As a new business advisor, I am no longer surprised that every new entrepreneur believes the hard part is creating the first product and the business. Perhaps luckily, they have no idea that scaling the business and maintaining vitality as a mature business is even harder. What most often kills a company is the illusion (or delusion) that all is now stable and everyone can relax.

The challenge is to retain the same sense of urgency, energy, commitment, and readiness in a mature company that you felt during the startup stage. The importance and reality of this need has been detailed well in a new book I just finished, “State of Readiness,” by Joseph F. Paris, Jr. He is a recognized thought leader on the subject of operational excellence and strategy.

We’ve all been frustrated when talking to a computer. Maybe it can’t understand what you’re saying. Maybe it hears you, but doesn’t understand what you mean. Or maybe it’s just a tedious chat with a cloying personality with whom you’d never choose to associate in real life.

I am wired to discount people who have total assuredness in their point-of-view, have dogmatic positions or use data as a crutch or substitute for logic. I appreciate people who have strong opinions or conviction but expect them to constantly be testing their opinions and refining their approaches as they encounter new people, facts or logic.

Pseudoscientific claims that music helps plants grow have been made for decades, despite evidence that is shaky at best. Yet new research suggests some flora may be capable of sensing sounds, such as the gurgle of water through a pipe or the buzzing of insects.

In a recent study, Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Western Australia, and her colleagues placed pea seedlings in pots shaped like an upside-down Y. One arm of each pot was placed in either a tray of water or a coiled plastic tube through which water flowed; the other arm had only soil.

BALTIMORE (AP) — Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan is launching a new economic development strategy focusing on further developing the life sciences and cybersecurity industries.

Hogan announced the plan called Excel Maryland at the first Governor's Business Summit on Thursday in Baltimore.

A steering committee will include state officials in partnership with Johns Hopkins University and the University System of Maryland. Excel Maryland will focus on developing collaborative strategies.

As a cancer scientist and someone interested in the ever-evolving relationship between science and the media, my eye was caught this week by the flashy headlines claiming that good-old tomatoes might just be the cure for gastric cancer. All the media fuss appears to stem from a paper accepted last week in the Journal Of Cell Physiology bearing the rather less exciting title : “Antitumoral Potential, Antioxidant Activity and Carotenoid Content of  Two Southern Italy Tomato Cultivars”. As a fan of both cancer research and tomatoes, I felt the need to examine the evidence presented in the paper and whether they substantiate the Daily Mail claims.

Accidental discoveries played a significant role in the introduction of some of the biggest business ideas. Here is how to harness them.

Several years ago I was asked to deliver a keynote address at a Startup Weekend conference. I asked the attendees whether they ever presented a new idea to their boss, just to hear the words “what you have here is a solution looking for a problem…” Most participants lowered their head and answered “yes.”

People often ask me, “Why did you move from San Francisco to, uh, Detroit?” The answer is easy. In 10 years, San Francisco will be as good as it is today, but Detroit will be a roaring city once again, defining a new technology hub at the intersection of steel and bits.

When choosing to move to Detroit, a city that has been in a recent state of rebuild, many do so to roll up their sleeves, get to work, and make a difference. These attributes are what’s needed in an entrepreneur, which makes the city’s vibe appealing to early stage startups.

Entrepreneurs are by nature big-idea people. They're creative. They're innovative. But it doesn't hurt for entrepreneurs to be copycats now and then by learning from the experiences and ideas of others. 

Who, then, could be better for entrepreneurs to get ideas from than some of the most innovative companies on the planet? After all, these businesses were originally started by entrepreneurs themselves. What can be learned from big corporations like Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), Priceline Group (NASDAQ: PCLN), Disney (NYSE: DIS), Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA), and Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ)? Here are five ideas from these successful innovators that apply to entrepreneurs in any industry.

Entrepreneurs have multiple sources of funding when they seek their first outside capital: friends and family, professional angels, venture capital (VC) funds and crowdfunding platforms. One type of funding, which is sometimes overlooked and which can be quite powerful, is corporate venture funds.

Like many other regions, Asia’s venture capital investment got off to a cautious start in 2017 — modest investment volumes and a noticeable decline in the total number of deals. Startups currently raising rounds of venture capital investments are inevitably learning some hard truths. VC money isn’t as readily available as the furious check-writing phase of 2015. And those startups that are receiving funding are finding the terms increasingly less appetising.

