Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
It’s a fact: ambitious entrepreneurs have a harder time in Europe than in some other parts of the world – but things are changing. In this conference, we look at some new, EU-supported approaches to entrepreneurship.
Topics for discussion:
A fresh approach to studying entrepreneurialism – which combines policy with individual drive – provides the insights needed to identify and address bottlenecks says Erkko Autio
Promoting entrepreneurialism is increasingly seen as a central plank of national economic strategy, as evidenced by a proliferation of entrepreneurship policies.
But what does the notion of an ‘entrepreneurial country’ mean? By now, it is widely accepted that an ‘entrepreneurial’ country does not simply mean that there are more entrepreneurs. After all, Uganda has the highest self-employment rate on the planet, followed closely by countries such as Peru. Even if these two countries have many merits, they are hardly leading examples of economic productivity and dynamism.
New Jersey doesn’t exactly have a reputation as a startup hub, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any ambitious tech entrepreneurs there. It could be that they just tend to migrate to more established locales like New York City and Philadelphia.
In an effort to keep that talent within the state, New Jersey angel investor Mario Casabona and partner Travis Kahn organized the TechLaunch startup incubator at Montclair State University. Today, six months and more than 90 submissions later, TechLaunch’s first class of 10 startups took the stage in Montclair to show off the fruits of their labor.
Entrepreneurs have no trouble focusing on how to build a product, and the good ones know how to find and nurture those first critical customers. Many, however, don’t know how to take their small business to the next level. What I’m talking about here is a level of discipline and skill necessary to collect and analyze the relevant business data, known as metrics.
Here is my selection of ten key metrics that every six-sigma joint like GE tracks without thinking, but too many small businesses only monitor haphazardly, if at all:
A recently published report from the AccountingDegree.com reveals which universities graduate the most entrepreneurs and how much funding these alumni get from investors and venture capitalists.
AS ocean waters warm, the Northeast is likely to face more Sandy-like storms. And as sea levels continue to rise, the surges of these future storms will be higher and even more deadly. We can’t stop these powerful storms. But we can reduce the deaths and damage they cause.
Hurricane Sandy’s immense power, which destroyed or damaged thousands of homes, actually pushed the footprints of the barrier islands along the South Shore of Long Island and the Jersey Shore landward as the storm carried precious beach sand out to deep waters or swept it across the islands. This process of barrier-island migration toward the mainland has gone on for 10,000 years.
Reinvigorating small business starts with identifying the high-growth firms that disproportionately drive economic activity and jobs. In an accompanying video, AOL cofounder Steve Case explains how big businesses can benefit too.
There’s mom. There’s apple pie. And there’s small business. As the US economy struggles to go on climbing out of the downturn and create jobs, no hero stands taller in the nation’s political and business psyche than the small-business owner. With good reason. Small businesses, defined as companies with fewer than 500 employees, account for almost two-thirds of all net new job creation. They also contribute disproportionately to innovation, generating 13 times as many patents, per employee, as large companies do.1 Sadly, small-business optimism is at its lowest levels in almost 20 years.2 After crashing in the recession, confidence remains below any level recorded since the early 1990s, because the recovery has been so anemic. Had small business come out of the recession maintaining just the rate of start-ups generated in 2007, the US economy would today have almost 2.5 million more jobs than it does.
Although the professional, scientific, and technical industry sector makes up only 6% of the U.S. workforce, it was responsible for 10% of national job growth from 2010 to 2012. In addition, the broad industry (NAICS 54) grew by 6% in the past two years, which illustrates our nation’s march toward a more technical, STEM type workforce. There are over 9.2 million jobs in this industry, which is driven by sub-sectors like computer system design services and management, scientific, and technical consulting services.
(PALM SPRINGS, Calif.) NOV. 15, 2012 – Resilience, innovation and a unique perspective on risk taking are just three of eight critical factors that separate the very best entrepreneurs from others, according to Ernst & Young LLP, which is honoring America's top entrepreneurs at its 26th annual Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® gala in Palm Springs on Saturday, November 17.
While the U.S. economy continues to wrestle with persistently high unemployment, slow growth and challenges from other developed and emerging economies, the more than 600 American companies named as finalists in the 2012 U.S. Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® program are creating jobs, expanding their businesses and planning for growth. Ernst & Young, in collaboration with the Kauffman Foundation, looked at what these companies are doing right, and in a new paper, "Defying gravity: High-growth entrepreneurship in a slow-growth economy," released today at the Ernst & Young Strategic Growth Forum®, identify eight reasons why these exceptional companies are bucking the trend and finding success.
Four decades ago, Danish medical students Jørn Dyerberg and Hans Olaf Bang traveled west across the Gre
enland ice sheet on dogsleds to test a theory. For many years prior to their journey, there had been anecdotal reports that Greenland Eskimos had an extremely low incidence of heart disease, and Dyerberg and Bang speculated that this was linked to the high levels of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) in the fish the native people consumed on a daily basis. After collecting and analyzing scores of blood samples, their hypothesis was borne out, and ever since, the medical and scientific community has been on a quest to determine exactly how PUFAs impart protective effects, and what amount must be ingested in order to achieve such benefits. Nearly 40 years and thousands of published studies later, however, these questions remain largely unanswered.
