe while on vacation or that time you were singled out in class for achieving the highest test score. Chip Heath, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, has written a book with his brother, Dan Heath, a senior professor at Duke University’s Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE), that examines the importance of moments in both life and work. The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact explains how companies can do more to create defining moments for their employees and customers, which can lead to greater satisfaction and boost the bottom line. Chip Heath joined Knowledge@Wharton to discuss the ideas in the book.

Image: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

With the current strong economy, as an active startup mentor, I’m seeing a new surge of entrepreneurs and startups, with the commensurate scramble for funding. There just aren’t enough angel investors and VCs to go around. Thus I’m getting more questions on new mechanisms, like crowd funding, or going public through the side door as a reverse merger.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

To state the obvious: Drugs are increasingly complex and so are their patent lives.

It’s not uncommon for a drug to have a dozen or more patents covering everything from the active ingredient to the delivery mechanism, to whether the biologic is a fully humanized or not. If the respective IP is submitted at different times, the patents may expire years apart.

US ANNUAL FUNDING TOPS $70B FOR SECOND TIME 2017 was the second year that saw dollar funding top $70B, but deals declined for the third straight year, falling 4% from 2016 and reaching the lowest annual total since 2012.

Image: https://www.cbinsights.com