We live in the age of the unicorn; startups that seem to leap to billion dollar valuations overnight. It’s a wonderful time to be an entrepreneur. The upside has never been greater. But let’s face it, the reason they’re called unicorns is because they are exceptionally rare.

While I regularly work with well-funded startups that have the possibility of joining the ranks of unicorns, I’ve also seen the other side of this phenomenon; founders and companies that become obsessed with their valuation and set their sights, and those of their employees, on incredibly unrealistic growth expectations.

The Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers both have their eyes set on the Lombardi trophy.

But off the field, brands from Facebook to Pepsi will attempt to outwit each other with their Super Bowl commercials.

While we wait to see which advertisers will win this year's event (here are the brand winners and losers of Super Bowl 2019), it's as good as a time as ever to take a walk down memory lane.

Image: Budweiser's "Puppy Love" commercial from 2014. YouTube/Budweiser

It’s a well-known fact that innovation is vital in today’s business world. And, strategic innovation requires skilled people. In the right roles. With clear paths to advance careers. Yet, a major challenge to businesses lies in the way they select, develop, and reward these people.

In their book Beyond the Champion: Institutionalizing Innovation Through People, Babson Professors Gina O’Connor and Andrew Corbett identify nine key roles that businesses must fill to achieve strategic innovation—a must in today’s business world.

Crowdfunding in the Netherlands has become one of the most popular ways to raise money for a project, or event. There are numerous reasons for crowdfunding becoming such a phenomenon in the modern era. Part of the reason is that it embraces new technological trends by using the online sphere to connect people with entrepreneurs and gives both newfound opportunities to make money.

Want to be a millionaire? Start thinking like one. And if you're not sure how, one logical first step is to start reading like one. 

MillionaireMatch, a dating site for high-net-worth individuals, conducted a survey over the holidays to determine the books most recommended by millionaires. About 500 users were surveyed, and according to a site representative, their millionaire status was "verified" by way of submitted financial documents.

Armed with some data from our friends at Crunchbase, I broke down the largest US startup funding rounds from the last quarter of 2019. I have included some additional information such as industry, company description, round type, founders, and total equity funding raised to further the analysis. To maintain a focus on tech-enabled companies, real estate, biotech, and lending companies were excluded.  This report only contains equity fundings.

Image: https://www.alleywatch.com

Standing outside of the Mercy Virtual facility in St. Louis on an unusually cold fall day, I was on the phone with two founders who were pitching me on a new blockchain startup. They had a few customers and some early traction, but nothing to indicate product-market fit. And yet, they had raised $3.5 million from crypto investors in an Initial Exchange Offering (IEO) to grow the team and build product. Remarkably, the $3.5 million they raised was non-dilutive, meaning they didn't have to give up equity in their business the same way you would have to through traditional venture capital. 

Image: https://finance.yahoo.com

One of the quickest ways to become an entrepreneur these days is to develop and publish a smartphone app. The price of entry can be less than $10,000, so the competition is huge and growing rapidly. According to Tim Cook at Apple, there were over 20 million registered developers in 2018. Yet according to other statistics, vanishing few of these ever generate a significant profit.

We all hear about the big winners, such as the game Clash of Clans, which still pulls in over a million dollars a day, and the smartphone version of Skype, which is making money through credits as an extension of the website version. We don’t hear about the remaining several million apps that are mostly free, and garnering only trivial revenue through advertising.

Here's a lesson in longevity, so take notes.

Grab the nearest pen from your desk, bag, or junk drawer. There’s a good chance it’s a Bic Cristal, the ubiquitous ballpoint launched in 1950 by Marcel Bich. Since then, BIC has sold over 100 billion worldwide. The product even has a place in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

Today, BIC is known for three product categories: stationery, lighters, and razors. But a look back at the company's 70-year history offers a case study in the value of sustained focus, and the dangers of straying from the path. 

Since last year I’ve had a smart speaker in my living room—an Echo Dot. My family uses it mostly to ask Amazon’s digital assistant, Alexa, to play music. But after I saw a report that an Alexa-enabled speaker owned by a family in Portland, Oregon, had recorded a conversation and sent it to a contact, I started wondering: what is it picking up on at my house when we’re not talking to it directly?

So I checked my Alexa history (you can do that through the “settings” portion of the Amazon Alexa smartphone app) to see what kinds of things it recorded without my knowledge.

