Entrepreneur Elon Musk, who envisions a human colony on Mars, is planning to create a new, much larger rocket ship code named “BFR” capable of travelling anywhere on Earth in under an hour.

If the concept becomes reality, a journey from New York to Shanghai can be completed in about 30 minutes. The surprise announcement means that Musk’s SpaceX, which has already disrupted the aerospace industry with reusable launches, plans to ferry humans not just to distant planets but across this one as well.

It's a tried and true trope of startups: the 21-year-old college dropout founder with a brilliant idea. These days, however, 21 just ain't that young.

A startup accelerator called the Tardigrade Group wants to push future founders to get started earlier. The startup incubator for teens, by teens, recruits and supports entrepreneurial high-schoolers that want to get serious about their ideas. 

Most new entrepreneurs work alone in developing their idea or a solution to a problem, but ultimately realize that starting and growing a business requires more. Not many people have the bandwidth to simultaneously cover all the required bases in finance, marketing, manufacturing, and operations, as well as solution development. It takes a working team to build a business.

What many don’t realize is that building that team is as critical and as difficult as building the solution. If you have the wrong people on your team, or the team can’t work together, you have no chance of making an epic business, no matter how great your solution. Witness the many memorable failure examples, including Friendster, Pets.com, and Webvan.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Children have been harnessing energy from their steps ever since 1992, when L.A. Gear introduced sneakers that light up. For most adults, however, the ambient energy created by the simple act of walking is forever lost. Considering that the average person takes around 216 million steps in a lifetime, it’s a significant waste.

Inventor Laurence Kemball-Cook hopes to harness the lost energy at two points of contact: the shoe and the floor. In 2009, Kemball-Cook founded Pavegen, a company whose floor tiles can capture the power of footsteps.

As some of the main drivers and primary beneficiaries of the recent urban revival, anchor institutions are often the largest employers in their communities. While typical examples of “anchor institutions” include large universities, hospitals, and medical centers—so-called “meds and eds”—that quite literally anchor urban centers, other powerful anchors, including successful high-tech companies and real estate developers, have the capacity and resources to wield enormous influence on today’s cities.

Nearly every major city holds a 2020 digital city strategy. While the topic of digital cities has been gaining popularity, we are still seeing a major disconnect between strategy and execution. Without a clear market definition, the digital city and smart city terms are often interchanged. We have all seen the perfectly designed simulation of buildings, cars, people, and public transport all centrally connected, hoping to create seamless life for people in congested urban locations.

No commute. No drive-by meetings. No dress code. Remote working can seem like a dream — until personal obligations get in the way. These distractions are easy to ignore in an office, but at home it can be difficult to draw the line between personal and professional time.

Consider when you’re working on a project and get a call from a friend. You know you need to finish your work, but you feel rude for not talking when you technically could. Or think about when you’re planning your daily to-do list, but also need to decide when you’ll squeeze in your personal commitments. Taking the time to put a few loads of laundry in the washer midday can seem like a quick task — until you find yourself making up that work time late at night. In the end, it’s never entirely clear when you’re really “on” or “off.”

Exposed pipes run above a pod of hot desks, crammed with hoodie-clad software engineers tapping at their laptops. Though millions of dollars are being generated here, it’s not your typical corporate environment; the buzzy room is brightened by floor-to-ceiling windows, bean-bag breakout areas and a scattering of succulents. In fact, it’s pretty much the exact picture one conjures when you think “coworking space”; it’s also located in a state that, last year, deployed $362 million in venture funds to startups and raised an additional $420 million in new venture capital. But we’re not in California or New York. We’re in Columbus, Ohio.

The Washington Business Journal's annual Innovation Awards honor 15 Greater Washington companies, agencies and teams working to keep the metro on the cutting edge in tech, health care, cybersecurity and more.

Honorees were selected from a pool of applications by a panel of Washington Business Journal staff, each honoree exemplifying how companies large and small are turning creative ideas into new business opportunities every year.

Image: The 2017 Innovation Awards event is scheduled for Sept. 28 at D.C.’s The Showroom - WIKIPEDIA COMMONS

TORONTO, Sept. 28, 2017 /PRNewswire/ - Yung Wu, a pioneering entrepreneur and serial investor, will be the new CEO of MaRS Discovery District, the board of directors announced today.

Wu will start at MaRS on November 1, 2017, the culmination of a global search to find a successor to outgoing CEO Ilse Treurnicht.

