As anyone will tell you, a healthy lifestyle can be hard to achieve. This is especially true for entrepreneurs, who you'll often find working 14-20 hours a day on little sleep. In my early days as a CEO and founder, I was certainly guilty of deprioritizing my own health. With pressing deadlines and quarterly goals, there just wasn’t time for a lengthy workout or healthy meal prep. 

So how do you incorporate a successful health and wellness regimen into a busy entrepreneurial schedule? Over the years, I have found that by implementing the following three lifestyle changes, I feel stronger and perform better, both inside and outside of the office.

Nacre, an iridescent material that lines some seashells, gains strength and toughness from its structure: brittle mineral chips glued into layers by squishy proteins. Now researchers have used the same principle to develop a superstrong glass composite that could one day make nearly unbreakable smartphone screens, windshields and other items that currently rely on various types of treated glass.

The new material combines rigid glass flakes, less than a hundredth of a millimeter thick, with flexible acrylic. “When we combine those two together, similar to nacre, we recover the best parts of both components,” says Allen Ehrlicher, a McGill University bioengineer and co-author of a new paper describing the composite, which was recently published in Science.

The 2021 Birch Bayh Virtual Lecture titled Reversing the Tide: the Bayh-Dole Act and the Renewal of American Innovation featured Joseph P. Allen, Executive Director of the, Bayh-Dole Coalition and was held virtually on Tuesday, October 19th, 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oUcXnf1FqQ

ADVANCEMENTS in agricultural technology have a major and exciting role to play in helping the growing global population access healthy, affordable and environmentally friendly food.

There has been much discussion at COP26 of how countries intend to reduce the impact food production has on the planet, but no-one seems to be addressing how this matches up with feeding our exponentially growing populations.

With the topic of “science and innovation” on the agenda of today’s climate summit, delegates need to consider carefully some of the exciting technologies which are paving the way for smarter and more sustainable food production in the years ahead.

Image: Agricultural technologies such as vertical farming are paving the way for sustainable food production (Photo: Duncan McGlynn)

Some of the best ideas come when the mind can wander, process new knowledge, and connect dots that don’t obviously seem to belong together.

For computer scientist and engineer Gregory Welch, the AdventHealth Endowed Chair in Healthcare Simulation in the UCF College of Nursing and Pegasus Professor, some of his biggest “aha” moments occur at times of reflection, especially while riding his bicycle along Central Florida’s Bike Trail.

Many people in the business world can rattle off a list of well-known, highly successful dropouts: Richard Branson, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs among them. But many people also believe those entrepreneurs are the few exceptions to a rule that requires an extensive business background to maximize chances of success.

Certain studies back up that assumption too. According to one, 84% of businesses started by MBA graduates are still operating after three years, which may make many aspiring entrepreneurs think they need an MBA to succeed. But is that really true? 

Knowing when to scale is a delicate art. If you do it too soon, you will falter and overextend yourself. But if you don’t head the call to scale up and think bigger, you'll let big opportunities pass you by. 

As an entrepreneur, you have a certain amount of judgment and instincts that has led you so far. Now you’re hearing the call to climb the next peak. To spread your wings and take flight with your business once again. But then doubt creeps in. You wonder if it’s the right time. You wonder if your resources will be wasted. In short, you wonder if you can trust your judgment again. 

In science the key question is “Is it true?” In management the key question is “Does it work?” But context is critical: Just because an idea works in a particular case does not mean it is a universal truth.

If you set a stretch goal, make sure that the organization has some stretch in it, or it will break. To execute a strategy, you need a dashboard covering a wide range of performance indicators. If you treat those indicators as your strategic goals, be very sure that what you are asking for is what you want, because it is what you will get.

Venture capital investment has surged in 2021. Investment dollars for the first three quarters of 2021 have nearly doubled from 2020, according to The Q3 2021 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

While investment dollars have increased in startups with at least one female founder, their share of dollars in 2021—17.2%—hasn't reached the record set in 2018—18.5%—the year the #MeToo movement took off.

Here's a move from the venture capital playbook that tends to punch entrepreneurs in the gut:

Investors give your startup a bunch of money to scale, they expect you to hire seasoned people for critical roles, then they start asking why your burn rate is so high.

The next thing that happens is a strongly implied suggestion to "trim the fat." Then things get dark while you figure out how to cut people without killing both productivity and morale, which, spoiler alert, you can't. 

