With the ITRC 2018 End-of-Year Data Breach Report revealing a 126 percent increase in stolen sensitive personal information, there is a growing population out there worried about all the people intent on hurting them. My recommendation to entrepreneurs is to recognize these concerns as an opportunity to make people’s life better, rather than worry and dodge the risk.

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Buffalo’s nascent startup scene logged significant wins in recent months – from investments in ACV Auctions to the opening of a downtown Innovation Hub.

But further growth has been stalled by a regional business culture that doesn’t prioritize collaboration, according to a report released Thursday by Techstars, a global startup accelerator and networking organization.

The analysis is the result of an ongoing paid partnership between state-funded accelerator 43North and Boulder-based Techstars, which in January announced a project to monitor and advise the Buffalo startup ecosystem.

The project is funded by a number of agencies, foundations and businesses, including Empire State Development, M&T Bank and National Grid.

Image: Buffalo’s nascent startup scene logged significant wins in recent months – including investments in ACV Auctions, shown above, but a report by global startup accelerator Techstars says further growth has been stalled by a regional business culture that doesn’t make collaboration a priority. (Derek Gee/Buffalo News) 

This summer, on July 20, we will mark the golden anniversary of the first-ever Moon landing, and we’ll do so at a moment for space exploration that may turn out to surpass the 1969 original.

The race to the Moon in the 1960s was a stunning achievement of technology, engineering, and politics–by some measures, one of the great achievements of human history. It changed the world we live in today, even if it didn’t inaugurate an era of routine space travel.

Image: Jeremy Thomas/Unsplash; Jake weirick/Unsplash; Moon and Apollo 11: courtesy of NASA

Even with trade tensions and tariffs dominating the headlines, important structural changes in the nature of globalization have gone largely unnoticed. In Globalization in transition: The future of trade and value chains (PDF–3.7MB), the McKinsey Global Institute analyzes the dynamics of global value chains and finds structural shifts that have been hiding in plain sight.

The great American political divide shows no sign of ending as the United States lurches toward the 2020 presidential election. However, one of the few areas where the parties have joined together in recent years has been where NIH funding is concerned.

Days after President Donald Trump proposed a 12% cut in NIH funding, to $34.368 billion, as part of his proposed $4.75 trillion budget for the 2020 federal fiscal year, leaders in Congress—on both sides of the proverbial aisle—made it clear they wouldn’t go along.

Global-strategy adviser Parag Khanna describes the ways that the world economy is increasingly Asia-centric and will be moving even more swiftly in that direction.

More than half of the world’s population lives in Asia, where economies are growing quickly and becoming increasingly interconnected in culture, business, and trade. In this first piece of a two-part interview, Parag Khanna, the managing partner of FutureMap, explains what’s underscoring this transformation, as laid out in his latest book, The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, and Culture in the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster, February 2019). In the next interview installment, he will explore some of the qualities that make Asia’s political economy particularly distinctive.

Image: from video. 

In 1979, MIT researcher David Birch published a report that would, unlike most studies in the field of economics, become big news. Examining more than 5 million individual firm employment records provided by the corporate information-giant Dun & Bradstreet, Birch purported to show that between 1969 and 1976, more than 80 percent of jobs were created by businesses with fewer than 100 employees.

Image: Far from becoming more important to the U.S. economy, small firms are becoming less important, at least when it comes to job creation. Visual: Mac Glassford, via Unsplash

What informed your decision to venture into entrepreneurship?

I grew up in a single family household, having lost my father at a tender age of one.  I watched my mom strive to make ends meet and ensure we had the basic necessities for survival. I guess that brewed my interest in becoming an entrepreneur. I grew up with the orientation that nothing is easily handed to you if you don’t go for it the right way. And I enjoyed the little returns made from the days labour. As an undergraduate, I began a college bulletin called Shellies Quill. I was 21 years then. I made roughly 300 copies that were sold for a meagre sum of N30 on campus. But my real journey as an entrepreneur began after my internship as a medical laboratory scientist in 2016.

