The Bayer Foundation today launched its new EUR 20 million Social Innovation ecosystem fund by awarding EUR 3 million to four pioneering social innovators – myAgro, MercyCorps, Path and Living Goods. The fund aims to scale up technology and entrepreneurial solutions that empower African smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty.

Bayer’s four awardees will provide over 1 million people in African farmer households with access to entrepreneurial solutions that increase their crop yields and access to health services. Today’s investment fuels Bayer’s objective to improve the lives of 100 million people – smallholder farmers and their family members – by 2030.

Job growth is one byproduct of the billions of biopharma investment dollars that flowed into Massachusetts over the past decade. In just the first half of 2019, Bay State drug companies took in almost $1.5 billion in venture capital and more than $800 million from initial public offerings.

Most of the investments are heading to one specific location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, considered to be the country's preeminent biotech hub.

With companies continuing to shrink or outsource their human resources departments, it is tempting to augment that traditional business function with artificial intelligence. Data science holds so much promise for other fields that it makes sense for algorithms to replace imperfect human decision-making for hiring, firing, scheduling and promoting. But new research from Wharton professors Peter Cappelli and Prasanna “Sonny” Tambe flashes a cautionary yellow light on using AI in human resources. In their paper, “Artificial Intelligence in Human Resources Management: Challenges and a Path Forward,” the professors show how limited data, the complexity of HR tasks, fairness and accountability pose problems for digital HR. The study, which was co-authored by Valery Yakubovich, professor at ESSEC Business School and senior fellow at the Wharton Center for Human Resources, also looks at how to remedy those problems. Cappelli and Tambe spoke about their research with Knowledge@Wharton.

The cost of college and student debt have emerged as major political issues in recent years as both younger voters and parents of students grapple with how to pay for higher education. But while progressive politicians have pushed for free college or big debt-cancellation plans, most families struggle in private to figure out how to finance a college degree, writes Caitlin Zaloom, an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University.

Digitization has become the dominant theme in discussions about the future of supply chains. Wherever there is a problem, there is the promise of a technological solution, using some combination of artificial intelligence or machine learning, big data, automation, and the Internet of Things.

Being an entrepreneur is more uncertain, more complex, more stressful, more pressured and less lucrative than regular corporate work.  We know — despite the blood, sweat and tears invested — around 90% of entrepreneurial businesses will fail. This figure comes from a 2017 report by the UK Treasury, later confirmed by The Start-up Genome Project’s analysis of over 3,200 high-growth start-ups.  Stateside statistics match.  According to Harvard Business School cohort analysis, more than 90% of tech-centric, venture capital-backed start-ups fail.

Low interest rates and high stock valuations are fueling U.S. life sciences CEOs’ growing appetite for mergers and acquisitions, KPMG’s CEO Outlook found.

“U.S. CEOs are very much attuned to financial markets and the cost of capital,” said Carole Streicher, KPMG LLP’s Deal Advisory leader for healthcare and life sciences. “Investors want to see CEOs maximize returns, whether that is from cutting costs, repurchasing shares, making acquisitions that will immediately boost earnings per share, or gaining a medication, device or technology that can sustain the product pipeline.”

Bristol-Myers Squibb has allied with biotech accelerator BioMotiv. The deal sets Bristol-Myers up to found and fund biotechs with BioMotiv before going on to acquire them outright once a preclinical candidate is identified. 

BioMotiv, a biotech accelerator associated with the $380 million Harrington Project for Discovery & Development, builds companies around academic science and helps these startups get into human testing and on to deals with larger partners. In the future, Bristol-Myers may step in partway through that process and buy the biotechs.

Image: The new Bristol-Myers Squibb agreement with BioMotiv comes three years after Bristol-Myers teamed up with a BioMotiv portfolio company. (Bristol-Myers Squibb)

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. That’s where I see too much entrepreneur burnout, growth plateaus, and founders being replaced, to their chagrin.

Be it creating ways for access to clean water, contributing ways to improve renewable energy for a more sustainable future or even creating 3D hearts, engineers are the future to solving many of the world’s global challenges.

The right education and training is necessary for future engineers to make breakthroughs in their chosen field, and Tel Aviv University’s (TAU) Faculty of Engineering is considered the go-to place for pursuing the unknown, creating future entrepreneurs and pushing the boundaries of knowledge.

