LAST WEEKEND, 150 of tech’s most gifted engineers traveled to an Arizona resort to spend three days at an event that, despite having never happened before, is called Reunion. The group ranged from the semi-famous, like PayPal founder Max Levchin and Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott, to the spectacularly promising, like Stanford junior Nancy Xu. There were a few panels, some company presentations, and a smattering of horseback rides and hikes in the afternoons. The retreat is the formal beginning of a new kind of institution, one that’s becoming increasingly popular among Silicon Valley’s elite and soon-to-be elite. It’s an ostensibly modern take on a very old idea: the social club.

 Image: COURTESY OF ALI PARTOVI

NEW YORK, Jan. 8, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexandria Venture Investments, the strategic venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an urban office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative life science and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, today announced the formal launch of the Alexandria Seed Capital Platform, an innovative funding model that brings together leaders from across the life science community to catalyze seed-stage investment in the most promising life science startups. The Alexandria Seed Capital Platform will be led by Alexandria Venture Investments and supported by a preeminent Advisory Board of seasoned biopharma and venture capital executives from Accelerator Life Science Partners, ARCH Venture Partners, Eli Lilly and Company, Pfizer and Roche.

Like so many conversations with guests on my What’s Next! Podcast, we talk about disruption and innovation, but this conversation was a bit different. My most recent guest, Jim Harris posits that innovation isn’t (only) about about the product, its also about the business model.

Innovation can be a function of any company or any industry but it’s the disruptors that are innovating on so many fronts which is having such ineradicable impact. They are the ones bucking the old way of doing things for a more modern innovation mindset. If you were to stop somebody on the street and say, “what is innovation what’s innovative?” They may say the iPhone is innovative.

Forget warm milk. A new study from the University of Pennsylvania says that fish may be the key to a good night’s sleep.

The paper, published Thursday in Scientific Reports, found an association between regular fish consumption and high sleep quality among Chinese schoolchildren, likely thanks to the omega-3 fatty acids found in fish. Largely as a result of that improved sleep, the researchers found, the children also scored higher on IQ tests.

Green sea turtles do not develop into males or females due to sex chromosomes, like humans and most other mammals do. Instead, the temperature outside a turtle egg influences the sex of the growing embryo. And this unusual biological quirk, scientists say, endangers their future in a warmer world.

Already, some sea turtle populations are so skewed by heat that the young reptiles are almost entirely female, according to a new report in the journal Current Biology.

Image: A cold-stunned Atlantic green sea turtle is released in December. (Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald/AP)

Entrepreneurship can be unpredictable. My quote to describe it is, “running a business is like my sense of fashion in that each year I look back at the last and wonder...what I was thinking.”

Needless to say, I’ve made a lot of mistakes. Entrepreneurship requires taking risks and inevitably, a fair amount of those risks don’t always pay off. What I’ve begun to realize is that mistakes are integral to success.

Without mistakes, you don’t learn or grow from your experiences as much. That means the value you can bring to an organization is limited without these mistakes.

Anyone who is managing their innovation program with innovation software is generally amassing a wealth of data. Many people are looking at that data on an individual idea-level, but it’s actually possible to start looking at that data and identifying new themes, trends, or topics that will inform your strategy in the coming years by grouping that information on tags, text analysis, and more. It can be a trend early-warning system if you pay attention to it.

This is just what the City of Calgary did when they launched their civic engagement initiative, looking to their citizens for city improvement ideas. Not only did they get tons of ideas, but they identified ten emerging opportunities for city stakeholders to think about as they move the city forward.

It is 5 P.M. in Santa Clara, California. Elodie Rebesque, a senior at Los Altos High School, is rushing out of class. She has a medical appointment of sorts. A few blocks away, she pushes open the door of BioCurious, a community lab whose mission is to create a space for amateurs, inventors, entrepreneurs and anyone else who wants to learn and experiment with biology in a friendly, educational environment. Eric Espinosa, Elodie’s mentor, quickly assesses the results of her last experiment to identify next steps.

Ahhh, it’s that the time of year again — the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference (JPM). It’s the Superbowl of the life sciences; the largest and grandest spectacle of the biopharma year.

JPM rolls around every January, setting the tone for the biopharma year ahead.

Or does it?

