In the digital era, even companies that have distinguished themselves as disruptors cannot afford to rest on their laurels. If they do, they face the chance of being disrupted themselves. Saikat Chaudhuri, executive director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management and an adjunct professor of management at Wharton, examines this issue in his latest white paper, co-authored with Mack Institute research associate Pragna Kolli, titled: “Navigating Digital Disruption: How to Thrive Through Innovation Management.” Chaudhuri recently discussed the paper’s conclusions on the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on SiriusXM channel 111. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

Bumping into a former Nasa engineer at a university networking event gave business postgraduate Matt Ritchie an entrepreneurial steer. He intended to return to accountancy after an MBA (master’s in business administration) at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Then along came an engineer with a radical plan – to plant 1bn trees a year using only drones.

Now that basketball season is over and with another NBA championship ring on their fingers, Golden State Warriors Steph Curry and Andre Iguodala are shifting to an off-season interest: venture capital.

On Monday, Curry and Iguodala announced they are launching The Players Technology Summit, which seeks to intersect professional sports with venture capital.

Image: http://www.siliconbeat.com

EAST LANSING, Mich. (AP) — A $3 million gift to Michigan State University seeks to help bolster entrepreneurship.

The East Lansing school announced Monday that Larry Gaynor, president and CEO of TNG Worldwide, and his wife, company vice president Teresa Gaynor, made the donation to create the Gaynor Entrepreneurship Lab on the first floor of the school's Business Pavilion.

WASHINGTON, June 19, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Small Business Administration has awarded a total of $2,324,100 to two nonprofit organizations providing "Boots to Business" entrepreneurship training to military service members, military spouses and veterans. 

This funding, offered by SBA's Office of Veterans Business Development, will enable the two organizations to deliver Boots to Business—the entrepreneurship track of the Department of  Defense's Transition Assistance Program—to military service members and their spouses, both within the continental United States and overseas.

Stripe is growing at breakneck speed, and it has been for years. At the beginning of last year, it had 350 employees. Now, having freshly moved into Dropbox’s old digs South of Market, it’s at 750. But according to COO Claire Hughes Johnson, the biggest challenge the company faces isn’t bringing enough new people on board. It’s integrating them into a complex organism that can’t stop/won’t stop moving forward. Figuring this out (continuously) is her mandate, and there are few people in tech operating at her level.

The title above is also the title of an article by Rachel Nuwer in BBC Future, a fascinating examination of the causes of societal collapse using research on this issue from a wide collection of experts. The implications for the current world situation are thought-provoking indeed.

In addition to the fall of civilizations, it occurred to me that in many ways Nuwer is also describing the fall of organizations.

She shares insights from political economist Benjamin Friedman, who wrote about the dangerous scramble for scarce resources and rejection of anyone outside one’s immediate circle. I immediately began pondering the ways in which an organization’s funds are distributed…and the fights for a larger share…combined with people in silos looking out for themselves without thinking about the impact on the rest of the organization.

Do you dread strategy meetings?

Really, we’re among friends, so you can be completely truthful in your answer: Do you REALLY, REALLY DREAD strategy meetings?

Of course, you dread them. Every executive dreads strategic planning. I know I do.

The reason is while it is important for organizations, participants hardly ever see the connection between participation and positive changes for brands and customers.

While a strategic planning process may promise to deliver real objectives and tactics, it often never happens as promised. Senior executives may say they want disruptive ideas, but they really want ideas that are easy to grasp and fit the current system. And who wants to waste precious time on trying to imagine and plan things an organization should pursue but ultimately never will?

It’s easy to spot and celebrate the innovations that change company fortunes: Apple’s iPhone, Warner-Lambert’s (and then Pfizer’s) Lipitor, Microsoft’s Windows, to name a few. What is harder to appreciate are those innovations that aren’t the blockbusters and home runs but nonetheless play a critical role in a company’s innovation strategy. I’m not talking about the incremental improvements, but rather the value of launching new products and services that hold tremendous value even though they don’t shoot for the moon.

