Bill Gates is a lot luckier than you might realise. He may be a very talented man who worked his way up from college dropout to the top spot on the list of the world’s richest people. But his extreme success perhaps tells us more about the importance of circumstances beyond his control than it does about how skill and perseverance are rewarded.

According to the US Small Business Administration, there are nearly 30 million small businesses in the United States employing 47.8 percent of US workers. All of these small businesses have a big impact on the US economy through job creation, innovation, and economic impact.

If you’re a small business owner, or you’re considering starting one, the first part of this article includes recent market studies and statistics with regards to small businesses. This “lay of the land,” so to speak, will provide you with an idea of what the current small business landscape looks like and help you decide on the best direction for your online business in the near future.

Contrary Capital, a university-focused venture capital fund, officially launched on Monday at 55 colleges across the country, including Hopkins. Contrary works with 100 students to find start-ups and projects within their university communities in which they can invest.

Venture capital funds like Contrary Capital typically manage the money of private individuals by investing in emerging companies that are often high risk but have the potential of a high payoff. Will Robbins, a managing partner at Contrary Capital and student at University of Illinois, explained what sets Contrary apart from other investment initiatives.

As the workplace changes, so must education and training. Exciting experiments are under way—but are they enough?

As technology transforms the workplace, the need for innovation in learning and development is urgent. In a series of recent discussions, members of the Consortium of Advanced Adult Learning & Development (CAALD)—a group of learning authorities whose members include researchers, corporate and nonprofit leaders, and McKinsey experts—recently met in Boston for the second year in a row.

On September 20, the Economic Development Administration (EDA) announced $17 million in awards to the 2017 Regional Innovation Strategies (RIS) program awards. SSTI’s Innovation Advocacy Council has worked with members to encourage Congress to support this program, which makes awards to support the creation and expansion of tech transformation networks (i6 Challenge) and early-stage seed capital funds (the Seed Fund Support). In total, EDA made 42 investments that leveraged over $22 million in private, state and local matching funds, including to eight SSTI members:

In late 2012 NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spotted what appeared to be plumes of water vapor spewing from the frozen surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. Another observation last year provided more evidence this was not a fluke. It is likely that below that distant world’s ice is an ocean larger than all of Earth’s combined. This created a frenzy in the astrobiological community—brimming with all that water, could Europa also have the necessary ingredients for life?

Image: https://www.scientificamerican.com

If you're on the prowl for inspiring quotes you can use for work, your book, speech, website, news report, blog, proposal, kidnap letter, or time capsule, look no further. What follows are 21 universal topics -- everything from Possibility to Failure to Change.

Welcome to ARP Network Quarterly Notes! Our goal is to keep you informed about ARP Network and Agricultural Research Service’s current information. We hope that the notes build networking opportunities for businesses to connect with ARP Network Members.

Please help us spread the word by sharing ARP Network Notes statewide with your company contacts, colleagues, other organizations, etc. Thank you!

ARS

The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is USDA’s primary internal research agency.ARS conducts research to develop and transfer solutions to agricultural problems that are both national and international in scope. ARS has nearly 2,000 scientists nationwide and a few in overseas locations. ARS scientists carry out 690 research projects on a variety of subjects. ARS has a Congressional mandate to disseminate the research findings of these projects to the American public and other interested parties.

Greater Washington has no shortage of respected leaders, and some of them are among the world’s most revered.

Forbes has identified the 100 living people it calls the greatest business minds; the executives, entrepreneurs, philanthropists and visionaries it considers to be the world’s elite, who have shaped the past century.

The magazine put its list together to celebrate its 100-year anniversary, as part of a special issue filled with essays from each member of the group — anecdotes, insights and perspectives about economics, industries and leadership.

Image: https://www.bizjournals.com

Innovation is the highest in regional centres that have research and development institutions and there are only 26 of these in regional Australia. But more than 150 regional areas have potential to match this innovation, a new index finds.

In conjunction with the Regional Australia Institute we’ve developed an Innovation Index that maps the national spread of two complementary aspects of innovation – research and development and “business dynamo”. The measure of research and development is focused on technical expertise and the number of applications for patents and the business dynamo measure incorporates startup rates, trademarks and the number of business to business services.

