Israel's startup ecosystem is booming, with a record amount of venture capital funding coming through the country's gates. Companies hailing from the region have seen a steady increase in capital invested in recent years, culminating in an eye-watering €2.4 billion across 310 deals in 2018, per the PitchBook Platform.

One of the trickiest parts of leading a large team is motivating them to innovate. As the one in the organization most often looked to for innovation, you must push teams to try new things. But just because you decide on a bold new path, this does not instantaneously translate into the hearts and minds of the team – or even your senior leaders.

Pushing anyone outside of their comfort zone can be a challenge. After all, it can be tough for any of us to change our ways.

Silicon Valley Bank is providing $300m (€266m) in credit to Irish technology and life sciences companies, a pot backed by the Irish Strategic Investment Fund (Isif).

The agreement between the specialist US lender and the State development fund announced yesterday.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the leading corporate banker in California's dot.com heartland, entered the Irish corporate finance market in 2012 and since has provided €226m to 29 Irish tech and medical sciences companies.

Global leaders and experts in biotechnology and life sciences toured the University of Delaware's Science, Technology and Advanced Research (STAR) Campus on Monday, June 3, to learn about the vibrant innovation community taking shape in Newark, Delaware.

The visit was part of a broader Delaware biotech ecosystem tour offered at the BIO International Conference, held June 3-6 at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. BIO 2019, an international gathering of more than 16,000 people from 74 countries, provided a forum to network and learn about biotechnology and biopharma trends and policy issues, while celebrating the latest research and innovations in health care, agricultural, industrial and environmental biotechnology products.

Image: UD College of Health Sciences Dean Kathy Matt shows BIO 2019 visitors a physical therapy lab at STAR Campus. - https://www.udel.edu

Being a good leader means making good decisions, especially under duress. A new book looks at how neuroscience can help leaders make sound judgments by mapping patterns of mental activity: The Wise Advocate: The Inner Voice of Strategic Leadership.

It was written by Jeffrey Schwartz, research psychiatrist at UCLA School of Medicine; Art Kleiner, editor-in-chief of PwC’s strategy+business management magazine; and Josie Thomson, business coach, speaker and author. Schwartz and Kleiner joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on SiriusXM to talk about the research behind their book. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

When you look at today’s biggest companies you may notice an interesting common denominator: the person who founded the company took it all the way from incubation to great success.

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and even Tencent and Alibaba in China. All of these companies had so called Founder-CEO’s.

At first glance it may seem obvious – he who dreamed it is best equipped to then grow it. However, when you look at the facts, statistics clearly show that the majority of the time this is just not the case. Most companies actually do not make it to the top because their “Founder-CEO” cannot/will not realise that they are not equipped to be the “Manager/ Executive CEO”.

Happiness and living the good life are a cornerstone of the American Dream. The authors of the Declaration of Independence made sure to list fundamental rights as those of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" when they drafted the decisive document.

To get a sense of how that part of the American Dream is doing across the country, we concluded our recent roundup of 50 of our favorite maps that explain the social geography of America with the above entry, showing the Gallup-Sharecare Well Being Index for each state in 2017.

"Go and create a business plan" is usually the first advice received when deciding to start a business. So preparations for a mission statement, company and product description, market analysis and strategy, SWOT and revenues projections begin many times without even having a clear idea of what it’s all about. But during this process, it is also common to receive feedback from all those successful "doers" who firmly stand for the inefficiency and irrelevancy of business plans. After all, how is it possible to foresee how things are going to be without even having started them yet? What is the point of creating a plan whose implementation is going to deviate, in many cases, from the original idea?

If someone asks you how you spend your time when you’re not at work, do you know where most of your day goes? It still surprises me that most busy people have their workday mapped out meticulously, yet they don’t realize how their time outside of work slips away. Partly, this is a consequence of the increasingly blurred lines that now exist between work and home. And partly, it’s a result of the fact that the tasks that take up time in our personal and home lives are difficult to quantify and account for.

Turning innovation into commercial success on a global scale is the golden goose Canada pursues. The challenges are multi-faceted and even culturally embedded, but solutions are in sight given Canada’s strengths.

