While the priorities for healthcare organizations and venture capital firms may have shifted during the Covid-19 outbreak, digital health startups are actually shattering venture capital records by raising $6.3 billion in the first half of the year.

With so many new entrants, it is more important than ever to look for a venture capital firm that has the right relationships and expertise. The process of evaluating a VC firm can be narrowed down to five words: Calm, Vision, Balance, Partnership, and Results.

Offshore wind capacity in the EU “should be multiplied by 25 times by 2050” as the European Commission looks for all possible ways of boosting the share of renewables in energy consumption, according to a draft policy document seen by EURACTIV.

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the EU would aim for a 250% growth in offshore wind by 2050. 

The projected rise in offshore wind is highlighted in a leaked draft of the European Commission’s offshore renewable energy strategy, due to be presented on Thursday (19 November).

Today, European offshore capacity stands at 23 gigawatts (GW). The leaked strategy wants the EU to reach 60 GW by 2030 and 300 GW by 2050.

Image: Offshore wind capacity will need to increase dramatically to reach the Commission's ambition (Vattenfall Nederland / Flickr)

Two years ago, global research and development (R&D) spending grew by 5.2 percent, significantly faster than global gross domestic product (GDP) growth, after rebounding strongly from the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Venture capital (VC) and the use of intellectual property (IP) were also at an all-time high. 

However, the coronavirus pandemic has hit the innovation landscape at a time when innovation was flourishing. And now that global economic growth is expected to fall sharply in 2020, observers wonder if R&D, VC, IP and the political determination to adopt innovation will also slump – freezing innovation finance and slowing humanity’s progress.

Image: Lee Sea Lin, director for innovation at Toppan Ecquaria which has partnered with GovTech to implement facial verification technology, demonstrates the technology on his mobile phone in Singapore. (AFP Photo)

(Reuters) - Comcast Corpsaid on Friday its corporate venture capital firm, Comcast Ventures, will become a part of its strategic business development team at its cable segment.

"We are aligning our approach to venture investing more closely with our business units and repositioning Comcast Ventures and its fund under the strategic business development team at Comcast Cable," the company said in a statement.

Image: FILE PHOTO: The NBC and Comcast logo are displayed on top of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, formerly known as the GE building, in midtown Manhattan in New York

Brussels should set up a €100 billion technology sovereignty fund to compete better in a world dominated by giant American and Chinese tech companies, according to one of Europe’s best-known tech investors.

“Unless we do this, we will become even more dependent on two countries than before,” Hermann Hauser, vice-chair of the European Innovation Council’s (EIC) advisory board, said.

With Hauser’s help, the EIC has established a special tech sovereignty taskforce, to put a greater focus on developing neglected technology areas. “The first task we’ve set ourselves is to make a list of technologies that are so critical to our lives that we’ve really got to do whatever it takes to have our own access to them,” he said in an interview.

Image: Hermann Hauser, vice-chair of the European Innovation Council’s advisory board. Photo: Wikipedia Commons.  

Europe is home to 98 operational ‘unicorns’, at last count. That’s a sizeable portion of the 495 unicorns around the world.

Whilst the majority of these billion-dollar companies hail from large European nations like the UK, Germany and France, smaller European nation states — notably Estonia, Portugal and even Malta — have joined the party, attracting investors and producing well-known unicorns. 

Will the coronavirus pandemic lead to long-term changes in higher education? To better understand the challenges facing U.S. colleges and universities, WSJ’s Alexander Hotz spoke with administrators, students, and a higher education futurist. Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/AP Oakland University didn’t top Matthew Henry’s list when he started hunting for colleges in Michigan to attend. But one visit to the spacious campus, situated on a serene 1,400-acre estate donated by the heiress to the Dodge auto-making fortune, sold him on the school.

Image: Matthew Henry’s education at Oakland University was made possible, in significant part, by the school’s partnership with Siemens. He sits with a robot controller connected to a conveyor system in a lab on campus. PHOTO: NICK HAGEN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Entrepreneurship is something we traditionally associate with large cities. Indeed, a few years ago, entrepreneur James Liang argued in his latest book The Demographics of Innovation, that as cities grow, they enjoy numerous advantages.

He argues that demographics have a huge part to play in innovation, and outlines three core ways they impact a country’s creative output:

The scale factor – Economies of scale are well known in business, but Liang argues that scale is also vital for innovation. Not only do countries with high populations have more researchers etc., but crucially, they have a large domestic market for budding innovators to sell to.

Several startup founders and investors from around the state have formed the “Wisconsin Startup Coalition,” an organization whose mission is to advocate for policies that advance growth in Wisconsin’s startup ecosystem.

The Wisconsin Startup Coalition was founded by Matt Cordio, co-founder and president of Skills Pipeline and Startup Milwaukee, and Peter Welch, chief operating officer of The Welch Group, a government relations and public affairs firm.

The organization’s board includes Fiveable chief executive officer Amanda DoAmaral, gener8tor co-founder Troy Vosseller, Frontdesk CEO Kyle Weatherly, KIIO CEO Lydia Zeller and other startup founders and investors in Wisconsin.

Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government's crash program to inoculate 300 million Americans against the coronavirus, includes a number of pharmaceutical partners like Emergent BioSolutions in Baltimore. CBS News correspondent David Martin toured one of Emergent's manufacturing suites where the company is producing two COVID-19 vaccines awaiting FDA approval. 

