Many startups and entrepreneurs I advise still default to growing their business via the traditional top-down, order-taking culture. I’m convinced that you can’t stay competitive that way with today’s customers, and today’s employees. It’s time to push decision making down into the organization –insisting that the people closest to the customer and the markets learn and make the decisions.

Dan Malven isn’t a wide-eyed optimist by nature. He’s a sober, even cautious, venture capitalist who is diligent about investments made by the fund he helps manage, Wisconsin-based 4490 Ventures.

When it comes to how he views the investment climate in the Midwest, however, Malven is bullish.

“Over the next 20 years, the Midwest should be a great market” for angel and venture capital investments in young, often tech-enabled companies, Malven told a May 21 meeting of the Tech Council Innovation Network in Madison.

We all want North Carolina to be an attractive place to live, work, create jobs, rear families and build communities. When we move from ends to means, the level of disagreement moves from low to high.

Generally speaking, progressives think that the best way to accomplish these goals is to expand government — to tax more, regulate more, and spend more on government services. Conservatives generally think the best way to make North Carolina a more attractive place to live and work is to restrain government so that it delivers basic services more cost-effectively, allowing households to keep more of their own money and freedom to use as they wish.

Most people believe that tariffs and subsidies are anathema in the world of global commerce. I don’t think either will be critical to the agricultural community 10 years from now. The push for farm subsidies is already moving in the direction of innovation in agriculture as opposed to overwhelmingly toward production.

Two factors are driving this: cost and food security.

Survey lists 10 most innovative cities

Beijing and Shanghai are among the 10 most innovative cities in the world, based on published articles in leading academic journals, a survey released on Friday said.

The report by the Shanghai Institute for Science of Science and Springer Nature publishing company surveyed 82 influential academic journals, including Nature, Science, and Cell, from 2012 to 2017, and calculated the contribution of different cities to global innovation according to the location of the authors' research institutes.

Image: A man experiences VR in the 5G experience area at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station on Feb 18, 2019. (Photo/VCG)

Technology-driven Canadian companies are at the cutting edge of global innovation and with the new Canadian trademark laws finally taking effect on June 17, 2019, it will be easier for these companies to get their brands into the Canadian market and, more importantly, take them global.

The new amendments to Canada’s Trade-marks Act will thereby usher in a series of changes that should have a positive impact on one of Canada’s most important sectors. 

Data released May 9 by the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM) illustrates the growth of clinical activity where gene therapy is concerned.

ARM’s Quarterly Regenerative Medicine Global Data Report for the first quarter of 2019 showed 372 gene therapy clinical trials were in progress as of the end of Q1. Interestingly, a majority (217 or 58%) were studies in Phase II, followed by Phase I (123 or 33%), and Phase III (32 or 9%).

The number of gene therapy clinical trials inched up by 10 from the 362 recorded as of the end of 2018. More significantly, the number of clinical studies jumped 17% year-over-year from the 319 trials in progress as of the first three months of 2018.

Americans and their families come from all over the world, and each family's story of its origins is unique.

The US Census Bureau's American Community Survey asks millions of Americans every year dozens of questions about their social, demographic, and economic situations. One of the questions on the survey asks respondents to write out the ancestries they and their family members identify with.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com

At the IBM think Summit Taipei, the global vice president at IBM told the opening session of the summit that IBM expects to have its first commercialized quantum computers ready to market in about three to five years.

The Era of Quantum Computing is Nearly Upon Us At the IBM think Summit Taipei this week, the director of IBM research in Tokyo and global vice president at IBM, Norishige Morimoto, told the opening session of the summit that IBM expects to commercialize its quantum computers in about three to five years, signaling that the era of quantum computing is fast approaching.

Image: https://interestingengineering.com

In the previous century, America’s legacy cities experienced massive population growth, becoming centers of innovation known around the world. This status was then followed by rapid population decline, as a result of a shifting global economy. But even as many American communities struggled to adjust to the changing economic winds, many remain and have become centers of innovation and growth.

