The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Enterprise Center in Johnson County and other organizations have formed a coalition to boost entrepreneurship nationwide.

Image: Wendy Guillies is CEO of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. ADAM VOGLER I KCBJ

When my company began, we were decidedly generalists. We didn’t specialize in any one industry or technology, and we saw ourselves as a technology company that was reasonably skilled at building apps for mobile devices. Things were good for a while, but competition in the technology world made us wonder about our prospects as jacks-of-all-trades. The lower and middle sections of the app-development world (generalist developers) are rife with competition, with countless low-quality options masquerading as competitors to legitimately good products. A study by Hyperlink InfoSystem, for instance, found that some developers can build apps for one-10th of the cost of a U.S. company.

Some people are born entrepreneurs. They know from the very start that they will never work for anyone but themselves.

Not my case. I ended up in business by accident. In fact, I was born and raised in the USSR. In my worldview, obtaining an MBA or running a business wasn't an option. It was illegal, even punishable.

So, I did the only logical thing: learn by doing. And as it turns out, I have a natural taste for it.

They’re bogged down by student loans and rising rents. They’re ditching wedding registries and tiered cakes. They’re running for president.

Welcome to the wide-ranging, complicated world of the generation born between 1981 and 1996: millennials.

All told, this cohort has changed the makeup of America. Millennials have made the country more racially and ethnically diverse, compared with members of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980), baby boomers (1946 and 1964), the Silent Generation (1928 and 1945), and the Greatest Generation (pre-1928).

Narrator: This is the Great Barrier Reef, and it's dying. Less than 20 years ago, the world's largest living structure looked like this, and this. But today, ongoing pressures from climate change put it at serious risk for being wiped out entirely. In fact, in August, an official report by the Australian government downgraded the reef's future outlook from "poor" to "very poor." So, how exactly did we get here? And can it be reversed?

Narrator: The Great Barrier Reef is big. So big, in fact, that you can see it from space.

David Wachenfeld: It's important for people to remember that the Great Barrier Reef

Gentian’s CEO Dr. Hilja Ibert, Ph.D., guests on BioTalk from the BioHealth Capital Region Investor Conference to talk about their presence in the US market, Biomarkers, and Innovate Diagnostic Efficiency.

Listen now on Google Podcasts http://bit.ly/2MwE0w8, Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/2P7e5Nw, and TuneIn http://bit.ly/2oZkv6x

Dr. Hilja Ibert has over 25 years’ experience from the international diagnostic industry, from which she also has extensive leadership experience. She is a hands-on CEO, driving development and commercialization of product solutions for the clinical diagnostics market.

Why do startups fail?

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Over a year ago, OpenAI, the San Francisco–based for-profit AI research lab, announced that it had trained a robotic hand to manipulate a cube with remarkable dexterity.

That might not sound earth-shattering. But in the AI world, it was impressive for two reasons. First, the hand had taught itself how to fidget with the cube using a reinforcement-learning algorithm, a technique modeled on the way animals learn. Second, all the training had been done in simulation, but it managed to successfully translate to the real world. In both ways, it was an important step toward more agile robots for industrial and consumer applications.

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In survey after survey, the execution of carefully developed strategy comes in as a key problem that evades solution by executives. They acknowledge that they can’t seem to get it right. It’s one thing to design a strategy in the boardroom and quite another to get it operating at all levels of the organisation.

How do we exploit the technological revolution for green growth and global development? Celebrated economist, author, and scholar, Carlota Perez joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the nature of techno-economic paradigm shifts and current progress in the cycle of technological revolution. Perez is the author of one of the most influential books on the subject, “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.”

Throughout my career in small companies and large, I’ve always been appalled by the number of people who have a negative attitude or complain all the time. These people don’t seem to realize that they are hurting themselves, as well as other people’s productivity, and jeopardize the future of the company they are working for.

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Just what exactly motivates you to work? According to the July 2019 FlexJobs survey, for 63% of millennials, the desire to travel is the primary reason. This data comes from a survey of more than 1,600 millennials, which looks to find out flexible work behaviors among this demographic. The issue of flexible work is one that is extremely important for millennials. They want a work-life balance and more often than not it requires the ability to work from anywhere and anytime.