Wu is chairman of NFQ Ventures, an early-stage investment firm based in Toronto, and has a track record of founding, scaling and actively backing several groundbreaking startups, including: Castek Software, an insurance software vendor that was sold to a division of Oracle in 2007; Fuse Powered, a mobile analytics and big data firm that was purchased by Upsight in 2016; and Antibe Therapeutics, a biotech company developing medicines to treat pain and inflammation.

We hear the stories about entrepreneurs. How great the life is. And it can be pretty great. But it’s not always sunshine and rainbows. In fact, there are myths about entrepreneurship that make it seem more glamorous than it really is.

Before you decide to jump in and give over everything to start a business, it’s a good idea to know what you are getting into. It can be a great journey, just don’t expect it to be smooth sailing, or have all the trappings you expect it to.

AT FIRST glance, it seems that America’s economy is losing its mojo. Many economists, most notably Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, have lamented that productivity growth seems to be anaemic when compared with earlier golden eras (see Free exchange). A gloomy chorus of business leaders has echoed what media outlets have by now turned into a mantra, that American entrepreneurship is in steady decline. Surely America’s overall competitiveness, then, is plummeting?

Exploring the “lost city” of Petra, a walking safari in Zambia, a cruise to Antarctica: This isn’t your average trip. Take your family vacation to the next level with 25 destinations worthy of your bucket-list.

For decades, many states have created, funded, dropped, and restarted technology-based economic development (TBED) programs to correct network and market failures across the innovation system. While the need for innovation, tech entrepreneurship and the higher-paying jobs resulting from both is widely recognized, the collective value or impact of sustaining a portfolio of state TBED policies and programs has received little empirical analysis. New research published in the Journal of Social Science Research does precisely that and suggests that long-term, historical investments in state-level policies that support entrepreneurship may have helped to accelerate the development of high technology industries.

BANGALORE, India — IBM dominated the early decades of computing with inventions like the mainframe and the floppy disk. Its offices and factories, stretching from upstate New York to Silicon Valley, were hubs of American innovation long before Microsoft or Google came along.

But over the last decade, IBM has shifted its center of gravity halfway around the world to India, making it a high-tech example of the globalization trends that the Trump administration has railed against.

The University of Washington was the top ranked American public university among the top 10 in Reuters’ annual list of the world’s most innovative universities.

For the third-straight year, Reuters ranked the top 100 most innovative universities based on 10 different metrics, including academic papers on research, patent filings and a university’s ability to transform its development and discoveries into real-world commercial impact. Reuters notes that the list “identifies and ranks the educational institutions doing the most to advance science, invent new technologies and power new markets and industries.”

Image: Political, business, and education leaders from Washington and China gathered earlier this month to celebrate the launch of the Global Innovation Exchange in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire photo / Taylor Soper)

Bloomberg Philanthropies, which funds innovation teams aimed at improving government in cities throughout the world, recently sent facilitators to hold workshops in more than 300 jurisdictions across all 50 states.

In a Medium post, organizers with Bloomberg described these events as an “unprecedented series of innovation workshops,” noting that they garnered participation from more than 3,000 city leaders. Organizers also estimated that the series included 2,000 hours of skill-building lessons, all of which were aimed at prioritizing the most pressing challenges facing cities, coming up with solutions to best them and implementing realistic initiatives that could be spread throughout other cities.

Image: Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies. - FLICKR/CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS-RALPH ALSWANG

FEW VENTURE-CAPITAL INVESTORS have forgotten the story of Pebble: In 2012, after every VC firm on Sand Hill Road had passed on investing, the smartwatch startup raised more than $10 million on crowdfunding site Kickstarter. It was an unheard-of amount for a crowdfunding campaign, and the resulting hype made Pebble an internet sensation. Then the VCs, suffering from FOMO, begged Pebble to let them invest. The startup eventually raised a total of $59 million.

While the figures on new product failures vary, there’s one thread that connects them: The majority of new products fail. And, that includes those designed by major brands.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen reported that 30,000 new consumer products are launched each year — and 95% fail. Even brands like Apple, Ford, and Pepsi have had some dismal product failures that were clear setbacks, despite having so many other highly successful product launches.

If you’re looking for money to start a new business, it helps to be white, male, attractive-looking, and living in a place like Boston or San Francisco. Better still, you want to have gone to a top-ranked university. People with these sorts of profiles win the lion’s share of funding from VC firms.

In 2014, Harvard Business School academic Alison Wood Brooks conducted a series of experiments designed to tease out the biases funders have toward certain groups. She found that male entrepreneurs are 60% more likely to get funding than females, even when women and men are pitching the same idea. Attractive males (as rated by participants) were 36% more likely to be successful than non-attractive males, she found.