You can have the most brilliant products with the slickest marketing, but if you’re selling flip flops during a snowstorm, you’re destined for failure.  Not only does timing matter because it can make or break your sales, but it also matters when you consider all the effort and money invested in new product or service rollouts.  Want to waste your time and money?  Launch at the wrong time!

When it comes to transforming healthcare, one thing is clear: it's a hot topic.

Most people see healthcare disruption as coming from two sources: government taking a legislative role that reshapes the big picture business model, and grassroots startups using technology to challenge the status quo.

We've seen government's recent struggles to help reinvent the system. Venture capitalists and startups have also been at it, with a cumulative $15.5 billion invested in innovation since 2014 and $3.5 billion invested in the first half of 2017 alone. Despite their best efforts, neither have truly moved the needle.

Fourth Economy congratulates the Indiana Economic Development Corporation for their Excellence in Economic Development Award from the International Economic Development Council on September 19th, 2017. The Indiana Economic Development Corporation won the award for the state's efforts related to quality of life investments designed to support the retention and attraction of talent through the Indiana Regional Cities Initiative. 

 “Fourth Economy supported our vision with a creative and engaged planning process that allowed us to launch the Regional Cities Initiative on solid footing and achieve quick success,” said Eric Doden former CEO for the Indiana Economic Development Corporation.

Crowdfunding is a multibillion dollar worldwide industry that continues to disrupt the traditional world of corporate finance, as well as change the way products go to market. Companies new and old, small and large, are now incorporating both rewards crowdfunding and equity crowdfunding. The capital raising playbooks have changed. The interest in how to use crowdfunding effectively is reaching new heights every day.

Angel investors and venture capitalists don’t make equity investments in nonprofit good causes. The simple reason is that it’s impossible to make money for investors when the goal of the company is to not make money. Yet as an active angel investor, I still get this question on a regular basis, so I’ll try to outline the considerations in common-sense terms.

A nonprofit organization is generally defined as an organization that does not distribute its surplus funds to owners or shareholders, but instead uses them to help pursue its goals. Examples include charitable organizations, trade unions, and public arts organizations. In the US, a nonprofit is technically any company who qualifies as tax exempt through IRS Section 501(c).

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

What is Philips HealthWorks? As a venture capital fund, what qualities do you look for in a partner?

While the Philips HealthWorks team is linked to our Health Technology Venture Fund team at Philips, we see ourselves, first and foremost, as defining a new model for innovation community engagement. Think of Philips HealthWorks as a new front door for early-stage companies to collaborate with our global company.

Our program is 12-weeks long, cohort based, and operating out 5 hubs around the world, including Cambridge, MA in North America.  While the programming is stage agnostic, our sweet spot is early-stage companies that have critical mass within the team (both technical and commercial), have a breakthrough innovation they are pursuing, some runway, but have not completely figured out how to turn that innovation into an impactful business.

When a hospital needs to rush a delivery from a lab somewhere else in a densely populated city–for example, when a surgeon needs an urgent biopsy of a tumor in the middle of a surgery to determine how much tissue to remove, or a gunshot victim in the ER needs blood that the hospital doesn’t have in stock–that delivery can sometimes get stuck in traffic. Couriers are also expensive. In Switzerland, hospitals and labs will soon begin using drones to make those deliveries instead.

Image: Matternet, a Silicon Valley-based tech company, designed the drones, along with a cloud system for sending and receiving platforms–and a newly launched system that can autonomously load, launch, and land the drones. (Photo: Matternet)

In June 2016, the MacArthur Foundation launched a sort of XPRIZE for philanthropy. The global competition, called 100&Change promised $100 million to whatever group could come up with the best solution to improve humanity.

Perhaps the most ambitious component: MacArthur let contestants define what the world’s most vexing problems were, in hopes that the process could expose the organization to issues it might otherwise have overlooked.

Sir Andrew Witty, the former long-serving chief executive of UK drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, has jumped into the biotech venture-capital sector, joining Hatteras Venture Partners.

Sir Andrew is joining US-based Hatteras as a venture partner. Separately, GSK’s ex-research and development head Moncef Slaoui has joined European venture firm Medicxi.