Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
Maybe there’s a great reason why your college grades suck–campus activism, a demanding job to help you pay tuition–or partying. Fortunately, you can still land an impressive internship with an unimpressive GPA. To find out how, Fast Company spoke with four people who did just that.
KANSAS CITY, Mo., Nov. 28, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Angel, a new comprehensive national study released today, provides a detailed picture of angel investors, who they are, where they live, and how they make investment decisions.
"Without angels, most high-growth startups wouldn't start," says Marianne Hudson, executive director of the Angel Capital Association. "But until now, there was very little data on angels and how they make investment decisions."
The American patent system is the lifeblood of the U.S. innovation economy. Businesses that secure patents innovate at higher rates than those that lack intellectual property; startups and new businesses that hold patents attract capital more easily than those that do not; and startups that obtain a patent are more likely to go public. According to the Department of Commerce, intellectual property intensive industries account for 38.2 percent of the U.S. economy, and support over 45.5 million good, high-paying jobs — about 30 percent of all U.S. employment.
My recent visit to Helsinki, Finland, quickly revealed a city that boasts a vibrant ecosystem of over 500 thriving startups, as well as hoards of ambitious entrepreneurs hungry to disrupt the tech scene. Little could I have guessed that Finland was a hotbed for entrepreneurship: investments into Finnish tech startups went up by 42% in 2016 and have quadrupled since 2011!
Image: Celinne Da Costa - The Finnish philosophy makes them very good at what they set their mind to, both as people and as entrepreneurs
Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa formed The Emerge Foundation in early 2017. Originally created as an entrepreneurial development program at the Gerald R. Edwards Entrepreneurial Center on Simpson’s campus, the growing EMERGE@Simpson program recently expanded to provide business incubation services to external enterprises.
Enterprises eligible for services include those with high commercialization potential affiliated with private colleges and community colleges. The Emerge Foundation contracted with Executive Director Todd Kielkopf in August of 2017 to guide ventures on business modeling, organizational development, and financing.
Image: http://siliconprairienews.com
But that won't be felt evenly. So says a McKinsey Global Institute study (PDF), which predicts shifting labor demand as a result of new tech. It predicts rich nations like America will find 25 percent of work automated by then, while poorer ones, like India, will see as little as 9 percent taken up by machines. New jobs will be created, but 375 million people will be forced to find totally different occupations—and, as we've reported, they will likely require more tech savvy than many workers have.
I have run three crowdfunding campaigns, all with over 1,000 backers per project, totaling close to $2 million in pledges. One of them raised over $1.2 million for a brand and prototype that I built in six weeks on a $600 budget.
What’s my secret? Above all, be passionate about your project, be honest and transparent with your backers, and show them that you truly care. On top of this, my seven most practical tips are as follows.
A growing number of companies have embraced the need for strong digital leaders. Our 2016 study of chief digital officers (CDOs), which analyzed the presence of such leaders among the world’s 2,500 largest public companies, revealed that 19 percent of these companies have now designated an executive to lead their digital agenda. This number is up from just 6 percent of companies in our 2015 study. And the uptick has gained momentum in recent years: Sixty percent of the digital leaders we identified in our most recent study have been appointed since 2015.
Image: Illustration by Lars Leetaru - https://www.strategy-business.com
Even the most tech savvy among us have a hard time wrapping their heads around Bitcoin. It's a hot topic and a frequent point of discussion among investors, entrepreneurs and stock traders, so you should want to know all about it.
For starters, here's an overly simplified explanation of Bitcoin: It's a digital currency (there are more than 800 now) that isn't controlled by a central authority such as a government or bank. It's created by "miners," who use computers and specialized hardware to process transactions, secure the currency's network and collect bitcoins in exchange. Supporters say it allows for more secure transactions over the internet. That's in part due to blockchain, a technology that records cryptocurrency transactions chronologically in a public digital ledger.
A medical device developer has created a $10-million venture capital fund to support early stage health care companies.
Holland-based Genesis Innovation Group said today it established the privately funded cultivate(MD) Capital Fund I, LLC, which will focus on medical device and orthopedic technologies.
The fully funded fund is limited to private placements and closed to the public.
The firm expects the fund to be “fully operational and actively seeking” investment opportunities by early 2018.
Image: Photo via genesisinnovationgroup.com
The big yellow school bus, with its plastic seats, rubbery smell, and cool-kids-in-the-back social hierarchies, hasn’t gotten a true update in decades. What will happen to such an old-fashioned vehicle when our streets become flooded with driverless cars? We know how service vehicles like delivery vans and city buses will be affected by autonomous tech. What about school buses, which are so vital and also so fraught with concerns over safety?
