WWJ's Vickie Thomas talks with Candice Matthews Brackeen, General Partner, Lightship Capital and Margaret Trimer, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Delta Dental about a new $50-million venture capital fund coming to Detroit.  It’s the largest such fund raised by a Black woman in the country.  It will invest in women and minority owned businesses.  

Thank you, Nyeemah, for the very kind introduction, and for being one of today’s masters of ceremonies. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the first day of our program focused on ways to accelerate American innovation in the life sciences. Our goal is to enhance collaboration among innovative companies and researchers to solve one of the most vexing health problems we have faced as a country in the past century.

Image: https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/executive-biographies/andrei-iancu

Ann Arbor SPARK, a nonprofit business accelerator, recently conducted its rescheduled virtual annual meeting, reviewed its work in 2019, and its assistance to the business community during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paul Krutko, president and CEO, Ann Arbor SPARK, detailed SPARK’s COVID-related efforts to support businesses throughout the region, distributing funds from the state of Michigan, Washtenaw County, and various foundations and private individuals.

Image: May Mobility was recognized as the Entrepreneurial Company of the Year during the Ann Arbor SPARK Annual Meeting. // Photo courtesy of May Mobility

VC and corporate investment in startups developing technology enabled solutions to climate change, and the transformation to net zero emissions, grew at a faster rate than VC investment as a whole between 2013 – 2019. In that time, US$60 billion of early stage capital was invested globally into startups contributing to tackling the net zero challenge. 

The U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Covid-19 evaluation protocol has been one of the most aggressive in higher education, with some 385,000 tests administered so far, and a seven-day case positivity rate of just 0.35 percent.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign began the fall semester as a shining example of higher education’s can-do spirit: It reopened its doors for in-person instruction with an ambitious plan to test more than 40,000 students, twice a week.

Image: FRED ZWICKY, UIUC

Even in a down economy, established and startup solution providers will find more opportunities for expansion and growth in states that foster entrepreneurial, innovative business environments. It’s why so much of the U.S. IT industry is clustered around a handful of technology hubs such as Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, Austin, Texas, and the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina.

Image: https://www.crn.com

WASHINGTON - More than 30 million cases of the novel coronavirus have been confirmed around the world, according to Johns Hopkins University. 

The worldwide count of known COVID-19 infections climbed past 30 million on Sept. 17. More than half of these known cases are located in the U.S., India and Brazil, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins researchers.

Entrepreneurs are a very specific breed of person and they think in a very specific way. You’ll likely know when you’re in the presence of one. Their words give clues as to how they think. It can be fascinating. Here are some ways entrepreneurs think and how to think like an entrepreneur yourself.

Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) has often been regarded as one of the most lucrative industries and for good reason. In 2018, over US$60 billion was invested in CVC deals.

That number returned a 100 per cent increase from the previous year and represents 23 per cent of the total calculated capital invested in represented VC firms. It is no surprise that CVC puts up these impressive numbers: it is an easy and symbiotic way to develop business interests, expand your network, and see tangible results in a short time.

Your time is valuable, and if you don’t treat it as such it will flitter away until there’s none left. The goal is to clear blank space to focus on big, needle-moving projects and incredible opportunities. If you’re drowning in admin, that isn’t going to happen.

Imagine it’s 8.00 am on a workday in the year 2025. You’re about to head to the office – a less frequent occurrence lately, since you, like many of your colleagues, work more from home. Instead of taking out your car keys as in years past, you reach for your smartphone and open your favourite Mobility as a Service (MaaS) app. Almost instantly you see a range of transportation options to select from, with one click. You choose the option recommended by the app for your journey: a ride-hailing carpool to the train station, with a rented bike waiting to take you the last mile after disembarking from the commuter rail. No need to pay at each step; the app automatically handles all charges and fees through an unlimited monthly subscription or an e-wallet.

Sally Allain, MSc., MBA, Head of JLABS @ Washington, D.C. joins Rich Bendis on BioTalk to discuss her career, the decision to open a BioHealth Capital Region location, and their new BLUE KNIGHT™ collaboration.

Listen now via Apple https://apple.co/35ivWc3, Google https://bit.ly/3k0vOlA, Spotify https://spoti.fi/2R84fuh, TuneIn https://bit.ly/2F0a0rN, and YouTube Audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efHvb42ohtc.

SBA efforts to reign in abuse of the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program continue, yet companies that seem to use SBIR awards as a primary revenue stream rather than a means to creating future revenue paths through new product and process innovations persist, based on SSTI’s review of award data. Known as “SBIR mills” many of these companies appear to be clustered geographically in specific metropolitan areas, many of which house major federal labs or research centers, the analysis of SBIR data reveals.  This suggests, from a policy perspective, that the federal agencies could be doing much more to curtail the mills and redirect awards into companies more consistently focused on turning innovation into products, profits and jobs.

As the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread to the U.S., there was one person millions of Americans immediately knew we could turn to for guidance: Dr. Anthony Fauci. As director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Fauci has advised six Presidents over 36 years. When COVID-19 reared its ugly head, he was among the first to step forward with facts and only facts.

Image: Stefan Ruiz for TIME

Bruce Tulgan, founder of the management training firm RainmakerThinking, says that the key to career success isn’t only embracing opportunities; it’s also declining projects, tasks, and requests for help so you create time for the most value-added work. He explains how to evaluate each ask, determine which you should prioritize, and deliver either a strategic “yes” or a well-thought-through no. Tulgan is the author of the HBR article “Learn When to Say No.”

This special downloadable collection brings together recent McKinsey research and perspectives on the climate risks the world must confront and actions to reduce emissions.

Image: https://www.mckinsey.com

What happens when a major city allows the coronavirus to rage unchecked?

If the Brazilian city of Manaus is any answer, it means about two-thirds of the population could get infected and one person in 500 could die before the epidemic winds down.

During May, as the virus spread rapidly in Manaus, the equatorial capital of the state of Amazonas, dire reports described overwhelmed hospitals and freshly dug graves. Demand for coffins ran at four to five times figures for the previous year. But since hitting a peak four months ago, new coronavirus cases and deaths in the city of 1.8 million have undergone a rapid and unexplained decline.

Launched in 2014, StoryBites is a weekly feature from YourStory, featuring notable quotable quotes in our articles of this past week (see the previous post here). Share these 40 gems and insights from the week of September 14-20 with your colleagues and networks, and check back to the original articles for more insights. See also our special compilation of quotes related to India’s coronavirus responses here.

When Covid-19 burst upon the scene in early 2020, startup ventures faced dramatic shifts in markets and the importance of strategic agility became axiomatic: If you wanted your venture to survive, let alone thrive, pundits (including ourselves) almost universally advocated deep internal cuts accompanied by pivots to new markets and business models. As the leadership of the tech-focused California VC firm Sequoia Capital wrote in a March Medium post identifying Covid-19 as the black swan of 2020, “Nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances.”

I realized a while back that creating a new company for the first time is a lot like whipping up a great dinner entrée for the first time – you need a recipe, even though it may look simple. You know the basic ingredients, and you can visualize the results you want. Yet you may not be so sure where to start, and how to put it all together.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com