The financial crisis and economic meltdown of 2007-2009 was disruptive for firms across industries, markets, and geographies.  It resulted in the collapse of the financial sector, radical changes in the regulatory and policy environment, and a severe contraction of the world economy. In fact, an economic meltdown of this magnitude fundamentally affects all aspects of firms’ business environment, unsettles their relationships with customers, employees, suppliers, and local communities, and generates a major shift in the competitive landscape. Consequently, companies are likely to fundamentally rethink and reshape their strategic investments to ensure survival and sustain (or even enhance) their competitiveness during and after the crisis.

What happens when you take a team of people from a range of backgrounds and skillsets and ask them to perform a challenging task on a tight deadline? Often, conflicts arise.

Sometimes conflicts can be productive: When teams are hammering out ideas and striving to find the most effective route to a shared goal, people will often express concerns and offer differing perspectives. That process can lead to stronger outcomes as well as a sense of shared accomplishment — even if not everyone agrees.

Ten years ago, when I was starting a tech company designed to simplify scheduling for independent service professionals, I was laughed out of Silicon Valley. Not only was I seen as the antithesis of the founder prototype, the venture capital community saw my Montana location as hard to get to and a deterrent to attracting top talent. At the time, the feedback was humbling, but I decided to grow my company here in Bozeman, as I saw Montana not as a liability, but as an asset.

Laszlo Bock says he wasn’t qualified to be the head of people operations when Google hired him for the job in 2006.

“I was like 33, with three years of HR experience, and had never worked in the tech industry,” says Bock. “There were a lot of signals to suggest they should not have hired me.”

Bock even wrote a three-page memo describing why he was declining a job with what he saw as a “still pretty young and unproven” company but ultimately decided not to send it. Instead, he accepted the position.

Northern Ontario Angels has been named as the #1 Angel Organization in Canada for the past 5 to 6 years, but this year have been named the #1 Angel Organization in North America. 

This announcement comes from the 2018 Angel Funders Report conducted by the Angel Capital Association, of which NOA is a standing member.  The collecting data of the Angel Funders Report was from 68 angel groups across the United States and Canada says a news release from the group.

Image: Mary Long Irwin – Executive Director of Northern Ontario Angels holding up #1 finger and Claire England from Central Texas Angel Network # 2. Supplied. 

One of the reasons that wage growth in America is stagnant, even while the country is at full employment, is that large corporations now employ more Americans than at any time in the last generation.  According to the Congressional Research Service, only about 30% of net new jobs in America are created by large companies, but a little over 50% of Americans now work for them.  This combined with the decline of organized labor and a drop in entrepreneurship has given large employers significant leverage over the wages and benefits they offer their employees.

Nonprofit groups that advocate for disease research are diving more deeply into venture capital in an effort to wield greater influence inside the startup ecosystem.

Startups for many years have gathered capital through grants from nonprofits, and sometimes by raising equity from them. In a new twist, several nonprofit groups are launching or expanding investment programs by raising dedicated venture-capital funds of their own.

Today, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) released the 2019 Emerging Therapeutic Company Trend Report, highlighting ten years (2009-2018) of biotechnology funding and deal making across five areas: venture capital, Initial Public Offerings (IPOs), follow-on public offerings, licensing, and acquisitions. The report also contains a 2019 snapshot of the industry’s clinical pipeline to highlight the significant contribution of emerging companies.

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory has released a tool designed to analyze huge amounts of data for research efforts aimed at helping clinicians improve patient care and medical decisions.

APL developed the Precision Medicine Analytics Platform with Johns Hopkins Medicine and unveiled the technology during the second annual inHealth Precision Medicine Symposium in Baltimore, Md., the lab said said Thursday.

One big cultural change in America over the past 20 or 30 years is that entrepreneurship has become glamorous. A big CEO once illustrated this to me by explaining that when he went to Harvard Business School back in the 1980s, hardly anybody planned a career in entrepreneurship.These days, hundreds of graduates of elite business schools pour out each year, stars in their eyes and startup ideas in hand.

What is the next big thing in technology?

For more than three decades, the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology has worked to diversify and grow the state’s economy by supporting groundbreaking research and innovation.

Our suite of peer-reviewed support programs has led to breakthrough technologies developed here in Oklahoma ranging from new medical devices to life-changing therapeutics to critical electronics flown on NASA missions.