Image: Photo: courtesy Teague
Who says you can't become an entrepreneur at 5 years old?
That's when Dean Kamen, legendary inventor of the Segway scooter, insulin pump and the portable dialysis machine, built his first gadget.
"I decided that inventing, especially solving a really important problem like making your bed automatically would be a great thing to do. And from that day forward I spent my life trying to looking at the same problems everyone else looks at, see them differently and try to figure out what technology that's now available, can be applied in some new way to this old problem to solve it," Kamen explained.
Chris Tidmarsh co-owns Green Bridge Growers, a commercial greenhouse in north central Indiana that provides herbs, lettuces and nasturtiums to local restaurants, and sunflowers and cosmos to florists.
He has degrees in chemistry, environmental studies and French. He has a passion for agriculture. He also fits a very rare profile for an entrepreneur. He has autism.
Image: Chris Tidmarsh, co-founder and co-owner of Green Bridge Growers, at the company’s bigger greenhouses.
There has been an ongoing explosion in entrepreneurial activity in recent years, supported by ubiquitous cloud services, accessible, low-cost open source software, big data analytics capabilities, and professionals hungry for new opportunities beyond the 9-to-5 corporate walls. And we're not just talking about Silicon Valley.
A recent study calculates that the number of technology-based startups in the US economy grew 47 percent in the last decade, and these new firms have been "making an outsized contribution to economic growth."
Image: Photo: Joe McKendrick - Cheap, ubiquitous tech means opportunities
“Alexa, can you tell me the impact of the wholesale shift to voice search and voice communication over the Internet?”
Amazon’s wildly popular personal assistant, Alexa, probably cannot answer that question for you. And even she doesn’t perceive how she is making us dumber and taking our choices away.
The world is surely moving from text to voice as the primary interface on the Internet. The rapid rise of Amazon’s Echo (and its smaller version, the Echo Dot) personal assistant device was the biggest story of the 2016 holiday shopping season. As of September 2017, Amazon had sold 15 million Echos and Google had sold five million of its own personal assistant device, the Google Home. This is impressive, for a category that just a year earlier had not existed.
KANSAS CITY, Mo., Nov. 28, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Angel, a new comprehensive national study released today, provides a detailed picture of angel investors, who they are, where they live, and how they make investment decisions. Key findings include:
In the old days, if you wanted to ask someone out on a date, you summoned up the nerve, tried to gauge their interest, and actually said the words, “Wanna go out?” Now you log in, swipe right, and send a couple of emojis, leaving the hard work to a dating app.
The situation is not so dissimilar for firms trying to develop and hone customer relationships, observes ESCP Europe’s Michael Haenlein. He’s the author of a new study about the challenges of managing those dynamics in the modern world.
Is there anything more painful to a professor than discovering half her students have been lost to shoe-shopping and Snapchat? The distraction of technology is a major driver of electronics bans in classrooms. But other academics are equally adamant that technology can be a force for good, or at least that professors have no right to tell students what they can and can’t use in class.
That long-simmering debate flared up last week in response to a New York Times op-ed by Susan Dynarski, a professor of education, public policy, and economics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Ms. Dynarski, who bans electronics in her classes and seminars, wrote that “a growing body of evidence shows that, over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures.
Innovation doesn’t always make you a winner in business. In my role as an angel investor in startups, almost every pitch I see highlights some real innovation in technology, business model, or market opportunity. Yet only a few of these get funded, and even fewer become dominant players in their chosen space. The rest fail quickly, or struggle for years to get real traction.
But don’t get me wrong. Innovation is necessary to get you into the game, but even a disruptive technology won’t assure you business success. These days, it’s all about harnessing your innovation to get an advantage in a business. Or as Steven S. Hoffman asserts in his new book, you have to “Make Elephants Fly,” and that requires getting outside of conventional thinking.
Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com
Although companies use crowdsourcing more and more to fill their innovation pipeline, it is not so easy to get people to submit their ideas to online innovation platforms. Our data from an online panel reveal that 65% of the contributors do not come back more than twice, and that most of the rest quit after a few tries. This kind of user churn is endemic to online social platforms — on Twitter, for example, a majority of users become inactive over time — and crowdsourcing is no exception. In a way, this turnover is even worse than ordinary customer churn: When a customer defects, a firm knows the value of what it’s lost, but there is no telling how valuable the ideas not submitted might have been.
