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.
The Float is a concept car by Yunchen Chai. It won the design competition hosted by Renault and Central Saint Martins. The participants of the competition had to design a car that emphasized electric power, autonomous driving, and connected technology.
This car uses Meglev technology, is non-directional, and a magnetic belt to attach multiple pods. The Float would even come with an app. This could be the future of car design.
Image: http://mashable.com
A lot has happened in the five or six years since marketing pundits started preaching that every brand should “act like a publisher.” Most notably, neither marketers nor publishers can rely any longer on their consumers to blindly trust them. As a result we are seeing a new tone in the way both marketers and publishers communicate, putting more of a premium on transparency — and even acknowledging their co-dependence.
In the summer of 2016, the University of Delaware launched a 12-week workshop for engineering students interested in starting a business. The program prepares undergraduates steeped in complicated math and lab work to bring their ideas to market.
“Just because you have a good product doesn’t mean you have a good company,” said Dustyn Roberts, director of the College of Engineering (CoE) Summer Founders program and assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
Image: http://www.delawarebusinesstimes.com
Regardless of the situation, it’s human nature to be seeking out the next big thing. That is how we keep evolving as a species. We've even evolved in how we stay connected with each other from mail to telephones to computers. This shift in how we stay connected took a fascinating turn with the widespread adoption of the internet and artificial intelligence.
In business, connectedness is everything. It is the basis for how sales are made, customers are satisfied, and how brands develop.
For the better part of a decade, telecom companies have suffered through declining revenues, cash flow, and return on investment just as tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others have mushroomed by building their businesses on the operators’ own infrastructure. While these tech visionaries have enjoyed well over $1 trillion in combined market-cap growth by innovating and thinking differently and adeptly, telecom companies have tried to compete by implementing the same old survival tactics: cutting costs, reducing the workforce, and timidly entering into new business adjacencies. The trouble is that playbook no longer applies.
What is a “smart” society? While flights of imagination from science-fiction writers, filmmakers, and techno-futurists involve things like flying cars and teleportation, in practice smart technology is making inroads in a piecemeal fashion, often in rather banal circumstances. In Chicago, for example, predictive analytics is improving health inspections schedules in restaurants, while in Boston city officials are collaborating with Waze, the traffic navigation app company, combining its data with inputs from street cameras and sensors to improve road conditions across the city. A city-state such as Singapore has a more holistic idea of a “smart nation,” where the vision includes initiatives from self-driving vehicles to cashless and contactless payments, robotics and assistive technologies, data-empowered urban environments, and technology-enabled homes.
Front Row Ventures, a student-run VC fund, has partnered with Real Ventures on its mission to invest $600,000 in 24 student startups.
Founded by three Montreal-based students, Front Row Ventures will make $25,000 equity investments in startups. The fund includes a team of 20 students from Montreal universities including McGill, Campus Montréal (UdeM, HEC, Polytechnique), Concordia, and UQAM, ESG, and ÉTS.
Whether you’re an executive, a manager, or part of the team handling day-to-day operations, you’ve probably thought more than once about what you bring to the table within your organization. What do you feel is your greatest asset? Chances are, consistency never tops the list—but perhaps it should.
Regardless of whether your a undergraduate student or an influential award-winning scholar, you ought to understand the power of consistency in your professional life. While many people think innovation, passion, and raw talent are the greatest assets you can possess in the workplace, the truth is simpler: consistency is actually more important than any of these assets. Sure, it’s great to be innovative and dynamic, but unless there’s substance and action behind your ideas, innovation and talent alone won’t get you very far. Here are a few reasons consistency can be your greatest asset in the workplace.
Twenty years ago, the October 1997 issue of Entrepreneur magazine featured stories on:
Nearly a year ago, none of Carson Kropfl's skateboards would fit in his locker or backpack, so the 12-year-old entrepreneur and inventor decided to solve the problem himself. That's when he came up with Locker Board, a startup that manufactures smaller skateboards made from recycled materials.
Image: ABC/Eric McCandless
Why not buy local apples from the farmers' market instead of imported bananas from a multinational grocery chain? If the shoes you desire are manufactured in your hometown, so much the better. It's all about supporting the local economy and employer.