As an entrepreneur, your daily schedule is likely jam-packed with meetings, phone calls and other tasks necessary to keep your business on track. Maximizing productivity is a must, but working straight through your lunch break and eating a chocolate bar “al desko” may not be the answer.
Whether it’s critical team building over organic fare, a heart-pumping workout or just some quiet time alone, a mid-day break can refuel and refocus you and your team. We consulted 10 hip, young entrepreneurs from around the country about their lunch hour ritual and how it helps them rev up for the rest of the day.
Google used to have really embarrassing hiring practices. It would hardly look at applicants who hadn't gone to an Ivy League school, MIT, Cal Tech, or Stanford. It also actually used to ask executives and engineers in their mid-30s about their college GPAs. The worst thing Google HR would do was ask applicants insanely difficult "brain teaser" interview questions. Gayle Laakmann McDowell, a former Google software engineer and author of The Google Resume, says the company has finally "banned" most of these awful hiring practices.
Key concepts Psychology Attention Working memory Communication
Introduction Have you ever told a friend or family member something only to later find that he or she completely misunderstood you—or never heard you at all? People often tell each other about important information that is not properly received, even when the conversation occurs in a quiet setting at close range. Why does this happen? In this activity, you will learn why communication can be so difficult by probing the psychology of listening. You will also experience how much a simple spoken message can be distorted.
For the third consecutive year, Area Development magazine's editors have conducted a survey of a select group of highly respected location consultants who work with a nationwide client base. We asked the consultants to name their top-5 state choices in 14 site selection categories.
States were ranked in each of the 14 categories based on the number of times they were named as a "top-5" choice by the responding consultants. According to the results, the top-10 states for doing business are Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Indiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma, in that order. Texas, which was cited more than 200 times overall, significantly led all other states as the consultants' #1 choice for doing business. The top-five states were each mentioned in at least 8 of 14 categories.
There were many ties filling the top-five slots, and then the remaining states that were named by at least 25 percent of the respondents were listed as "Next Best." However, in some categories, only four slots were filled because no other states had enough mentions to be listed.
On Tuesday, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the first group of six external innovation fellows who will leverage technology to address critical health care needs, The Hill's "Healthwatch" reports (Baker, "Healthwatch," The Hill, 11/13).
Program Background In June, HHS announced the launch of the Innovation Fellows Program, which aims to recruit experts from outside the agency to work on four innovative health care projects that rely on health IT.
The projects will last for six to 12 months (iHealthBeat, 6/26).
Details of Participants The six external fellows were selected from a group of more than 100 innovators (Zigmond, Modern Healthcare, 11/13). They will be paired with HHS internal innovators, or "host fellows," to conduct their projects.
A new era of business is in the works, and it involves the implementation of environmentally-sound initiatives that not only save companies money, but also reduce pollution, consumption, and waste in order to do less harm to the planet through the course of commercial operations. As public awareness of environmental issues continues to grow, so too does the call for products and services that cater to the eco-conscious consumer. With global warming, deforestation, and the depletion of limited natural resources to worry about, not to mention pollution and myriad other issues that affect our health, many people are looking for ways to do their part when it comes to reducing the carbon debt of humanity. And savvy businesses are finding ways to adopt standards and practices that meet the growing demands of a green public. But the evolutionary process has only just begun.
George David Clark’s recent post, “The Patience Problem,” and my own classroom experiences got me thinking about not just the energy crisis in the classroom at this time of year but, more specifically, the creativity crisis. As Clark says, students are loaded down more and more with work and other responsibilities. As a consequence, their creativity is stifled.
I recently watched a YouTube video of John Cleese talking about creativity. In it, he says space and time, among other things, are crucial elements for people to come up with original ideas. People who intend to be creative need to create an “oasis” by “setting boundaries of space and time,” he says. It has to be a quiet space with enough time to let the worries of life, which will inevitably overtake quiet thinking, slip away after a while. He also says that the most creative people stick with problems or questions longer and usually don’t take the easiest or first solution they can think of.
Patents. A single word that incites a fervor in the online tech blogging realm, perhaps only after the emotional responses to the iPhone vs. Android battle or TechCrunch using expletives in an article title.
With the publicity of the Apple and Samsung patent litigation, it became evident that some authors and commenters around the web do not fully understand patents and the patent system. In some instances, the scope of a patent was blown way out of proportion and deemed excessively broad. In other instances, conclusory statements were directed toward the entire patent system without an explanation or justification. For example, some people claim that patents are outdated relics that now only serve to stifle innovation. Typically, this argument has been made in regards to so-called “software patents,” but it is interpreted by many as implicating the entire patent system.
Thankfully the election is over (almost). A few seats are yet to be determined. Although many of our readers asked for voting "advice," we didn't feel it was proper for us to "endorse" candidates. That's your decision, but we have, and will continue to tell you about your senators and congressmen as it relates to SBIR and small business. Your interaction with them is vitally important.
In this issue:
Des Moines – Nov. 12, 2012 — The Iowa Innovation Corporation was the recipient of the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds (NASVF) 2012 award for Best Approach for Technology-Based Economic Development. The award was presented October 16 during NASVF’s 19th Annual Conference in Cleveland, attended by more than 200 local, regional and national leaders in innovation capital and technology-based economic development. The award recognizes the achievements by a technology-based economic development organization in the development of innovative best practices and effective economic development models.
