(Bloomberg) -- Explore what’s moving the global economy in the new season of the Stephanomics podcast. Subscribe via Apple Podcast, Spotify or Pocket Cast.

The European Union is planning a 3.5 billion-euro ($3.9 billion) fund that will invest in early stage technology in an effort to increase the pipeline of innovations that might someday take on giants in the U.S. and China.

Baseball is a game of tradition, and Grayson Stadium is as traditional as they come. The Savannah venue was built in 1926, back when game-day radio broadcasts were a new thing. The Boston Red Sox held spring training here, leading Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Jackie Robinson to round its bases. For three decades, a local high school also took Grayson’s field for its annual Thanksgiving Day game against a military academy. And between 1984 and 2015, it was home to a minor league team called the Sand Gnats. This was all baseball in its classic form -- orderly and staid, romanticized by purists. 

Many people find it difficult to deal with corporate workplace rules, company internal politics and regulations. They’re dreaming about working on their own project and in their own way. They desire to have full control over their time and goals. But for most people this will actually stay what it is. A dream. But how do you know if you are ready to stop dreaming, start doing and to build your own business?

Bryan and Shannon Miles have been married since 1997, and in full-time business together since 2010. In 2017, they reorganized their five companies into one, BELAY, which provides virtual support to businesses and has generated just under $100-million in revenue since its inception. 

The couple shared their insights via email about what they've learned it takes to build a company and a marriage that is happy and healthy.

Image: BELAY

Every culture and community puts pressure on its members to follow the norms. Even young people who start out wanting to be different are called “freaks,” and most are slowly bent back into the norm by the time they “grow up.” Maybe that’s why so many entrepreneurs struggle with building a disruptive new business, where breaks from the norm are the key to success.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

The headlines coming out of Silicon Valley are not great right now, particularly for the unicorns—or startups that seemingly come out of nowhere to be valued at more than $1 billion—from Airbnb to Uber to WeWork.

Is the Silicon Valley dream over? We put this question to Dr. Astrid Scholz, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Zebras Unite, a growing movement that aims to make startup and venture capital culture more ethical and inclusive.

A group of academic, biotech, biopharma, and healthcare leaders at Harvard and across Massachusetts plan to create a new center for innovation and manufacturing next-generation medicines, according to a Monday press release.

The center, which is estimated to cost $50 million dollars, will be an independent non-profit located in the Greater Boston area. The board of directors of the new center includes leaders from Harvard, MIT, Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, GE Healthcare Life Sciences, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.

Image: Senior members of Harvard's central administration, including University Provost Alan M. Garber '76, work in Massachusetts Hall. Photo: Sydney R. Mason

Acouple of weeks ago, I attended The Times CEO Growth Summit in Glasgow. One of the sessions posed the question: “Given that Scotland is a contender on the world stage, what more can we do to drive inclusive growth and innovation?”

While there was broad consensus on the panel, one issue was hotly debated. On one hand, there was a view that there were too many new ideas being developed by start-ups and that they should be encouraged to fail quickly so that winners could be picked at an early stage and investment concentrated on them. On the other, there was a concern that such an approach results in selecting what appears to be cool at first sight, rather than what would make the…

As an entrepreneur, the scariest word you could here is “failure”. Every entrepreneur is terrified of failing and having to start all over again. However, in order to be successful, you need to fail. As crazy as this sounds, failing can lead to more success and a better business. Here’s why as an entrepreneur, you need to fail:

Research has shown that when employees have friends at work they are better performers, more engaged, and happier with their jobs. However, thanks in large part to technology, how we relate to our coworkers is changing in two important ways. First, we are less likely to live close to our coworkers. This means that we may not have the opportunity for in-person, informal shared experiences (e.g., going to happy hours, running into each other at the “water cooler”) as well as organizationally sponsored shared experiences (company outings/dinners). Second, we increasingly rely on technology to communicate with our colleagues.

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Chris Barrow is a senior banker with J. P. Morgan commercial bank. Chris joined J.P. Morgan in 2012 in the Philadelphia office, where he and his team focus on providing financial solutions to life sciences companies located in the Mid-Atlantic - Delaware, Pennsylvania and Maryland. Chris has over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry with roles that have spanned from public accounting to banking.

In 2019, scientists around the world pulled off some impressive feats: They imaged a supermassive black hole for the first time, debuted two treatments for the Ebola virus, and launched a spacecraft into orbit that's powered by sunlight alone. 

Over the past year, researchers have also discovered a hidden continent, captured video of a giant squid in its deep-sea habitat, and sent a probe to an asteroid 5.5 million miles from Earth.

Image: A computer simulation of how a supermassive black hole's accretion disk and its event horizon (or inner "shadow") might appear to a telescope on Earth. Event Horizon Telescope/Hotaka Shiokawa

100 innovations making the world better, smarter and even a little more fun.

Ever since Eric Reis published his bestselling book, The Lean Startup, the idea of a minimum viable product (MVP) has captured the imagination of entrepreneurs and product developers everywhere. The idea of testing products faster and cheaper has an intuitive logic that simply can’t be denied.

In less than two decades, the amount of collaboration in global innovation initiatives has grown exponentially, finds a new report from the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organization.

According to the 2019 World Intellectual Property Report, between the early 2000s and the second half of the 2010s, the number of scientific papers authored by teams of multiple scientists compared to individual scientists surged from 64 percent to just under 90 percent. In the same time period, the percentage of patents filed by teams rather than individuals grew from 54 percent to 68 percent.

Business success or failure is the sum of small wins and losses that result from our ability to act. Every action we take is a form of investment with an expected return. The more knowledge and experience we gain, the more likely we’ll make decisions with a higher probability of success.

Most of us have blind spots in our ability to build a business, due to lack of experience, too much ego, over-confidence, or unjustified faith in a subordinate. Only a few of the entrepreneurs I have worked with in a decade of consulting are smart and humble enough to recognize that they don’t know what they don’t know, and have an effective process for shining a light on their blind spots.

From gene editing to microfluidics, the scope for innovation in the field of life sciences is vast and ever-expanding. Yet many researchers don’t know how to make the leap from academia to industry.

Concordia’s District 3 aims to do something about that.

Waterloo, Ontario, Nov. 22, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Startup companies at the University of Waterloo's flagship entrepreneurship programs have generated more than $2 billion in revenue and around 7,500 jobs over about a decade, according to a major new report by Deloitte Canada.

The first third-party study to measure the dollar value of contributions made by the University’s entrepreneurship and co-operative education programs also shows companies that hired Waterloo co-op students realized an additional $525-million in returns in 2018 alone. This total employer gain is based on outputs from co-op students during their work terms and subsidies for hiring co-op students, after subtracting the salaries paid and training costs. 

The number of UK startups and the amount of investment has taken off in the last five years, suggests BioCity analysis. With a growing funding base supporting the UK life science ecosystem, there have been an increase in the number of start ups in the UK by almost 50%, BioCity, a UK-based business incubator, stated in its recent report.

This number correlates with a significant increase in investment into life science startups, as investment has increased four-fold, to approximately £2.8bn ($3.6bn), in the same time period (2014-2018, compared to 2012-2016).