San Francisco, when the weather is good, is a truly beautiful city. And just below it, along the area called the Peninsula, sits Silicon Valley. Over the past decade or so, these formerly distinct regions have blended together, owing to a combination of limited land resources and the spread of millennial-run companies populated by young employees who want to live in the city. It’s become one contiguous strip of tech firms situated along a 50-mile swath that starts just below San Jose, Calif., and goes all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge.

This current year has already ushered in a tidal wave of tech innovations, from the rise of social robots and personal assistants to Amazon Prime’s one-day delivery gamble and the proliferation of voice search. The latter alone became a $1.8B retail segment in the US in 2017, and is predicted to rise to around $40B by 2022. Amazon Prime’s ability to prioritize Prime subscribers in their supply chain and get them their packages within 24 hours has rocked the world of online retail. Chatbots have been heavily deployed this year too, and are generally well-received by customers who would otherwise have to call or submit forms. But we're more than halfway through 2019, so it's time to ask: What big tech changes are going to affect the way we live and work in 2020? 

What comes to your mind when you hear the word “Entrepreneurship”? A good looking guy, dressed like a GQ business model with the latest and most expensive foreign car. Right? This is a common assumption and mostly a misconception about the lifestyle of entrepreneurs. Although this is mostly the case in Hollywood movies, it is not exactly true in real life.

Private capital investment in Australia is now seeing a healthy amount of activity in the Series A stage, where a number of venture capital (VC) firms have established traction in the market.

Later stage B and C rounds — where investment amounts rise into the seven or eight figures — are generally still the domain of larger overseas funds.

Every so often a promising entrepreneur seems to freeze in the oncoming headlights and gets run over by his competition. Why is it that his idea which seemed so fundable only months ago fails to attract investors today? The team is the same. The company's market is the same.

A Seattle investment company is not only creating a $50 million fund to invest in Boise technology startups but is moving its headquarters to Boise as well.

“We’ve been watching the Boise region for a while,” said Mike Self, general partner with StageDotO Ventures. “It’s like Austin 25 years ago. We don’t think there’s a better region to be investing in than Boise.”

Chinese startups from ride-sharing giant Didi Chuxing to media and entertainment juggernaut Bytedance once raised record amounts from the country’s private investors. But this investment boom is petering out rapidly as people are a lot less certain of finding gems amid a global stock market slump.

Image: Zhang Yiming, chief executive officer and founder of Bytedance.GILLES SABRIE/BLOOMBERG

Sixteen years ago, I stood in a parking lot near a freeway in San Diego and experienced one of the more amazing technology demos of my professional life. About 100 yards away, the sandy-haired, eclectic inventor Woody Norris pointed a metal plate about the size and shape of a cereal box at my head. He hit play on a portable CD player attached to the gadget. Amid the din of cars and trucks whizzing by, I heard the gentle sound of tinkling ice cubes, as clearly as if a bartender were swirling a bourbon on the rocks by my ears.

Image: Photograph by Mehau Kulyk/Science Photo Library

It’s a dilemma in the career re-entry world: What level is the right level to return to after a career break?

Returning professionals who take a lower-level position than the one they were in before their career break may worry they are selling themselves short. Employers can be confused by the relauncher who applies for a lower level role, because they appear overqualified. Conversely, some returning professionals believe they should be returning at a higher level than what the employer views as available or appropriate.

Gardens crossed by paths that branch off and intersect dot the art of entrepreneurship. Located in the Sicilian Piraino, a medieval village in the province of Messina, there is the garden of Giuseppe Gembillo, former professor of history and philosophy of complexity and science at the University of Messina. Gembillo has designed a garden that is an event in continuous evolution. On the hill, a window overlooking the sea and the Aeolian Islands, the garden receives the breath of Aeolus, the god of the winds bringing as a gift the charm of myths. Gembillo learned the arts of knowing how to do, think, imagine and understand from Piracmone (whence the name Piraino), the cyclops who worked iron, designed lightning strikes and built walls. The four types of knowledge are essences of the flower of “knowledge of knowledge” – namely, the knowledge that reflects on itself.