I face a constant barrage of fires and creative challenges daily, so I’ve had to come up with an arsenal of tactics to keep my mind fresh for each new challenge. Below are the tactics I use when I find myself stuck or feeling uninspired on a project. They always help to unlock the ideas I need. 

Eric Tarczynski spent two years traveling around the country to put together a team of about 100 students at 50 campuses.

That team is integral to his new venture capital fund, Contrary Capital.

The idea behind the early-stage fund, launched last month, is to cover the gap between university entrepreneurial programs and the seed fund money that helps a fledgling company take a prototype to market.

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VANCOUVER, Oct. 12, 2017 /CNW/ - The BC Tech Association is excited to announce that the British Columbia-led Canadian Digital Supercluster consortium has been shortlisted to phase two of the application process for funding through the federal government's Innovation Superclusters Initiative. The consortium is comprised of technology leaders including TELUS, Microsoft Corp., D-Wave, UrtheCast, Finger Food Studios and PHEMI; leading industry players including Teck, TimberWest, LifeLabs and Avcorp; and six post-secondary institutions including BCIT, Emily Carr, SFU, UBC, UNBC and UVic. This past July, the consortium submitted a proposal to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. With more than 50 national applicants, only nine were selected.

The venture capital industry is being squeezed by a growing liquidity crunch, industry sources said.

Even though venture capital firms are awash in capital, the pace of exits is slowing.

The 3Q 2017 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor — released Oct. 10 by the Washington-based National Venture Capital Association and Seattle-based data research firm PitchBook — indicated that if the pace of U.S. venture capital investment holds, 2017 will have the most capital invested in a decade.

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A couple weeks ago, Rusnano Sistema Sicar, a Russian private equity fund, announced that it will invest $6 million in Apis Cor, a startup originated from Siberia which has designed a 3D printing technology for the construction industry.

The Apis Cor 3D printer is a mobile robot capable of constructing buildings using fine-grained fibre concrete with special additives. It can build walls in any design for buildings of up to three storeys in a very short time.

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The MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy has awarded over US$1 million in prize money in its second annual MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge (IIC) in recognition and celebration of for-profit and non-profit organizations using technology to improve economic opportunity for base- and middle-level income earners.

Approximately 1,000 organizations from around the world competed in the challenge. Nearly 160 expert core judges reviewed the applications. The 16 top-scoring competitors — all of which are inventing a more inclusive, productive, and sustainable future for the global workforce — advanced to a Champion Committee, which selected four grand-prize winners.

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As Scene reported two weeks ago, there's another pivot coming for the floundering Global Center for Health and Innovation. BioEnterprise, a non-profit business incubator and accelerator headquartered in University Circle, will take over strategy, marketing, programming and tenant engagement activities at the county-funded building. The Cuyahoga County Facilities Development Corporation, a non-profit created by the county to oversee the Global Center and convention center, approved the transition in a vote today. SMG, a Philadelphia-based firm, had previously run those aspects of the Global Center and convention center. It will continue to run operations under the agreement.

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No one country has a monopoly on innovation. Silicon Valley may be synonymous with cutting-edge tech, but changing global currents—from immigration restrictions to political instability—are suddenly opening up new opportunities well beyond the San Francisco Bay Area.

Especially here in India. More than ever before, we have the chance now to retain our homegrown talent and utilize it to develop new industries that will change the world.

Sherry Knowles has a very personal interest in defending intellectual property — she believes it saved her life. Ms Knowles, herself a patent lawyer, fears that the treatment that helped her combat breast cancer, a medicine known as Adriamycin, would not have been produced if the tighter patent regulations introduced over the past decade had been in place when she fell ill.

As a former chief patent counsel at GlaxoSmithKline, Ms Knowles, who runs her own life sciences legal consulting firm, has a vested interest in defending IP laws. She knows that major pharmaceutical groups like GSK can only monetise new drugs based on their ability to patent innovations.