If there is one characteristic shared by all successful entrepreneurs, it’s this: they are always learning.

Learning for entrepreneurs is non-negotiable. Charting your own course in life and business means that we must ever evolve to the next best version of ourselves. This happens through continual reading, reflection, and focused action; then a new level of development is reached, and the process begins again.

Ready to start the next chapter of your life as an entrepreneur? Here’s how to get started…

Entrepreneurship is highly attractive for many reasons. If it’s time you did something different this could be the best life move you ever make. These are the first steps you’ll want to make.

As smaller companies struggle to break into the market, global luxury goods companies continue to soar to incredible heights.

Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren and Estée Lauder are among the top brands generating an aggregated revenue of US$247 billion in FY2017, according to a recent study by Deloitte.

The rich taste for life’s finest luxuries is stronger than ever with the increase up US$30 billion on the previous year’s revenue.

As clothing and footwear dominated the charts, the top 10 companies in the multiple luxury goods sector alone collectively accounted for 30.8% of the total top 100 luxury goods sales.

According to a recent report published by American Express, women presently own 40% of all U.S. businesses – 12.3 million companies. These firms employ 8% of the workforce and generate $1.8 trillion in revenues. Yet despite the meteoric increase in the number of successful women-led businesses, female entrepreneurs receive less than 3% of venture capital.

The disproportionate amount of venture capital allocated to female entrepreneurs was addressed at a session titled, “Disrupting Venture Capital: Funding Women Entrepreneurs” at eMerge Americas, a premier technology event connecting the Americas.

The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) has approved a contract for the Boring Company to build an underground transit system which would run less than one mile near the north end of The Strip.

The Boring Company’s project—called the LVCC Loop, but referenced in documents as the “Campus Wide People Mover”—will transport passengers from one end of the city’s convention center to the other.

Recent improvements in U.S. air quality are saving thousands of lives per year, according to the latest Health of the Air report from the American Thoracic Society (ATS) and New York University (NYU).

The report, published in Annals of the American Thoracic Society, looked at the health effects of particulate matter and ozone pollution above ATS-recommended levels. The annual number of premature deaths associated with these substances fell from about 12,600 in 2010 to 7,140 in 2017, the report says. Together, the pollutants were also responsible for some 15,500 serious illnesses, down from nearly 27,000 in 2010.

Entrepreneur and AOL co-founder Steve Case called on the undergraduate Class of 2019 to redefine entrepreneurship and lead innovation in cities and states throughout the country at Saturday’s Centennial Commencement.

“The most important thing you learned at Babson is that entrepreneurship isn’t a career path. It’s a state of mind,” he said to the graduating class of more than 550 students and their hundreds of friends and family members in attendance. “That mindset will prove to be what makes you different … and you’re going to need it, because our nation needs a reset.”

Image: http://entrepreneurship.babson.edu

Five-year-olds invent imaginary friends, teenagers visualize what an amorous crush would be like, and adults plan for job achievements, buying a house or traveling the world. Imagination is a trait that we all possess and use in our daily lives. But if we try to think of situations that are too far from our reality in time or space—perhaps the world in 2500 or what it would be like to live on the moon or Mars—we often have a hard time visualizing those scenarios.

Marc Singer regularly tours university research labs looking for promising ideas.

“It’s a little like a James Bond movie,” said the managing partner of Osage University Partners, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa. venture-capital firm.

“Some of it is mind-boggling technology,” he said, adding that he sees unique potential in university startups backed by...

State and local officials are committing $5.5 million to kick-start efforts to launch an evergreen fund that would help propel early-stage technology startups.

Invest Detroit Ventures, Invest Detroit's venture capital unit, received a $3 million boost from the Detroit-based Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Foundation, along with $2.5 million from the Michigan Economic Development Corp. to convert its First Capital Fund into a sustainable evergreen fund — which does not have specific time constraints, according to a Thursday news release.