When she was a child, Lori Most hopped on jet skis and rode her bike to extremes. One journey through a patch of sand resulted in a universe of scratches on Most’s face. “I walked home dripping blood all over the place,” said Most, founder of Backpack EMR, which provides software solutions for medical clinics in remote locations. Most also played rugby, a sport not known for its gentleness, for 15 years. 

Sethuraman Panchanathan has a lot to celebrate this week as he marks his first anniversary as director of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). President Joe Biden has asked Congress to boost its current $8.5 billion budget by 20% in 2022, and a bipartisan majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives has embraced the idea of making NSF the lead agency in a massive increase in federal research spending aimed at helping the United States outinnovate the rest of the world. Lawmakers also want to give NSF a new multibillion-dollar directorate tasked with developing new technologies.

Image: Sethuraman Panchanathan leads an agency suddenly in the limelight. NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION/PHOTO BY STEPHEN VOSS

If you are one of the many professionals still trapped between jobs by circumstances outside your control, or are about to dump the loser job you have now, you should be actively defining and starting your own business, in parallel with looking for that ideal job. Let me explain why this is a win-win deal, no matter what the outcome.

Are you tired of the same old tedious desk job, where you work tirelessly to make someone else’s company successful? Well, if yes, then you’re not alone. Many people around you, whether it is a colleague or not, share the same feeling. These days, the word ‘corporate slavery’ is tossed around like a ball in a football game. Being a corporate slave sucks the life out of people who could have been so much more if they were working for themselves.

The University of Pittsburgh announced today that it will spearhead the creation of the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance (PLSA), a nonprofit, membership-based organization that will develop, promote and oversee a life sciences strategy to drive future regional growth.

Image: Launched with a $1.2 million grant from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, the nonprofit, membership-based organization will help the region become a hub for the emerging life sciences economy. (Aimee Obidzinski/University of Pittsburgh)

Staff working at Deloitte will be able to work wherever they want when Covid restrictions are eased and work from home guidance is scrapped.

Staff at the Big Four firm will not be obligated to work from the office for a minimum number of days per week, as has been a typical response of Deloitte’s competitors.  

Some 15,000 Deloitte staff responded to an internal survey about the future of work at the Big Four firm, with more than 80 per cent of those saying they expected to work from a Deloitte office for two days or fewer per week.

Image: https://www.cityam.com

The U.S. Small Business Administration recently made important clarifications to its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Policy Directive, giving the industry more certainty about whether and when a successor-in-interest to a Phase I/Phase II SBIR/STTR awardees is eligible for Phase III awards.

I often hear the popular notion that successful entrepreneurs are built from a single heroic insight or a single innovation. This is just plain wrong. The business world is a symphony of players and elements that only works when everything interconnects harmoniously. Continuous innovation and continuous learning are required for any sustained connection and success.

Not even COVID can halt our burgeoning technology sector. Indeed, while questions can be asked around the UK’s response to the pandemic as a whole, the same cannot be said of how its scale-up and technology businesses have coped with the massive disruption to the economy.

For companies that want to take innovation seriously, start with the CIO.

The CIO and CIO organization can be at the center of innovation in any company as long as we understand innovation for what it is.

The word “innovation” may be bandied about with such imprecision that it can become for many, mere pabulum. To say a product or solution is “innovative” is merely to say it exists -- such is the nature of overuse and hyperbole. In no sector is this truer than in technology where every idea or minute change is heralded as “innovative.” No wonder so few people take the word seriously anymore.

Technology enabled accounting firms to weather the coronavirus pandemic, but it will be just as fundamental to success as we return to something approaching normalcy. While there may have been a time when advanced technology could be used to supplement your core business, today it is your core business.

A new study has appeared to support an old idea: Aging is inevitable and immutable, so anti-aging research is doomed in advance to failure.

In 1957, George Williams wrote

This conclusion banishes the “fountain of youth” to the limbo of scientific impossibilities where other human aspirations, like the perpetual motion machine and Laplace’s “superman” have already been placed by other theoretical considerations. Such conclusions are always disappointing, but they have the desirable consequence of channeling research in directions that are likely to be fruitful.

 

You can’t win as an entrepreneur working alone. You need to have business relationships with team members, investors, customers, and a myriad of other support people. That doesn’t mean you have to be a social butterfly to succeed, or introverts need not apply.

It does mean that you need to look, listen, and participate in the business world around you, and network through all available channels, like business-oriented social networks online (LinkedIn), local business organizations (Chamber of Commerce), and events or conferences in your school or industry.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed many problems in American society ranging from public health and racial disparities to economic challenges and supply chain limitations. As was true with many nations around the world, the United States was caught without a detailed plan for dealing with a pandemic. Hospitals were unprepared for the deluge of patients and health care providers did not have access to the supplies they needed to protect themselves. State and national leaders provided mixed cues on how to shut down and when to reopen, and there continue to be sharp partisan differences in how people feel about wearing masks and getting vaccinations.

Founders almost always cite lack of money as the reason for failure, but if you look deeper, I believe the reason is more often about dysfunctional people and leadership. Sometimes it comes right back to the founder, in terms of a malaise often called “founder’s syndrome.” A few years ago I was intimately involved with a promising startup that taught me about this issue.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

CHAPEL HILL – As COVID-19 began to spread around the globe, companies and entrepreneurs stepped up to develop new technologies and redeploy existing technologies in their portfolio to tackle the disease and cope with the constraints it brought. The pandemic forced telemedicine into the mainstream and brought mRNA vaccine technology to the forefront. At the same time, new technologies such as CRISPR gene editing and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches have been finding their niche for speeding up drug discovery and development.

Image: Gene editing CRISPR DNA genetics (Source: Pixabay)  

A fundamental shift in the way businesses make decisions is taking place. Traditionally, running experiments and abiding by the scientific method has been the domain of scientists, but managers across industries have been adopting cultures of experimentation to inform their decisions at an unprecedented scale.

With a constant need to grow and innovate, established firms often look outside for novel products by collaborating with and acquiring start-ups. For start-ups, a tried-and-true exit strategy is acquisition, but it’s often a perilous journey as between 70 and 90 percent of M&As fail. In a recent article for California Management Review, Nir N. Brueller and I found that start-ups seeking an incumbent sponsor are more likely to succeed if they keep certain patterns in mind.

SAN DIEGO (KGTV) -- A group of sleep scientists from 11 countries is warning about an emerging type of advertising in which companies try to manipulate your dreams.

Coors Light, Microsoft, Sony and Burger King have experimented with ways to engineer content into people's dreams in recent years, prompting nearly 40 scientists to write an open letter this month calling for increased government oversight.

Image: https://www.10news.com

Studying procrastination used to be a terrific way to avoid doing things I was supposed to be doing. It hasn’t been as much fun for me since one of the things I supposed to be doing was writing this column on how to manage procrastinators. Rats!