In recent weeks, three separate reviews of R&D grants and awards at NIH have shed new light on issues of minority and women representation among researchers and on potential conflicts of interest by investigators. NIH has been publicly working to address concerns about representation and trustworthiness among its investigators. While the results from these studies show that the agency has more work to do, the availability of this information speaks favorably to NIH's transparent approach to these conversations. 

Business R&D activity has been historically concentrated in a few states and became even more so in 2017, according to a National Science Foundation issue brief on the latest Business Research & Development and Innovation Survey (BRDIS). Despite finding total business R&D surpassed $400 billion in 2017, reflecting a 6.8 percent increase over 2016 results, NSF’s data also reveals R&D activity in five states alone – California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Washington and Texas – captured well over half of all of the nation’s business R&D investment in 2017.  These top states represented 55.2 percent of the total in 2017, while five years earlier their share was “only” 49.4 percent of the reported results.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “a blueprint for long-term planning toward social, economic, and environmental well-being.” Two of the 17 goals – Decent Work & Growth and Sustainable Cities & Communities – are especially relevant to US economic developers.

Economic development organizations (EDOs) can use these two SDGs to measure and communicate the range of work they do to enhance economic opportunity in their communities. The SDGs can also help EDOs promote their locations to young talent and the growing numbers of businesses who seek places that demonstrate a commitment to sustainability and well-being.  

CEO Jason Miller to step down in June 2020; Mark Weinberger, EY and Peter Scher, JPMorgan Chase to lead search for new CEO

Washington, D.C.—In almost three years since its creation, the Greater Washington Partnership has become a driving force in moving the region forward, having immediate impact around the issues and opportunities that differentiate the Capital Region as a leading innovative regional economy. Jason Miller has been the inaugural Chief Executive Officer of the Partnership, and he will be stepping down as CEO in June 2020, to pursue opportunities working on pressing economic issues at the national level, building on his efforts driving economic growth and prosperity in a regional economy. As the Partnership looks forward, Mark Weinberger of EY and Peter Scher of JPMorgan Chase will lead the search for a new CEO to continue the advancement and impact of the organization.

This September upwards of 7000 startup enthusiasts, founders, investors, and representatives of the world’s biggest tech companies flocked to Copenhagen for TechBBQ, the crown jewel in the Danish startup event calendar. 

The event is now heralded as the biggest startup and innovation summit in the Nordic region but began with humble beginnings back in 2012. While tech events tend to flower from the ecosystems around them, in Copenhagen the opposite seems to be true. Grassroots nonprofit organizations like TechBBQ and Copenhagen For The Win (CPHFTW) played a key role in laying the seeds for the strong ecosystem which has flourished, to make the Danish capital the ‘unicorn factory’ it is today. 

I became a VC 12 years ago in 2007 when the pace of deals was much slower. I had just left Salesforce.com where I was VP, Products, after they had acquired my second startup. As I was trying to figure out the role I wanted to play in the VC world I decided I wanted to focus on businesses that were building deeply technical products to solve problems for business users.

Just as I was getting the swing of things the world shifted beneath my feet and the stock market went into a free fall and venture capital all but shut down for nearly a year. It proved to be fortuitous because it allowed me the time & space I needed to get to know tons of founders and VCs and to hone my craft.

Synopsis

We live in the Age of Knowledge but we are heading towards the Age of Imagination. However, our current education systems still divide arts and business, juxtaposing them as different worlds, apparently ignoring the essential truth that imagination is the springboard of innovation. For business to continue to evolve, the barriers to creativity and innovation must be lowered.

In Innovation and the Arts: The Value of Humanities Studies for Business, editors Piero Formica and John Edmondson bring together a cast of expert contributors to explore how arts education can transform future business and social endeavours by developing empathy and enhancing skills frequently identified as lacking in graduates entering the workplace. Looking at arts and humanities across the broad spectrum of business and social innovation, and in the context of business education, examples of entrepreneurial and innovative developments, and the nature of the innovative mind, the contributors show how underdeveloped empathy and creativity constrain innovation. Art is disruptive, and innovation requires disruption to thrive.

Suburban Maryland has become one of the nation’s strongest markets for life sciences, according to JLL’s latest industry Outlook.

As home to the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), suburban Maryland has always held a distinct advantage over core life sciences clusters. Innovation is thriving and investors, employers and real estate stakeholders have taken note and are collectively changing the market, cementing its role as a leader in the life sciences sector.

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