But what about the realm of financial strategy for the average investor? Does the "buy local" trend extend to "invest local"?
Image: Those thinking of angel investing should join a group, rather than going it alone, says R. Stewart Thompson, the Calgary-based founder and chief executive officer of VA Angels. JEFF MCINTOSH/THE GLOBE AND MAIL
If an entrepreneur doesn’t find themselves in over their head at least 20% of the time, they are probably not pushing the limits, not taking enough risk, and probably not working on an idea that’s worth doing. The challenge in to know when and how to ask for help, and not let bravado and ego mask anxieties. The best people know when they don’t know, and know how to find the right help.
Unfortunately, too many entrepreneurs I know are terrible at finding and accepting help. Perhaps it’s because they jumped into this lifestyle because they are passionate and stubborn about following their own vision, and they enjoy being their own boss. Too often they are also hesitant, inexperienced, and fearful of hiring people or finding a mentor to be the partner they need.
Regular exercise may prevent many cases of future depression, according to a new Australian study, and researchers say that as little as one hour a week can make a real difference. The paper, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, followed more than 22,000 healthy Norwegian adults without symptoms of anxiety or depression for an average of 11 years, asking them about their exercise habits and symptoms of depression and anxiety at the beginning and end of the study.
We are creating an intelligence that is external to humans and housed in the virtual economy. This is bringing us into a new economic era—a distributive one—where different rules apply.
A year ago in Oslo Airport I checked in to an SAS flight. One airline kiosk issued a boarding pass, another punched out a luggage tag, then a computer screen showed me how to attach it and another where I should set the luggage on a conveyor. I encountered no single human being. The incident wasn’t important but it left me feeling oddly that I was out of human care, that something in our world had shifted.
One of the criticisms leveled at Richard Florida is that many of the Rust Belt cities that tried to cater to the creative class ended up wasting their money on worthless programs.
What this illustrates instead is that leaders in the Rust Belt have taken the contours of the current economy as a given, and attempted to find a way to adapt their community to that.
Image: http://www.newgeography.com
The trends of Internet of Things connectivity have grown pervasively in 2016-17. In 2018 more ideas and actual complex issues being addressed will IoT to its next tier of actualization. The very fact that devices can represent themselves digitally, monitoring them becomes easier so that data streaming in real time takes a step closer to relativity and reliability.
Image: https://readwrite.com/
From Star Trek to Family Guy, storylines based on ripples in the spacetime continuum theorized by Albert Einstein abound. Well, three U.S. scientists just won the Nobel Prize for Physics proving him right.
The three octogenarians headed a massive crowdsource effort that simultaneously proved Einstein right—and wrong. In his General Theory of Relativity, he posited way back in 1915 that space and time are not constants, and that in the presence of energy and mass, like that of a black hole, they become malleable.
Image: The Virgo Detector (Photo: The Virgo collaboration/CCO 1.0)
The turn of the 21st century redefined innovation once more in the global economy, as thought leaders have been driven by the goal of gaining a competitive advantage through human capital.
We spoke with Vic Anand, the Director of Innovation and Partnerships at AppStudio. Over the past two years, he has been tasked with leading AppStudio's innovation activities and overseeing the external partner relations network.
A landmark study led by the Black Dog Institute has revealed that regular exercise of any intensity can prevent future depression – and just one hour can help.
Published today in the American Journal of Psychiatry, the results show even small amounts of exercise can protect against depression, with mental health benefits seen regardless of age or gender.
In the largest and most extensive study of its kind, the analysis involved 33,908 Norwegian adults who had their levels of exercise and symptoms of depression and anxiety monitored over 11 years.
SINGAPORE: The main obstacle to innovation in the public sector "is ourselves", Education Minister Ong Ye Kung said on Monday (Oct 2).
Speaking to more than two thousand senior officials at the Public Service Conference 2017, Mr Ong said public sector officials need to take stock of how often they say no and instead find a way to say yes, when it comes to the pursuit of innovation.
Image: File photo of Ong Ye Kung. (Photo: Justin Ong) - http://www.channelnewsasia.com