Impact Centre senior fellow Charles Plant’s research notes that Canada’s innovation ecosystem is caught in a few vicious cycles. His work, “The Narwhal Project,” analyzes the obstacles Canada has to overcome in order to create a world-leading innovation economy. Canada ranks last among similar OECD countries in the number of innovation economy companies with more than 250 employees per million of population. Clearly, a better balance between small, medium-sized, and large companies is needed.

Image: A BlackBerry employee works at the company's Network Operating Centre in Waterloo, Ont., in this file photo. BlackBerry is one Canadian company that grew into serving consumers and businesses globally. (The Canadian Press/Andrew Ryan)

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Jeff Rose explains that many entrepreneurs approach him with questions about how to start preparing for hiring before they have made a single penny. 

Rose recommends holding off on these questions until you've made a legitimate profit. Once your business begins generating cash, you can then seriously start considering whether to file for LLC status. The ultimate lesson here is to focus on making money first; then to focusing on the smaller tasks that are legitimately less pressing later on. 

I know some entrepreneurs with successful businesses, and others who seem to have a great relationship with their family, but I can’t think of many who have both. Some people would argue that these two successes are mutually exclusive, but I’m not convinced.

Like the United States of America, the universe has been celebrating its own existence with fireworks since its beginning — the Big Bang, in the univere's case. Now, 243 years after the U.S. came into existence and 13.8 billion years after the universe did, NASA researchers have discovered a distant star system exploding in festive red, white and blue light, roughly 5 million times brighter than Earth's sun.

Image: Eta Carinae, a distant star spouting twin nebulae of red, white and blue gas, is pumped for Independence Day. Credit: NASA, ESA, N. Smith (University of Arizona) and J. Morse (BoldlyGo Institute)

Recently, we published a feature on the battle of the startup hubs in the Middle East. There are several cities across the region, attempting to lure startups to their lands in a bid to boost and diversify their economies. But in their attempts at doing so, the competition might derail collaboration between them than encourage it.

Image: Wamda

An Island company that's helping veterinarians reduce use of antibiotics has announced a major private investment deal that will enable it to scale up production, and market its Island-made health products worldwide.

MicroSintesis has closed a deal worth $16.4 million with Toronto-based Northern Private Capital.

"The world is focused on antibiotic resistance ... so we're looking to take our technology to global markets," said Hannah McIver, CEO and founder of MicroSintesis. "We're looking to build what will be a first-in-class production facility."

Image: MicroSintesis says it will expand production facilities, among other initiatives, as a result of a new $16.4 million private investment. (Brian Higgins/CBC)

The first independent evaluation of the Metropolitan police’s use of face recognition warned it is “highly possible" the system would be ruled unlawful if challenged in court.

The news: London’s police force has conducted 10 trials of face recognition since 2016, using Japanese company NEC’s Neoface technology. It commissioned academics from the University of Essex to independently assess the scheme, and they concluded that the system is 81% inaccurate (in other words, the vast majority of people it flags for the police are not on a wanted list). They found that of 42 matches, only eight were confirmed to be correct, Sky News reports.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

Space food has come a long way from the powders, purees and freeze-dried cubes early astronauts had to endure. New technologies are pushing the boundaries of food preparation in microgravity. But will astronauts ever be able to simply cook homemade meals like we do on Earth? Maybe one day, but for now they might have to start with dessert: this fall the International Space Station (ISS) will test the first “real” space oven—by baking cookies.

Companies used to stay competitive by being reliable. They provided the tried and true. Customers valued companies that reduced the risk in their lives. But the technology boom turned that completely around. Now almost every industry must contend with the need to innovate. Customers want products and services that are high quality but also the latest and newest vs. the tried and true.

The Fourth of July is a time for hanging out in the backyard, going to the beach and enjoying a beer or two while celebrating the independence of America. One of our favorite ways to do that is with a few independent craft beers — not many people embody the American spirit better than a craft brewer.

So we reached out to a few of them see which beers they’ll be drinking to celebrate America’s birthday. Light, low in ABV and easy-drinking are the qualities they all have in common, which works out — you’ll probably want to drink more than one.

Image: https://gearpatrol.com

The United States has countless accents. But, where did they all come from? American accents have been evolving for hundreds of years. And while Americans sound very different today, here's where some of those iconic accents got their start.