Malaysian Global Innovation & Creativity Center (Magic), the country’s startup and innovation lab, is toying with the idea of providing capital to startups, a top executive with the organisation said. Currently, the startup and innovation lab is known for its capacity building role, facilitating collaborations and helping companies scale to the next level.

Image: MaGIC CEO Ashran Dato’ Ghazi - https://www.dealstreetasia.com

You will be pivoting your business in your lifetime, whether you are a new startup, or a mature company like Motorola or IBM. You can count on it and plan for it, or you wait for the next survival crisis brought your way by this rapidly changing world. You can even give it a more elegant name, like “market-focused reinvention,” but it won’t be graceful if you don’t take the lead.

The ocean’s deepest fish doesn’t look like it could survive in harsh conditions thousands of feet below the surface. Instead of giant teeth and a menacing frame, the fishes that roam in the deepest parts of the ocean are small, translucent, bereft of scales — and highly adept at living where few other organisms can.

Image: https://scienceblog.com

Sponsored Post: Cold and flu season is quickly approaching, spreading the malaise of this season’s hottest viruses that are prone to knock the productivity right out of your office. But what does the life of a virus in your office look like? Aside from the general feeling of hatred that most (besides microbiologists), share for their microbial marauders, the life of a virus is an amazing feat of genetic reengineering that even the most sterile germophobe can appreciate.

From finding a building to obtaining equipment to putting together a productive team, every element of a successful startup requires funding. Unless and until you can find someone to finance you, there’s no way to get your business off the ground. Traditionally, new businesses have relied on venture capital for their early financing. But this funding method doesn’t work for many kinds of firms, even when those firms have promising plans for success. Only by recognizing the gaps left by traditional venture capital and finding new methods to fill those gaps can we provide effective funding for all new businesses.

Twenty years after McKinsey researchers declared a “war for talent” under way, organizations and leaders appear to be more talent-obsessed than ever. There are endless conferences, books, and C-level roles all geared toward mastering the mysteries of talent: finding it, attracting it, rewarding it, developing it, and of course retaining it.

But while this obsession rests on a correct premise–that talent drives individual performance and, in turn, organizational success–it’s belied by the way businesses typically spend their money.

Building a profitable side hustle could be your passport to financial and business success. Whether you're building a side project with the goal of getting out of debt, making a big upcoming purchase without breaking the bank, or generating extra income for another reason entirely, it's important to keep track of your finances with any business.

Wading through the challenges of a new side hustle can be difficult, especially if you've never started a  business before.

Image: https://www.thebalance.com

Apprenticeships are commonly identified with skilled trades such as welding and carpentry, but new research indicates that expanding apprenticeships into other occupations would lead to more job opportunities. Researchers from Harvard Business School’s Managing the Future Work Project and Burning Glass Technologies, a labor market analytics company, found that the number of occupations that commonly use apprenticeships could be expanded -- from 27 to 74.

As storms go, the one that struck northwest Alaska in mid-November was not remarkable. Its pressure was not particularly low, nor its 30-mile-per-hour winds particularly strong. Still, it sent several feet of rough seas surging into the beleaguered coastal communities that dot Alaska’s northern and western shores. In Deering, a village of 126 people perched on a sandy spit on the northern coast of the Seward Peninsula, the tempestuous waters eroded some 10 to 20 feet of beach, according to local news reports.

The Slush conference in Helsinki is certainly living up to its slushy reputation but it's a good place anyhow for networking and doing deals within Europe. And with the Nordic region accounting for half of the billion-dollar tech exits in Europe, it's a fast-growing startup hub that can't be ignored.

The connections between Finland with tech powers Silicon Valley and Asia are still limited but growing. In one effort to diversify, a chartered plane from the Valley to Helsinki  was loaded with venture capitalists making the 14-hour trip to check out what's going on in tech in the Nordic region. Some 111 million Euros was invested in Finnish startups in 2016, most of it coming from nearby countries or within Finland.

