When people think of Comcast, they likely still think of Comcast cable. It’s easy to forget the breadth of what Comcast now owns, including: NBCUniversal (Comcast acquired a 51% stake for $6.2 billion in 2011), Universal Studios (obtained when Comcast bought out GE’s remaining 49% stake in NBCUniversal in 2013), and Sky (Comcast outbid Fox for Sky in 2018, paying $39 billion).

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Venture capital has never appeared as potent and notable as it is today. Firms are multiplying to fund an ever-growing number of tech startups worldwide. Young graduates in engineering and business are now embracing venture capital as a safe and attractive way to join the tech world: not quite as risky as founding a startup, yet more rewarding and interesting than a dull job in the traditional corporate world.

Chris Iller had worked in marketing for local TV stations for 25 years when he decided to make a major career change. Iller wasn’t happy with his job — and he realized other local TV stations had few openings. “The local TV station is fading away,” Iller says, “because of streaming services and Netflix. In 2017, Iller started researching self-employment: either starting his own business or buying an existing business.

Ryan Allis at Hive, a global community of entrepreneurs, innovators, and investors, published a list a few years ago titled “The 12 Greatest Innovators of All Time.” On it are the usual suspects, such as Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Graham Bell, Marie Curie, and in the modern era, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. And, to be sure, all deserve the accolade. But the list has a glaring omission: George Washington.

How has a health system with a 323-bed hospital and a three-person innovation team built connections with more than 100 startups around the globe and attracted a Johnson & Johnson innovation lab to collocate on its campus? And how does it simultaneously challenge its own academic faculty to tackle the quandary of pediatric device innovation?

Liberty, Grand Canyon, Western Governors, and a few other universities have found a new way to play the game that many colleges are losing. Could they one day lay claim to a significant share of the nation’s new college students?

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Amazon is building a new Amazon Robotics innovation hub in Westborough, Massachusetts, creating 200 tech and advanced manufacturing jobs in the process.

Opening in 2021, the company plans to invest more than $40 million in the new site to allow Amazon Robotics to continue to grow its engineering, manufacturing, support and test teams in the state.

The new 350,000 square feet facility, developed by Atlantic Management of Framingham, Massachusetts, will feature corporate offices, research and development labs, and manufacturing space and will be in addition to Amazon Robotics’ current site in North Reading – together serving as the company’s “epicenter of robotics innovation”.

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The six faces around the table displayed expressions not usually seen in a corporate room. They ranged from sheepish to flustered to outright embarrassed. These were the successful, ambitious participants in a peer coaching group, and they’d been nominated to attend a leadership program by their bosses. Their uncharacteristic appearance was because of a just-completed assessment that said most of them were in a full-blown crisis trying to manage their time and energy.

We’re in the middle of a work revolution. Globalization and the rise of artificial intelligence, paired with a new generation of consumers who desire more personal, intuitive brand experiences, are forcing companies to rethink their approach to talent management and acquisition. Workers with capabilities that allow them to keep up with this pace of change —  such as adaptability, technological literacy, and people-management — are now in steep demand. But today’s employers are struggling to keep them on board.

Some have long argued that corporations should strive for profits above all else, that making money for shareholders is a company’s sole reason for being. But as the transformation to the Fourth Industrial Revolution – also known as Industry 4.0 –continues, more business leaders are starting to see a bigger picture—and a larger responsibility.

Image: DELOITTE GLOBAL

DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The world's business leaders are increasingly embracing a new form of capitalism, moving from one focused primarily on shareholder value to one focused on serving the broader world, as the Fourth Industrial Revolution (also known as Industry 4.0) rewrites the role of business in society. Released today, Deloitte's third annual Readiness Report, "The Fourth Industrial Revolution: At the intersection of readiness and responsibility," identifies an evolving form of capitalism in which business leaders and organizations are starting to prioritize their responsibilities to societal stakeholders alongside profitability.