From the banks of the Connecticut and Delaware rivers, inland across the Appalachian Mountains and midwestern flatlands to the shores of Lake Michigan, dozens of cities once rose together to make the United States an industrial superpower. Among them are not only big cities like Detroit and Philadelphia, but also many smaller ones whose size belies their massive contribution to our economy and culture.

Details have emerged about some of the more wacky stunts cities are pursuing to woo Amazon’s second headquarters (give a cactus as a gift; create an Amazon “war room”), but mayors have thus far kept the most consequential details of their bids for HQ2 a closely guarded secret.

To compete, cities are working alongside state and local officials to come up with appealing economic incentive packages. And past mega-deals’ precedent and local laws suggest that the proposals on the table could get extreme.

Brick by brick, and startup by startup, the New York biotech scene is slowly being built up. More startup incubators are either up, or in development, than ever before. Several pieces necessary to a functional life sciences ecosystem are now in place, and many other milestones will simply take time to develop and succeed. Yet industry and government leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs can’t get complacent—there is much more that New York can do, right now, to gain ground on other hubs and further establish the region as a top center for life science. If the right progress is made, 2018 could be a signature year for the city—or, if progress proves elusive, the momentum could slip away.

Hiring is by far the biggest concern we hear from founders. Finding the right people to work at your company is high-stakes. Poor performers can take a catastrophic toll on your success. Most seasoned CEOs say that founders should be spending as much as 50% of their time early on getting the right talent in the door. Yet, the actual hiring process tends to remain more of an art than a science for startups — regardless of all the structure and rubrics they try to impose.

Twenty years ago, China’s manufacturing-based economy was one-ninth the size of the U.S. economy. The gap has closed tremendously, driven in large part by the explosive growth in the nation’s mobile-connected middle class.

How explosive? Even living and working in China, sometimes it is difficult to appreciate the speed at which the innovation ecosystem is growing here. China is the second-largest venture capital market in the world and has seen VC fundraising more than double in the last two years, fueled by the global aspirations of the government, entrepreneurs, and investors.

“Agile” has become the mantra for the digital age. If you don’t move fast, so the thinking goes, you can never be any good, because your competitors will get there first and you’ll be left in the dust. In many circles, this notion has become so well established that no one even thinks to question it anymore.

While agility is a good thing for any organization, innovation is never a single event. For example, while Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, it didn’t arrive on the market until 1945 — nearly 20 years later — and that span was shortened because of massive help from the US government.

We’ve positioned innovation incorrectly. Too often we position innovation as creating a new and valuable offering or solution, ready when customers are ready to demand new products and services. In other words, we’ve positioned innovation as something to do to prepare for future business, future needs and future demands. Yet, innovation does answer these issues – identifying needs and developing ideas for products and services for unmet and perhaps unanticipated needs.

Earlier this month, the MIT Technology Review posted an article that asked “What the hell is an initial coin offering?”

When befuddlement emanates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, arguably the world’s foremost grantor of geek cred, you know you are in truly new territory.

Here’s what it is: An initial coin offering, or ICO, is a fundraising mechanism based on a “cryptocurrency,” such as bitcoin.

What began as a kind of business experiment in innovation has acquired a life of its own.

The idea in 2011 was to create a space at what was then Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical research and development facility in San Diego for an “innovation center,” a place where 18 to 20 life sciences startups could incubate, replete with lab space and equipment. J&J would screen applicants and charge them to lease the space, but would not require an ownership stake or impose licensing requirements on the startups. It would be a “no strings attached” deal.

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Comments on the corporate departures from Connecticut, such as the recent announcement by Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc., suggest they are symptoms of deep-rooted problems within Connecticut's business climate.

Although this may or may not be the case, it is critical that policymakers understand the national and global context and external forces that are at play here. Rather than adopting simplistic solutions to ill-defined problems, we must think carefully about what we are doing right as well as what we need to change.

Image: Jackson Laboratory in Farmington. (MICHAEL McANDREWS / Hartford Courant) - http://www.courant.com