Image: Mobile gaming founder Petri Jarvilehto at Seriously

The most effective way to improve the lives of millions in poverty is to support agriculture in developing countries. Most of the world’s poor are farmers, and those who are not spend much of their income on food. Transforming a country’s agriculture sector can create jobs, raise incomes, reduce malnutrition, and kick-start the economy on a path to middle-income growth. In fact, almost every industrialized nation began its economic ascent with an agricultural transformation. Recent examples include Brazil, China, and Vietnam, each of which at least doubled the value of its agriculture sector within 20 years of starting its transformation. Many other countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are earlier on the path of transformation.

Eric Leuthardt believes that in the near future we will allow doctors to insert electrodes into our brains so we can communicate directly with computers and each other.

It’s the Monday morning following the opening weekend of the movie Blade Runner 2049, and Eric C. Leuthardt is standing in the center of a floodlit operating room clad in scrubs and a mask, hunched over an unconscious patient.

If you’re always working for the weekend, you’re not alone. Just one-third of employees are actively engaged at work, leaving the majority of us unhappy on the job, according to the most recent State of the American Workplace Gallup poll. Instead of keeping an eye on the clock and the calendar, take the reins by creating a career that you love, experts suggest.

The health care industry is going through a major transformation right now. And that means many companies are at a crossroads.

They need to either move forward and look for new and innovative ways to treat patients or get left behind. This can't always be done with each company or research organization working in their own silo. In order to achieve the most efficient and impactful medical advances, there needs to be collaboration here in Cleveland, across the state of Ohio and around the globe.

Image: CONTRIBUTED PHOTO - Dr. Hiroyuki Fujita

When I was 24, I launched my first startup. I wish that I could say it was a grand success, but it was an absolute failure. My cofounders and I took seed capital, fought amongst each other and eventually, realized that the company was built on a faulty premise. Like 75 percent of venture-backed startups, we crashed and burned. It was also during this time that I received some of the worst advice in my life.

The biotech ecosystem in Portugal is rapidly growing. Ricardo Perdigao, Investment Manager at Portugal Ventures, discusses the country’s potential in this field.

Portugal has seen the number of life sciences startups triple between 2008 to 2015. A study by Portugal Ventures links this growth to a better funding environment and to researchers being more aware that they can start a successful business from scientific breakthroughs. In addition to Portugal Ventures, the largest life sciences investor in the country, several other VC investors including Caixa Capital, Hovione Capital and Pathena have been providing seed capital to bring promising projects from universities to the market.

Image: https://labiotech.eu

A lot of research has already been done on the significant contribution of immigrant scientists and engineers to the U.S. innovation system. Less research, however, has been done on the presence of migrant and immigrant leadership in corporate America. While there has been some research done on ethnic minorities’ representation in senior corporate roles in the U.S. — for example  the study of the ethnic composition of boards in corporate America by Richie Zweigenhaft — studies of immigrant leadership talent are still scarce. This is despite the fact that many well-known CEOs of American companies are immigrants, such as Elon Musk (Tesla), Sergey Brin (Google), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Dara Khosrowshahi (Expedia and Uber).

Venture capital* fundraising has seen a slight slowdown in in the first three quarters of 2017 when compared to the same period last year. However, first-time venture capital funds represent a larger proportion of total fundraising compared to last year. As at September 2017, first-time venture capital vehicles represented 31% of all venture capital funds closed, compared to 25% in the same period last year. Additionally, the number of first-time funds in market has increased from 470 as at September 2016, to more than 590 in September 2017. Despite the many obstacles that emerging fund managers face, first-time venture capital funds of vintage 2010 or older have generated substantially higher median returns than vehicles run by experienced managers. In fact, first-time venture capital funds of all vintage years between 2006 and 2014, except for 2008 and 2009, have outperformed non-first-time funds.

Image: http://www.valuewalk.com

A sweeping new report about European startups from venture firm Atomico paints a picture of a cross-border ecosystem that is brimming with confidence and having a transformative effect on the continent’s workforce.

“The State of European Tech 2017,” the third annual data set Atomico has compiled, was released today at the Slush tech conference in Helsinki, Finland. While the 143-page report covers a wide range of topics, it reaffirms the feeling among many on the right side of the Atlantic that years of a startup groundswell is now creating a robust tech economy that has a distinctly European flavor.