Even if you ignore all the hype around crowdfunding, there can be no doubt that it is a real alternative for entrepreneurs to achieve visibility and funding today. According to a recent article on Thrinacia, there are now aver 600 crowdfunding platforms in existence, currently estimated to add more than $89 billion to the economy at a compound growth rate of 17% from 2019 to 2022.

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The National Capital Consortium for Pediatric Device Innovation (NCC-PDI), in collaboration with MedTech Innovator, is now accepting applications for its showcase pitch event on March 23, 2020 in College Park, Maryland. The competition is focused on pediatric devices in three areas of critical need: Cardiovascular, orthopedic and spine, and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

Deductible business expenses help entrepreneurs with many of the costs of running a company. Business owners know that most expenditures can be written off, although there may be limits and timing. Check out the most common tax deductions for small business. Last Spring the IRS released data showing the common deductions taken on sole proprietorship returns. Other entities claim the same types of deductions  — C corporations, S corporations, partnerships, and limited liability companies (LLCs), although you may find slightly different rules for some deductions.

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As an entrepreneur, one of the most important tasks to learn is how to successfully scale your business to new heights. However, this can serve as a challenge for many small business owners that don’t have a solid growth strategy in place. Today’s guest is Beate Chelette, the author of the #1 international Amazon Bestseller “Happy Woman Happy World – How to Go From Overwhelmed to Awesome”.  She has been named one of fifty must-follow women entrepreneurs by the Huffington Post, and sold her first venture to the one and only Bill Gates.

Innovators can improve their performance by paying attention to academic science.

In 1981, in the far outskirts of Los Angeles, a start-up made a bet that would change the lives of millions. Applied Molecular Genetics (Amgen) decided to take a chance on University of Chicago professor Eugene Goldwasser’s research and try to clone the gene behind the hormone that spurs the body to make red blood cells.

Goldwasser had spent years trying to get pharmaceutical firms interested in his work but to no avail. Chicago was not an R&D hub when it came to biotechnology, and local pharmaceutical giants such as Abbott or Parke-Davis did not pay attention to his work. Amgen’s interest meant that, finally, a firm was listening to him. Goldwasser was thrilled, and Amgen glimpsed an anaemia-fighting blockbuster on the horizon.

Developers, hold on to your wallets. 

For programmers, developers, and software engineers of all sorts, it's increasingly unnecessary to live in a tech hub like San Francisco or Seattle — which is good news, as the cost of living in each city only continues to skyrocket.

So why pay the median $4,128 in monthly rent for a two-bedroom San Francisco apartment when you could build your career in a city that isn't among the most expensive? 

Image: Drew Anthony Smith/AP Images for Booz Allen Hamilton

Metro Boston experienced a year-over-year increase of 8% in life sciences employment through the third quarter, NKF’s Liz Berthelette reported, citing data from JobsEQ. That led to the second consecutive year of absorption exceeding one million square feet for lab space, and the market ended 2019 with 5% vacancy, a new low.

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On Halloween day 2008, a mysterious paper entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System appeared on a cryptography mailing list. Its author, Satoshi Nakamoto, was a pseudonym and, to this day, no one is absolutely sure of his or her true identity. Nevertheless, the revolution the paper unleashed was all too real.

While the objective of the Bitcoin paper was to establish an alternative currency—a concept that had great resonance in the midst of the global financial crisis—it soon became clear to many that the underlying technology, called blockchain, could be of even greater utility as a distributed database.

MANCHESTER — Inside one of the new labs at the University of New Hampshire’s Manchester campus on a recent afternoon, assistant professor of biotechnology Kristen Johnson and two students evaluated genes as part of pancreatic cancer research.

The process is known as quantitative polymerase chain reaction, or qPCR.

“We are looking at various aspects of pancreatic cancer,” Johnson said. “We are trying to evaluate some of the things related to the DNA inside the cells.”