Starting a new business is a serious undertaking. Yet many aspiring entrepreneurs I know approach it as a fun project, get-rich quick scheme, or perhaps an expensive hobby. Others quit their day jobs and commit everything to their new passion, without regard for their own well-being, or the welfare of others around them. Neither of these approaches bodes well for success.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com/

“Every morning I wake up and think of what I need to do, and I’m afraid,” Ayse Birsel confesses. “What if I don’t come up with a good idea? The only remedy to that is to start doing it.”

But Birsel, who’s the cofounder and creative director of design studio Birsel + Seck and the author of Design the Life You Love, knows it isn’t easy pushing past that fear in order to get started on something.

Industry funding of university research is an important component of U.S. academic research and industrial innovation, especially as federal funding for universities continues to decline and companies cut back on basic, intramural research. However, U.S. states vary dramatically on the extent to which their research universities attract industry support. In part, this is because of policy and administrative choices states and universities make. All states, but especially the laggards, would benefit from policies to attract more industry research funding, particularly as such funding appears to generate technology-based economic activity at the state level.

Image: https://itif.org

A Chinese riddle invites on to guess the identity of runners without a leg, swimmers without a flipper, gliders without a wing. The answer, of course, is snakes. Today more than 3,000 species share a long, limbless body that can negotiate land, water and even the air between trees. Their ancient ancestors, however, had limbs of various shapes. How, scientists have wondered, did snakes lose their legs?

Students with the potential to be America’s next Einstein can be identified in elementary school, yet most won’t grow up to be innovators. So where’s the disconnect? Researchers from the Equality of Opportunity Project examined patents, tax records, and test scores to determine which kids grow up to become inventors in the United States—and which ones do not. According to the findings, limitations that begin early in life help dictate whether a given American will contribute transformational ideas to society.

Angel investors from around the world will meet in Istanbul in February to explore the role of family offices and wealth management institutions in fostering innovation and delivering more business value.

The World Business Angels Investment Forum (WBAF), which will be held between Feb. 18 and 20, will host presidents and leading angel investment figures from 75 countries, which fund entrepreneurs with a transaction volume of $50 billion around the world.

This year’s forum will be gathered under the theme of “Unlocking the Potential for Innovation: Angel Investors Partnering with Family Offices and Wealth Management Institutions.”

For loggers, fishers and pilots, the risk of life-threatening accidents in remote locations comes with the job. High rates of workplace fatalities kept those occupations atop the latest list of America’s most dangerous jobs, according to the 2016 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS).

Mark was a sophomore at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when he began mining cryptocurrencies more or less by accident.

In November 2016, he stumbled on NiceHash, an online marketplace for individuals to mine cryptocurrency for willing buyers. His desktop computer, boosted with a graphics card, was enough to get started. Thinking he might make some money, Mark, who asked not to use his last name, downloaded the platform’s mining software and began mining for random buyers in exchange for payments in bitcoin. Within a few weeks, he had earned back the $120 cost of his graphics card, as well as enough to buy another for $200.

In a celebrated 1995 article in Newsweek, astronomer Clifford Stoll blasted Internet visionaries. “Do our computer pundits lack all common sense?” he asked. “The truth is no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

Clearly, he was mistaken, but Stoll was no Luddite. In fact, he was an early adopter of the Internet who had spent years online. His article merely reflected what he saw: a complex technology meant for highly technical people like him, not a easy-to-use service for ordinary consumers.

The nonprofit sector is being stirred up my new digital tools and dynamic social marketing strategies capable of raising more funds than was possible a decade ago. Social change is no longer limited to nonprofit enterprises. Social entrepreneurs are discovering new ways of thinking about their roles as changemakers. The traditional NGO business model is still as relevant as it always was, but awareness of new options can help directors to think creatively about their business model.

Come on, we have all thought it as entrepreneurs, at one point or another in our careers: “I just wished I could clone myself in finding new employees for my business. Nobody works harder than I do. Nobody is as smart as I am. I don’t trust anybody to make decisions or manage teams better that I do.”

Sound familiar? But is "cloning" yourself really the right solution for your hiring goals? There are clear advantages and disadvantages to a strategy like this, so you will need to figure out if cloning yourself will help or hurt your business, based on your business’s specific needs. Read on.