At AURP’s BIO Health Caucus, we will explore trends in life science research, opportunity zone funding resources, the marriage of life science and philanthropy in global partnership opportunities. Discover the unique roles that biomedical innovation cluster and research parks play in innovation ecosystems around the globe. Translating discoveries from the lab to the market has never been more important. Connect with AURP at booth #3955 or One-on-One Partnering! 

I always like to pick out a bunch of books to bring with me whenever I get ready to go on vacation. More often than not, I end up taking more books than I could possibly read on one trip. My philosophy is that I’d rather have too much to read on a trip than too little.

If you’re like me, you’re probably starting to think about what’s on your summer reading list this year -- and I can’t recommend the books below highly enough.

Vanguard has had innovation in its DNA for some time. It existed in pockets across the company. The company’s current chief information officer John Marcante, along with the company’s former CEO, Bill McNabb, and senior leaders made a trip to Silicon Valley several years ago. It was a "lightbulb moment" of sorts, as the company realized the amount of innovation and venture capital being put toward financial services and fintech, more specifically.

One of the most striking features of living organisms, both animals and plants, is the way their physiology and behavior have adapted to follow the fluctuations of daily light and nocturnal darkness. A clock in the brain synchronized to environmental cues generates biological changes that vary over a 24-hour cycle—circadian rhythms (from the Latin words circa and diem, meaning “about” and “a day,” respectively). In this way, the earth’s rotation is reproduced in the dynamics of our neuronal circuits.

The team at Jumpstart Foundry has invested $2.25 million in the 15 promising startups — two of them from Middle Tennessee — that make up most of its 2019 cohort.

Run by Vic Gatto, Jumpstart looks for health care companies that have a product but may need to refine it or are ready to go to market. The firm invests $150,000 in each venture — valuing them at either $2 million or $4 million — and works with them to improve their systems and become cash-flow-positive.

Graduation season is upon us, along with its signature mixture of excitement, relief, nostalgia, hope and anticipation for the future. (And speeches. Plenty of speeches.)

No matter where you are in the journey of a career, graduation season can serve as a career maintenance checkpoint, an opportunity to reflect on progress, remind yourself of valuable lessons and recommit to your most ambitious aspirations. It's a time to revisit the big questions that reoccur at every professional turn and transition, that new grads are just confronting: What lies ahead for me? How do I construct my career with purpose and define success on my own terms?

The word that might best define the world at the moment is “unstable.” Climate change and its attendant consequences–natural disasters, weather shifts, and forced migration–threaten regions across the globe. Brexit in the U.K. and the Trump presidency in the U.S. are knocking the legs out from under two of the world’s most powerful economies. Concerns around cybersecurity add a layer of difficulty to information sharing.

The estimate has been revised upwards because ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting more rapidly than expected.

New predictions: In 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that sea levels around the world would rise by between 52 and 98 centimeters by 2100. However, a new study in PNAS by a group of 22 researchers predicts that the real level could exceed two meters, if emissions growth continues along current trends—an outcome they describe as “plausible.”

How Big Is the Universe?

Infographics should tell a story.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) arises from molecular events that scientists are piecing together to discern an overall story, parts of which are well known, others less so. Some of the lesser-known epigenetic events in the Alzheimer’s story have just been filled in by scientists based at the Van Andel Research Institute (VARI). What’s more, these epigenetic events, which occur early in Alzheimer’s, appear to fit well with what we know about the disease’s progression to its most devastating biological features.

Most entrepreneurs I know are driven, curious and never content with the status quo. These traits are probably why so many of them dabble in multiple ventures. A restaurateur may open a wine shop; a personal trainer may launch a line of fitness apparel. There’s always a new opportunity out there somewhere, and diversifying your income can be a sound strategy. 

It’s time for more entrepreneurs to reset their focus, and shift their thinking to completely different ways of doing things. Everyone talks about innovation, but the majority of business plans I see still reflect linear thinking – one more social network with improved usability, one more wind-farm energy generator with a few more blades, or one more dating site with a new dimension of compatibility. Serious changes and great successes don’t come from linear thinking.

Image: Image via Good Free Photos

Beijing is the fourth most innovative city in the world, ranking ahead of London, New York and Hong Kong, according to real estate consultant JLL.

San Francisco, with its robust tech industry, topped the list of the top 20 innovation-oriented cities published by JLL last week, followed by Tokyo, