A HUGE CONGRATULATIONS to Sally Allain on her new position as Head of hashtag#JLABS @ Washington, DC. We, at @Children's National Health System, are super excited to work with Sally and the entire JLABS team to hashtag#Innovate4Kids

Richard Bendis Judy Costello Vasum Peiris, MD, MPH, FAAP, FACC, FASE Jeffrey M. Gallagher Michael Friedlander @Cassandra Isley John Newby @Kyparissia (Kyp) Sirinakis Tami Howie TEDCO Arti Santhanam @Marshall Summar Josh Wilson, MBA Cherri Carbonara @Kimberly Ovitt, APR Kurt Newman Elizabeth Flury @Chelsea Hewitt Jennifer Cosenza Melinda Richter @Carli Hickman Michelle McMurry-Heath

Image: https://www.linkedin.com

In honor of the new JLABS @ Washington, DC – a 32,000 square foot facility located on the new Children’s National Research and Innovation Campus, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JLABS launched the JLABS @ Washington, DC Children’s QuickFire Challenge.

Visionaries within the fields of pediatric oncology, pediatric surgery and influenza are invited to submit innovative ideas for up to $150,000 in total grant funding; one year of residency at JLABS @ Washington, DC; and mentorship.

There’s something of a bull market in understanding attitudes toward risk. Last decade’s financial crisis spawned a slew of platforms — Riskalyze, FinaMetrica, Tolerisk, and a rapidly growing list of competitors — that seek to understand people’s tolerance for financial risk. It is now common for financial advisors to ask clients a set of questions about how much money they’re willing to lose in exchange for the chance to make more. The advisors then use the answers to assign clients a risk number and match them to appropriate portfolios. The practice represents an important step in the evolution of thinking about risk. In the wealth management industry, it’s become a given that it is not enough to analyze just risks themselves, but also how different people respond to them.

Image: Photograph by Adie Bush

As a society, we hold ardent (and conflicting) opinions on entrepreneurship: 1. It can’t be taught; 2. It can be taught, but only in advanced education; or 3. It can only be learned in the school of experience and hard knocks, a notion often accompanied by the opion that earning an MBA is a waste. 

Think for a moment about the way you view MBAs. Confident. Maybe even cocky. They are probably well-dressed and poised for a career in management, finance or equipped to climb the slippery pole of Fortune 500 success. Now think about your opinion of entrepreneurs. Many will envision college dropouts -- perhaps in hoodies -- who are invariably opportunistic, confident, charismatic and unafraid to take risks. Who could ever teach these abilities? And does anybody really need an MBA? 

We are living in a new generation of business, where customers drive the experience, and highly engaged employees are required to keep up with customer expectations. Traditional business leadership practices, including autocratic, reactive, and narcissistic, aren’t good enough. Over 16 percent of workers are still actively disengaged, and half have left at least one job because they hated their boss.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Adrianna Kezar, professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and director of its Pullias Center for Higher Education, has devoted much of her professional career to fighting the adjunctification of academe. And while adjuncts themselves make a strong case against it, Kezar has bolstered their cause with her own research and activism. Their cause is her cause.

Almost every professional knows it’s a good idea to leverage your alumni network. After all, attending the same college or graduate program gives you a shared history — and that commonality is a great excuse to connect with other interesting, accomplished people. But in practice, it’s more difficult. Beyond staying in touch with your pre-existing friend group, how can you build relationships with other alumni without it seeming awkward or transactional?

Fostering a good organizational culture requires motivated staff members, patience and a good work environment. A good physical work environment, that is.

As companies seek to improve their team dynamics, more and more are altering the way they design office spaces in order to facilitate creativity among employees, according to a panel on Tuesday, the fourth day of Baltimore Innovation Week 2019.

Image: Collaborative design firm Gensler's BIW19 panel of designers and media clients. (Photo by Karuga Koinange)

Phoenix is known as the land of sunshine and real estate. But every so often you might hear someone compare Phoenix with Silicon Valley, the land of tech startups, innovation, billionaires and companies like Tesla. Some have gone so far as to call Phoenix the "Silicon Desert." 

But when people talk startups, they usually talk about San Jose and San Francisco, or Seattle, New York and Boston. What about us? How big is Phoenix’s startup scene? How is it shaping our metro area and our future?

McKinsey delivered a mostly upbeat assessment of Europe’s biotechnology industry in August when it published a report titled, “Biotech in Europe: A Strong Foundation for Growth and Innovation.”

“European biotechs offer investors space for growth and momentum,” McKinsey concluded in its report. “With a strong science base that is less fully utilized than its U.S. counterpart, they have ample opportunities to translate innovation into products. Armed with adequate funding to expand, they could achieve global competitiveness and success in coming years.”

A crowdfunding agency can make or break your campaign. When you're spending that much amount of money on an agency before you even launch, you need to make sure you've chosen the right one. This blog from Crush Crowdfunding highlights the crowdfunding agency myths you need to know.

Breakfast, it is oft alleged, is the most important meal of the day. Also a thing of champions. Plus a meal you really can have at Tiffany’s (as long as you book a month ahead and don’t mind paying $35 for avocado toast). And for many families, breakfast is now becoming something else: their primary family meal.

Whether intentional or not, the tech startup landscape has been optimized for middle- and upper-class white males. According to one analysis, 77% of venture-backed founders are white and 90% of them are men.

The volume of venture capital deals has reached an all-time high, but the value of those deals has slowed worldwide due to continued declines in the Chinese market.

This could be the start of a trend as projections indicate declines in early-stage deal volume, which may foretell problems for later-stage investors years down the road, according to a report from Crunchbase.

Bill Gates believes he can predict the future—at least when it comes to global health. And his vision is pretty impressive: No more malnutrition and fewer doctors working to save lives because more people are stable and healthy. And there’s a nice ripple effect—without those problems, we can pour more resources into improving our quality of life instead.

Marc Andreessen’s call that “software is eating the world” has proven quite prescient. Whether you're the founder of a unicorn tech startup, a local small business, or a social media influencer, nowadays, it seems that just about every business needs a tech strategy. Yet keeping up with the latest developments is not easy. Even tech pros have problems.

If you're having trouble dreaming up ideas for a new business, one option might be to head to business school for an MBA in entrepreneurship. Getting an MBA in entrepreneurship can help self-starting students turn ideas into reality as they develop skills and a business plan. Here are the 10 best MBA programs for entrepreneurship.

The idea that we are living in an entrepreneurial age, experiencing rapid disruptive technological innovation on a scale amounting to a new "industrial revolution" is a pervasive modern myth. Scholars have written academic papers extolling the coming of the "entrepreneurial economy". Policymakers and investors have pumped massive amounts of funding into start-up ecosystems and innovation. Business schools, universities and schools have moved entrepreneurship into their core curricula.

Contrary to popular belief, commas don't just signify pauses in a sentence.

In fact, precise rules govern when to use this punctuation mark. When followed, they lay the groundwork for clear written communication.

Read more: The 11 mo

Voyager Capital invests in business-to-business software companies and has several Portland portfolio companies.

Image: Diane Fraiman, partner at Voyager Capital CATHY CHENEY | PORTLAND BUSINESS JOURNAL