If the Tri-Valley business community is known for one thing, it’s the innovation economy. Entrepreneurship from the labs and outside the region is pulled in by an ecosystem of incubators, accelerators and venture capital that drives the engine of growth that has propelled the Tri-Valley. These centers of innovation and support are some of the most important pieces of that engine, assisting the many startups in the region.

The Tri-Valley’s national laboratories, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore, are a key part of the region’s history and the development of its innovation economy. They also contribute to the high density of master’s degree and PhD holders in the region.

The national labs have been researching and developing cutting edge innovations since World War II, when they were commissioned by the U.S. Government to study nuclear energy and weapons for the Allied war effort. The need for research of that kind has never gone away, and the labs have been doing studies for various branches of the government ever since.

Image: On Dec. 7, 1962, President Kennedy made a tour of Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORIES

The World’s 10 Most Innovative Economies.

In the 21st century, innovation has become the heart & soul of economic policy.

Customized cancer treatment, faux meat products, smart home technologies are frequently positioned as ‘the next big thing’.

Which countries are consistently innovating the most?

Bloomberg Innovation Index highlights the 10 most innovative economies& the seven metrics used to rank 2019’s top players.

Many business owners get their books together once a year when tax time comes around. I believe that is a huge mistake. Below are 5 reasons why it is crucial to review your financial statements on a monthly basis.

Let me preface this post by saying that reviewing your financials monthly is the absolute minimum I would recommend. Some businesses should actually review them bi-weekly, weekly or even daily, depending on the size and complexity of the business.

A venture capital firm formed by a founder of one of the first companies to win Food and Drug Administration approval for a cell therapy for cancer closed a new fund worth more than half of $1 billion.

Boston-based Vida Ventures said Thursday that it had closed its Vida Ventures II, or Vida II fund, raising $600 million. The close brings the total amount the firm has raised to about $1 billion since the firm’s founding in late 2017 by Arie Belldegrun, founder of Kite Pharma. Kite won FDA approval for Yescarta (axicabtagene ciloleucel) in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma in October 2017. In August of that year, Gilead Sciences announced it would acquire Kite for $11.9 billion.

Look around your workplace and you are likely to see people from across the age span, particularly as more Americans are working past age 55. In fact, the Society for Human Resource Management argues that there are a full five generations on the job today, from the Silent Generation to Gen Z.

A result of this boost in age diversity are conversations about how generational differences will impact the functioning of our organizations. After all, Millennials only want to communicate with coworkers via text — and Baby Boomers don’t text, right? And you need to attract those tech-y Millennials with promises of flexible work schedules, but their older counterparts all want a traditional workday, correct? Well, actually, wrong.

Research has shown that that the typical person makes about 2,000 decisions every waking hour. Most decisions are minor and we make them instinctively or automatically — what to wear to work in the morning, whether to eat lunch now or in ten minutes, etc. But many of the decisions we make throughout the day take real thought, and have serious consequences. Consistently making good decisions is arguably the most important habit we can develop, especially at work. Our choices affect our health, our safety, our relationships, how we spend our time, and our overall well-being.

The pace of innovation has skyrocketed worldwide in the last few years despite a slowing global economy, trade war tensions, and low productivity growth. Countries such as Israel, Japan, South Korea, Sweden, and Switzerland spend more than 3% of their GDP on research & development. Global R&D expenditure has more than doubled between 1996 and 2016. Here we take a look at the top 10 most innovative economies of 2019.

When a country has managed to get to a point where it is wealthy enough to start spending money on research and development within a wide variety of fields in science, it starts to innovate in ways that might not have been thought possible before. The World Intellectual Property Organization, an international organization that tries to quantify the amount of innovation each country brings to the world, has released an index that has ranked countries based on the innovativeness of their contributions to the world at large.

Two of today’s biggest tech companies are now 20 years beyond their days as startups that revolutionized market segments with their initial innovations. Amazon turned 25 in July, while Google turns 21 in September.