Startups in stealth mode are a common enough phenomenon in the Bay Area where so many believe they have the next best killer application and would like to keep things on the down-low.

But as transparency and trust become highly significant in healthcare, some prominent health data experts appear to be not taking too kindly to companies in stealth mode.

Particle physicists are used to popping champagne corks when they make discoveries at lilliputian scales, but now it’s neuroscientists’ turn. After 12 years and more than $40 million, an eclectic team of 100 biologists, computer scientists, and neuronal proofreaders announced on Wednesday that they have mapped the “connectome” in the central region of the poppy-seed-sized brain of a fruit fly, working out the precise meanderings of 25,000 neurons and their 20 million connections.

Image: Cross-section of fly brain seen under an electron microscope; different colors mark individual neurons. COURTESY JANELIA RESEARCH CAMPUS/HOWARD HUGHES MEDICAL INSTITUTE

When you think of the most physically demanding jobs out there, you might think of professional athletes or construction workers.

But you might be surprised which other jobs get you moving and require an astonishing amount of physical fitness.

To find out, we used data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET), a US Department of Labor database with detailed information on jobs.

Image: Being a dancer is the most physically active job in the US, according to Occupational Information Network data. AP/Jennifer Sinco Kelleher

America is the world’s leader in technological innovation, and that’s unlikely to change. But in the global economy, information and investments flow instantaneously, and America’s most important asset—intellectual property—is easily copied and counterfeited.

Making matters worse, a string of court decisions have weakened U.S. intellectual property rights. The Supreme Court passed up deciding important cases this month that could have reversed the trend. These events diminish confidence in the U.S. patent system and undermine American global competitiveness.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) awarded its 2019 Newcomb Cleveland Prize to University of Maryland entomologists Raymond St. Leger, Brian Lovett and their seven West African collaborators.

The prestigious award is given to the authors of the most impactful paper published in AAAS's flagship journal Science during the previous year.

The winning paper is chosen based on the quality of the scholarship, innovation, presentation, and the likelihood of influencing the field and wider interdisciplinary significance.

Image: CREDIT: ETIENNE BILGO

Part of India’s inhabitants is under the age of 25 years with a mean age of 28 years, which bodes neatly for the full ability pool

India’s expenditure on R&D remains to be as little as 0.6% – 0.7% of the GDP, a lot less than South Korea, Israel and Japan

As in step with the International Innovation Index 2019, India stood on the 52nd place out of a complete of 129 international locations

As we release the DataLabs through Inc42 Annual Indian Tech Startup Investment File 2019, introduced through Dell, right here’s a have a look at the important thing highlights from the detailed research of the funding traits, innovation and R&D panorama, startup insurance policies and macroeconomic components that influenced the Indian startup ecosystem from 2014-2019. 

A Bedford-based nonprofit, MITRE, is the powerhouse beyond a new initiative called Bridging Innovation, designed specifically to play matchmaker between startups and government agencies.

For the program, MITRE has partnered with essentially all of Massachusetts’ major players: MassRobotics, MassChallenge, Gov. Charlie Baker’s cybersecurity advisory panel, the Massachusetts Military Asset Task Force, Techstars’ Air Force Accelerator, Harvard Innovation Labs, MIT Engine and the UMass Lowell Innovation Hub.

87 venture-backed companies IPO'd in 2019, in line with 2018. These companies raised $26.3 billion in the IPO market, a more than $11 billion increase over the previous year. Driven by strong biotech activity and a rising number of large tech unicorns, OrbiMed topped the most active venture firms in the 2019 IPO market, along with other healthcare VCs.

Image: https://www.nasdaq.com

Industry 4.0 demands that business owners reconsider traditional strategies and processes. Waterfall is out, agile is in, and more than ever, innovation is key to entrepreneurial success.

Entrepreneurs can't let themselves get stuck, though, within an endless proof-of-concept loop. If innovators commit to failing fast and often just for the sake of experimentation, their product might never iterate toward actually satisfying consumers and the venture might fail altogether because of an inability to overcome the commercialization conundrum.

Imagine this scenario: An employee named Rowen arrives at work on his 10-year anniversary and finds a gift card with a sticky note on his desk. The note is from his manager, acknowledging his anniversary. Realizing it didn’t even include a thank-you or a congratulations, Rowen rolls his eyes.