Until the recession a decade ago, market research indicated that as many as 90 percent of the roughly 20 million American small business owners were motivated more by lifestyle than growth and money. More recently, the desire for extra income has become the key driver in new startups, according to the popular press. It seems that more people are focused on money today.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Venture building — creating a new profitable business inside a corporation — is becoming increasingly popular with big companies. Siemens Energy is forming a new team called Siemens Energy Ventures, and one of its objectives is to build growth startups in energy transition and climate to help the company and its customers accelerate the journey to net zero.

There is a new realisation with corporations that in order to stay relevant and innovative, they need more than classical innovation programmes. Growing as a business doesn’t mean strengthening your core portfolio, but come out with a portfolio of businesses. Those businesses could end up as part of the mothership, or evolve into separate and independent businesses at scale.

What You Should Know:

– Techstars, today announce the 2021 class of the Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator, run in partnership with Pivotal Ventures, an investment and incubation company created by Melinda French Gates to advance social progress in the United States.

– The 13-week program focuses on innovative solutions to address the unmet needs of older adults and their caregivers. Program themes include aging in place, caregiver support, care coordination, financial wellness, preventive health, and social engagement.

Worldwide trademark-filing activity boomed in 2020, defying a global economic downturn and signaling vibrant entrepreneurship and the introduction of new goods and services in response to the pandemic.

WIPO’s World Intellectual Property Indicators Report (WIPI) also showed that patent and industrial designs filing activity rebounded in 2020, illustrating the resilience of human innovation even amid the dire global health situation. 

Trademark filing activity rose by 13.7%, patents by 1.6% and designs by 2% according to the WIPI, which compiles new data from some 150 national and regional authorities and shows how innovators, designers and brands are increasingly relying on intellectual property tools to expand their enterprises and seek new growth.

Image: https://www.wipo.int

Juergen Mueller, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Board Member at SAP

Innovating faster remains a top priority for companies and is what keeps our customers awake at night. Research also shows that a lack of innovation culture can be a company’s biggest stumbling block. It is one of the key findings of the latest Conference Board C-Suite Challenge.

More alarmingly, a McKinsey survey revealed that only 21 percent of executives believe they have the expertise, resources and commitment to pursue new growth areas successfully. To accelerate innovation, it needs to be an intrinsic element of a company’s corporate culture.

New research from the US has shown that white-tailed deer are being infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans. Antibodies were found in 40% of deer that were tested from January to March 2021 across Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and New York state. A second unpublished study has detected the virus in 80% of deer sampled in Iowa between November 2020 and January 2021.

California is unprepared to confront increasingly extreme heat, according to a UCLA report published Oct. 27.

The report from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation outlined a lack of coordinated policy and funding efforts at the state level to address extreme heat exposure, said Gregory Pierce, co-director of the center and a contributing editor of the report.

JR DeShazo, one of the report’s authors and former director of the center, said their research was guided by three questions: which populations are the most vulnerable, which locations face the most consequences when exposed to heat and which agencies are responsible for regulating such exposures.

• The Autonomous Vehicle (AV) industry has seen unprecedented levels of technological advancement. 
• Regulators around the world have been tasked with creating policy and legislative frameworks for this fast-moving industry. 
• We outline the latest trends to consider when developing mobility policies as the industry works towards post-pandemic recovery.

The transformational changes of mobility that have inspired academic scholars and fiction writers alike are steadily progressing to become part of our reality. The Autonomous Vehicle (AV) industry’s rapid development has encouraged regulators around the world to introduce policy frameworks and legislation to enable the safe experimentation and development of the technology. As they navigate this unprecedented pace of technological advancement, we reviewed and mapped the latest developments on the AV industry post-pandemic.

Image: An autonomous vehicle by Silicon Valley-based robotics company Nuro. Image: REUTERS.

Everyone knows that startups are risky, but they also expect that the job will be exciting and potentially very lucrative (think early employees at Facebook and Google). Yet we have all heard stories about the high turnover, unstructured work environment, lower base pay, and unpredictable expectations from the top.

It’s data season, with groups like Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), CB Insights, PitchBook and Crunchbase News putting out data sets that we’re having fun exploring. This morning, we’re adding one more to our arsenal.

The Exchange spent some time this week diving into the SVB “State of the Market” report for the fourth quarter. As is common from the bank’s publications, it’s a dense riff of charts and notes, ranging from economic data and trade figures to venture capital statistics.

Image: Image Credits: Nigel Sussman