These companies entered our consciousness on the strength of their initial focus -- online bookselling in the case of Amazon, and search technology for Google. And as we all know, they didn’t stop there. Their starting points were followed by other ideas and expansions, and now, like other growth companies who’ve come before them, they need to continue to innovate and refine their strategies.

The Angel Resource Institute has released its latest analysis of 2018 angel investing. Characterizing the full year of investments captured in the annual survey – more than 2,500 individual transactions – the report profiles activity by several different factors useful in understanding regional differences in the early stage financing community. It should be noted, however, that adjustments in the deal size ceiling for inclusion in the analysis for 2018, to reflect the degree to which angels are participating in next-stage rounds (Series A), make comparisons to previous years less meaningful.  

We live in the age of the unicorn; startups that seem to leap to billion dollar valuations overnight. It's a wonderful time to be an entrepreneur. The upside has never been greater. But let's face it, the reason they're called unicorns is because they are exceptionally rare.

While I regularly work with well-funded startups that have the possibility of joining the ranks of unicorns, I've also seen the other side of this phenomenon; founders and companies that become obsessed with their valuation and set their sights, and those of their employees, on incredibly unrealistic growth expectations.

Watch this free Entrepreneur Insider session with renowned serial entrepreneur David Meltzer, who will help you build a brand that resonates with your audience.

The EU’s new technology funding body, the European Innovation Council (EIC), is supposed to be a place where people can pitch wild ideas and win funding to pursue them.

Helping make this vision reality is the head of Science Foundation Ireland and chief science adviser to the Irish government, Mark Ferguson, who last month was picked to head a 22-strong board of research and technology experts overseeing EIC’s rollout.

“I’ll encourage the board to be as entrepreneurial as the community we serve,” Ferguson said. “Our research is good. Our innovation potential needs to be developed. Look at artificial intelligence. In research Europe is leading, but on companies created we’re way down the list,” Ferguson told Science|Business. 

Image: Mark Ferguson speaking at a conference in Tallinn, Estonia - https://sciencebusiness.net

However, finding a sufficient source of funding to fuel their startup remains a big challenge for small business owners.

In fact, 65% of startup owners admit to not being confident they had enough money to start their business. This makes education around funding options for small businesses that much more important to explore. Every small business owner should look at their options, what they offer, what they have to sacrifice, and the circumstances that call for each.

More employees are voluntarily leaving their jobs than at almost any other time this millennium. When an employee quits, it can feel like a gut punch, leaving managers scrambling both emotionally and operationally. The loss can be particularly acute when employees “ghost” their organization, simply not showing up to work, sometimes only days after starting the job.

Moore’s Law, which posits that the number of transistors on a microchip will double every two years, is not, strictly speaking, a scientific law at all. It is not immutable. It is reliant on intellectual capital. And as, Jonathan Gruber and Simon Johnson show in their new book Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream, it is reliant above all on the financing and underwriting of that capital—which the U.S. government used to do in a substantial and serious way, and which the authors argue it must do again.

People are becoming more exposed to entrepreneurship careers through television and social media, and through the large rise in incubators and university entrepreneurship programs. As a potential career path, employees may want the flexibility and satisfaction of being their own boss and earning more through self-employment. But will they succeed on both these counts? When someone leaves traditional employment and starts their own business, are they actually able to improve their salary or at least able to improve their job satisfaction?

Image: https://blogs.lse.ac.u

When it comes to the choices we make, most of us like to think we’ve made the “best” decision. And while the everyday decisions (what to eat for breakfast, whether to read this article) don’t sap much mental energy, the choices that we encounter at scaling startups are often far more weighty: Deliberation on whether or not to raise a new round, or which new product feature to add to the roadmap, is intensified by a high-pressure environment with no safety net. Where good decisions can accelerate your company’s growth and foster trust among teams, bad decisions can endanger the bottom line and injure morale, sometimes irreversibly.