Associations have the power to bring together people, data, information, knowledge, and insights from diverse walks of life and create broadly trusted platforms for conversations, collaborations, partnerships, and actions. The diversity of these activities can enable members and customers to engage in agile relationships. Innovative associations multiply these connections into value creation on a local, regional, and global scale. As connections grow and impact scales, associations can discover critical topics for society and gauge solutions' effectiveness.

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) is innovating in terms of how it will invest in projects, creating a new public-private partnership known as BARDA Ventures, based on the 21st Century Cures Act and venture capital methods.

As a result, BARDA seeks proposals from existing nonprofit partners to manage a long term health security fund no later than Dec. 8, 2020. That fund will be used to guarantee support for breakthrough technologies and new means of preparedness and response to health security threats. This, the organization hopes, will help its ability to stimulate innovation and promote disruptive technologies to close gaps in pandemic response and other healthcare preparedness.

It has become alarmingly clear that the Covid-19 pandemic is threatening women’s careers. In September 2020 alone, 865,000 women left the U.S. workforce, compared to 216,000 men. Furthermore, one in four women are considering either leaving the workforce or reducing their work hours. A stream of advice has suggested how working mothers can work from home with kids, manage work/life boundaries (or lack thereof), and handle anxiety over school decisions. Yet when we interviewed working mothers about these challenges this summer, we learned how many have taken it upon themselves to address the challenges they’re facing, rather than their employers and managers stepping up and getting involved.

Latest market analysis from the British Business Bank finds early stage venture capital funds have the potential to generate higher returns than later stage VC funds. Early stage VC funds generated a pooled Distributions to Paid In (DPI) multiple of 1.43 and pooled Total Value to Paid In (TVPI) multiple 1.99, which is 0.73 and 0.71 pp higher than later stage VC funds.

The new report, UK Venture Capital Financial Returns 2020, draws together data from existing data sources including PitchBook and Preqin, and from the Bank’s own programmes, as well as a new survey of fund managers, to provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of the asset class and its performance.

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) recently released “Improving local development incentives. Effective practices for local governments in northeastern Illinois.” This new guidebook offers a set of principles and strategies to improve the use of development incentives in the Chicago region.

The guide’s four key principles are:

1. Equity – supporting development in disinvested communities, providing equitable access to amenities and employment, and keeping incentives from contributing further to inequitable outcomes;
2. Performance-driven use – establishing clear goals and performance measures and recognizing that incentives are just one among many community tools for development;
3. Pursuit of regional benefits – avoiding race-to-the bottom competitions among neighbors that do little to improve the region and are costly at the local level;
4. Transparency – publishing clear incentive policies, sharing agreement details, and conducting evaluations.

Ten strategies address goal setting, public accountability, and judicious and targeted use of incentives. The strategies also recommend assessment of economic benefits related to racial and economic equity, regional gains/losses, and local employment that go beyond the narrow fiscal impact metrics that often drive local incentive offers. 

Melissa Mazzeo began her career with the goal of making a big impact on the world. Her first professional role was at a global public health organization, which took her to Uganda, among other areas in need. Later, she went to Yale University for an MBA and master’s in environmental management. At that point, she was resolved to do something bold for a business student at an elite institution; she wanted to take over her mom’s small business.

BARDA today announced a new type of public-private partnership, BARDA Ventures , that will realize authorities granted in the 21st Century Cures Act to utilize venture capital (VC) methods and practices. This will be the first time HHS has utilized VC practices to make investments. As part of the new program, BARDA is soliciting proposals for an existing nonprofit partner to manage an investment fund that will support breakthrough technologies and create entirely new approaches to enhance U.S. preparedness and response to 21st century health security threats, including COVID-19 and future pandemics.

Over the past 14 years, BARDA has created strong and impactful public-private partnerships with companies large and small in the life sciences, biotech and pharmaceutical industries. BARDA now is extending this approach to include partnerships with the private investment community.

If some of the many thousands of human volunteers needed to test coronavirus vaccines could have been replaced by digital replicas—one of this year's Top 10 Emerging Technologies—COVID-19 vaccines might have been developed even faster, saving untold lives. Soon virtual clinical trials could be a reality for testing new vaccines and therapies. Other technologies on the list could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by electrifying air travel and enabling sunlight to directly power the production of industrial chemicals. With “spatial” computing, the digital and physical worlds will be integrated in ways that go beyond the feats of virtual reality. And ultrasensitive sensors that exploit quantum processes will set the stage for such applications as wearable brain scanners and vehicles that can see around corners.

Image: Credit: Vanessa Branchi - https://www.scientificamerican.com

Over the past nine months, more than $7 billion in federal funding has poured into the BioHealth Capital Region aimed at the battle against COVID-19 and has shown a spotlight on the broad impact biopharma life science companies and academic institutions are making in the fight against the pandemic.

“The moons are aligned over the BioHealth Capital Region right now and people are beginning to see how important the region is in helping to address the research development and manufacturing needs to address this dreaded disease,” said Richard Bendis, president and chief executive officer of BioHealth Innovation.

Well just to lighten the mood I have just seen on my BBC news app that the Oxford University? Astra Zenaca group have just announced that they have tested 43,500 people from here and abroad and they are claiming that it prevents 90% of people getting Covid. They also announced there was no safety issues with this vaccine. Could this help life to start to get back to normal, they say they are approaching the government to start rolling it out next month, lets just hope this is the light at the end of a very dark tunnel.