Book publishing is often distilled to a single, romanticized alliance: the relationship between author and editor. Think Wolfe and Perkins. Plath and Hughes (although "author/editor" is too narrow a description of that relationship). Carver and Lish...

Image: Michael Morgenstern for The Chronicle 

Man’s best friend -- they come in all colors, shapes and sizes. Whether you want to relax at home or hike on your day off, there’s a dog that fits your entrepreneur lifestyle. You may be hesitant to make this big commitment as you grow your business, but I’m here to share four reasons why every entrepreneur can benefit from having a dog.

Too many business owners still think of “customer support” as an after-sale process to rectify customer problems with completed transactions. The world has changed. With the advent of instant communication and social media, customer service starts at the first hint of interest by you, and never ends for repeat customers. One bad customer experience will kill not only one customer, but many future ones, who hear the message via social media and friends.

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State officials say nine communities in Tennessee are receiving funds to prepare them for economic development projects that would create jobs.

The new chairman of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) is promising to crack down on “bad actors” that increase drug prices “dramatically”—in part by expelling member companies that carry out the sky-high hikes.

Jeremy M. Levin, D.Phil., MB BChir., who is also chairman and CEO of Ovid Therapeutics, told GEN such expulsions would be considered individually, and didn’t define how high a dramatic price increase would be to incur the wrath of BIO.

Image: Jeremy Levin, D.Phil., MB BChir., new Chairman of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. (Alex Philippidis)

Laxman Pai, Opalesque Asia:

Biotechnology venture capital firm Third Rock Ventures has raised $770m for its fifth fund, a sign that investor interest in funding early-stage science continues unabated despite volatile public markets.

The investment vehicle, the largest ever raised by Third Rock in its 12-year history, will support investments in 10 to 12 companies. The Boston-based firm's new fund came together quickly.

With Fund V, the firm will continue to execute on its strategy of discovering, launching and building innovative life sciences companies that have the potential to transform the lives of patients and their families.

Johns Hopkins University is among the top 10 schools worldwide that earned the most patents for university-born inventions and technologies last year.

Johns Hopkins ranked at No. 9 on the 2018 list of top patent-earners, published by the National Academy of Inventors and the Intellectual Property Owners Association. The institution earned 132 U.S. utility patents throughout 2018.

Hopkins has ranked in the top 10 since 2014, when it boasted 140 patents — it had 143 patents in 2015, 167 in 2016 and 164 in 2017.

So much of the world now is driven by uncertainty.

The promise of technological innovation is exciting, but we live in a chaotic world. With election outcomes that somehow continue to surprise us, new and exciting services that outstrip the pace of regulation, and tumultuous geopolitical relationships...we live in a guessing game.

That culture of uncertainty seeps through the cracks of businesses that aren’t prepared for it. When business leaders aren’t prepared for uncertainty in overall markets, employees become uncertain about their future.

Marketing has been on the front lines of the digital revolution, but the landscape has become much more complicated, requiring a focus on growth, data, and new modes of creativity. In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, Simon London speaks with McKinsey senior expert Biljana Cvetanovski and partner Jason Heller about the next chapter of marketing, which is focused on digital—across many touchpoints—and the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) as the architect of a company’s growth engine.

There is a member of the Maryland state legislature who has lived under China's Communist rule. Her name is Lily Qi. Steve Inskeep of NPR's Morning Edition has been meeting with people like Qi who have a foot in both countries - the U.S. and China - and he is here with us now.

Image: Doby Photography/NPR 

At the molecular level, we may not age gracefully; that is, we may not follow a continuous, linear downward slope. Instead, we may fall precipitously after we lose control of our exquisitely balanced anti-aging programs, sometime in our 50s. These findings, derived from a study of tissue-coding and noncoding RNA, may help explain why human disease burden increases so sharply from the sixth decade of life onward. They may also lead to therapies that enhance longevity, provided the natural termination of protective gene expression patterns does not indicate that they have outlived their usefulness.

Often the Trump Administration’s concern to create jobs has taken priority over, and been in conflict with, other important issues such as sustainability and the need to tackle climate change. However, the rise of circular economy business models represents an opportunity for the Administration’s jobs agenda and the business community’s concerns about sustainability to align. The circular economy could be a driving force for the creation of local jobs as well as better environmental stewardship.

How has the intensity of research and development (R&D) performance changed across states and over time? As a follow up to an article in last week’s Digest that examined changes in total R&D expenditures for each state over the 15-year period from 2002 to 2016, this week’s Useful Stats focuses on R&D intensity. Overall R&D intensity is defined as total R&D expenditures (the sum of all R&D performed by industry, federal labs and agencies, colleges and universities, and other research institutions in a state) as a share of each state’s gross domestic product in a given year.  Notably, five states stand out for exceeding the national average in both R&D intensity and increases in R&D intensity from 2002 to 2016: Oregon, Delaware, California, Maryland, and Massachusetts.

While most of Wall Street focuses on large and mega cap stocks, as they provide a degree of safety and liquidity, many investors are limited in the number of shares they can buy. Often the biggest public companies, especially the technology giants, trade in the low-to-mid hundreds, all the way up to over $1,000 per share. At those steep prices, it’s pretty hard to get any decent share count leverage.

Are you responsible for innovation project oversight? Don’t be too dazzled by devices, the real changes taking place in innovation are in mindsets rather than hardware. Sure, technologies are changing the ways we do things, but more importantly the changing ways we do things are altering the innovations that we will come to rely upon.  Here are eight telltale signals to be on the lookout for to ensure that your organization’s innovation mindset is keeping up with the times:

Whether you’re starting a business, relocating one, or just moving to live and work, there are endless reasons for why Maryland is the top state to relocate to. The BioHealth Capital Region continues to climb the GEN’s annual ranking of the nation’s top biopharma clusters, and was ranked fourth in 2018. There are many factors that make Maryland a great place to headquarter your BioHealth company. Biotech and life science companies are high-risk high expense ventures, and the location of your company is key to its success.

As people across the globe are spending more time in the virtual sphere, businesses are also making a robust digital shift. Other than cutting costs, e-commerce is giving businesses higher visibility than brick and mortar stores ever could. Increasing their reach both nationally and globally, the e-commerce sales grew 13 per cent in 2017, hitting an estimated $29 trillion as reported by UNCTAD. A similar surge was seen in the number of online shoppers, which jumped by 12 per cent and stood at 1.3 billion people, or one-quarter of the world’s population.

The biggest challenge these days doesn’t seem to be in starting a new business, but sustaining it against the onslaught of market changes and new competitors that emerge every day. Yet, as an angel investor, I still see too many new business owners who are convinced that their biggest challenge is to get money to start, and once launched with some initial success, they can relax.

We have much to be proud of in Northeast Ohio. Since the early 2000s, we have transformed Cleveland's downtown into a vibrant urban core and injected new life into many city neighborhoods. We have accelerated the restructuring and diversification of our economy. We have changed Cleveland's image and have attracted a new generation of leaders eager to engage and help drive continued improvement in the future.

As the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution continue to evolve, the role of data has become indisputable. In an effort to extract even more value from data, organizations are increasingly linking and connecting diverse data sets, a practice that stands as one of the primary factors shaping today’s global economy. From 2017 to 2019, the percentage of companies forming data-related partnerships rose from 21 percent to 40 percent. A growing share of business competitors are also deciding to connect their data—rising from 7 percent to 17 percent. Overall, McKinsey estimates that connecting data across institutional and geographic boundaries could create roughly $3 trillion annually in economic value by 2020.