As an angel investor, I sometimes worry that all the viable unique ideas must already be taken. Entrepreneurs keep talking to me about the Internet of Things (IOT), autonomous vehicles, inter-planetary travel, and other exciting opportunities, but the majority of real plans I get seem to be “me too” variations of several common themes that have already been done too many times.

We all want to get out there ahead of the crowd, and invest in that truly innovative idea that seems so obvious in its appeal that you wonder why nobody ever thought of it before. Examples in the past, that were not huge leaps in technology, would include the light bulb, telephone, the zipper, and post-it notes. I haven’t found the next one yet, even on Shark Tank.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 

On the heels of a decade-high year in VC fundraising, 2017 remains strong. In PitchBooks’s latest funding report, we found that U.S. VCs raised 58 funds in the first quarter, to the tune of $7.9 billion. Add this to the $121 billion in dry powder that is already waiting to be deployed to the world’s most promising startups.

CHICAGO, May 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- VentureApp, a professional chat platform, today announced VentureMap Chicago, an interactive network visualization of the city's tech ecosystem, in partnership with TechNexus, a Chicago-based venture collaborative and incubator. The map displays hundreds of investments into tech startups by angel investors, venture capitalists, incubators, accelerators, and more. VentureApp mapped Chicago startup and investor relationships to give professionals the ability to discover trends in their community and pathways to connect with investors in their extended network. VentureApp users can also use the map to connect directly with other users via the chat interface.

With so many paths to success, the research field of entrepreneurship began to emerge and studying the various interdisciplinary fields that integrate into the overall success became an important tool to understanding the why. Prior to Techstars, I worked in research at the Kauffman Foundation. We marveled at the newness of the general academic study of entrepreneurship.

RM Global has created a VC fund dedicated to the FutuRx biotech incubator Johnson & Johnson set up with OrbiMed and Takeda. The life science investment banking firm has secured preferential access to FutuRx, positioning it to get in on the ground floor alongside the companies that founded the incubator.

To get the fund started, RM Global has pulled in $30 million for its first closing. The plan is to open it up for new investors and dial up its cash haul ahead of a second closing in the near future. That will give RM Global the ability to secure stakes in the likes of BiomX, a FutuRx graduate that raised $24 million from OrbiMed, Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Takeda Ventures and others earlier this month to bankroll its microbiome R&D plans.

Image: The flag of Israel (Zachi Evenor (CC BY 3.0)) 

Trust me, I never thought it would come to this. If you had asked me a week ago what I was expecting from Google's I/O developer conference, "boring" is not the word that would've come to mind.

Yet, looking at this year's announcements, I'm struck most by how completely expected and, well, safe it all is. Sure, Google Lens was far and away the best thing Google previewed here, and a standalone VR headset is particularly enticing if you're a VR enthusiast (so far a pretty small, self-selecting group).

Not so long ago, training to meet the press and television reporters was a realm reserved for top business executives only. Now, even the earliest stage startup can rise to visibility or be forever lost by their first media spotlight, so it behooves us all to know the rules early. Most entrepreneurs I know admit to a poor first media interaction, and many are still waiting for the instant replay.

On the social media side, the stakes are just as great. Ask Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, who raised over $10 million on the Kickstarter crowd-funding platform for his relatively low-tech wristwatch with programmed clock faces. Kickstarter may take a bit of the credit for this, but they admit the majority of projects without media attention don’t even approach their funding goals.

Image: http://blog.startupprofessionals.com 

The Smart Cities for All initiative, led by G3ict (Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs), with the support of Microsoft, has helped to produce a new toolkit to assist cities with implementing smart city programs that can help all community members.

In a recent survey of more than 250 experts worldwide, research has found that 60 percent of people feel that smart cities are failing persons with disabilities and older persons.

I’ve been involved with several startups where a giant incumbent attacks you and tries to sue you out of existence. When you first receive the threat it feels like the local pizza shop when they first get a call from the local mafia boss and you can feel the shake-down coming. The first instinct is fear, then dread, then panic. You begin to think about how hard it will be to fund raise, sign customers, hire employees, etc. with the cloud of a lawsuit hanging over you.