Despite the best cybersecurity efforts, the number of breaches in the healthcare world is remaining fairly constant, according to the latest Protenus Breach Barometer.

The Barometer is based on data provided by DataBreaches.net.

“If the Breach Barometer has taught us anything, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ a healthcare organization will experience a data breach, but simply a matter of ‘when,'” the May Protenus report states.

In the 1980s, I was part of a team doing research into the geography of the high-tech industry. We couldn’t find a single significant high-tech company in an urban neighborhood. Instead, they were all out in the suburbs—not just Intel and Apple in Silicon Valley, or Microsoft in the Seattle suburbs, but the Route 128 beltway outside Boston, and the corporate campuses of North Carolina’s Research Triangle.

Xconomy Texas —  San Antonio — What’s the best way to build a startup? Bootstrap it, raise little or no VC funding, and (ideally) sell it for hundreds of millions—or billions—of dollars, according to two venture capitalists.

That’s what they did at least. Andrew Farquharson, now the managing director of InCube Ventures in San Jose, CA, was the chief operating officer of Almeda, CA-based Operon Technologies when it sold to European nucleic acid company Qiagen in an all-stock deal worth around $110 million in 2000. Farquharson and his co-founders tried, but failed, to raise venture funding and instead were able to bootstrap.

Thanks to changes in federal and state statutes, Wyoming residents will be able - as of July 1 - to make investments through crowdfunding options. Information released by Secretary of State Ed Murray's office notes that crowd funding occurs when a business raises capital by seeking and receiving monetary investments by a large number of people. 

Image: http://www.wyomingbusinessreport.com

TEDCO is known for providing seed funding for early stage companies.

“We want to help the incubation industry raise their bar, too, and keep pace with acceleration and innovation in Maryland,” said Neil Davis, Director of Entrepreneurial Development at the quasi-public agency that backs early stage companies.

So the agency is offering a new grant to help incubators try something new — or, something that’s been tried outside of Maryland.

Image: Inside Johns Hopkins' FastForward 1812. (Photo by Stephen Babcock) - https://technical.ly

The “birthplace of biotechnology” is to receive $10 million for a pioneering precision medicine programme.

It was announced this week that the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine (CIAPM) has been awarded the money from the local government’s budget, a decision welcomed by the California Life Sciences Association (CLSA).

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Online crowdfunding platforms — such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo — can make you an overnight success if you play your cards right. 

Whether it’s bankrolling a movie continuation of a cult TV show, or getting a VR prototype off the ground (before being sniped by Facebook, of course), funding large projects with pledged donations can work if the scale is right. 

VINELAND — Shorter wait times, easier access to electronic health records and education on the medical uses of your wearable smart devices — those are just a few things coming out of Inspira Health Network in the near future.

Officials announced Thursday the launch of the Inspira Innovation Center, an initiative that aims to encourage health professionals to develop solutions that can help patients, be sustainable and have commercial value. In the same week as the announcement, the health network received a $1 million donation to the Inspira Health Network Foundation Cumberland/Salem from Dr. Frank DeMaio, a retired Vineland physician.

“We believe that it’s really important that [Canada] take these bold bets in order to position ourselves well, going forward,” one consultant urges.

That’s the message from certified public accounting company, Deloitte, on the heels of a new report Bold Bets for our country: It’s time for deliberate action.

Blaine Woodcock, a consulting partner with Deloitte, says while Canada celebrates its 150th birthday this year it’s time to start preparing for the next 25 years.

Once you’ve hired an employee, you need to get them settled and in sync with the company. Part of that process is establishing their goals: Are they looking to develop certain skills? Do they need certain resources to accomplish their tasks. To find out what questions elicit the most informative responses, we asked members from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) this question:

There are 163 accelerators in Britain and the hype around them feels like they’re now the go-to destination for budding start-ups. But could an alternative type of business support be a better fit?

Businesses that enter accelerators often have a very specific end goal in mind. They’ve got their minimum viable product (MVP), their brand identity and they enter an accelerator programme for the fast-track mentoring that will transport their business from start-up to profitable enterprise in the quickest possible time.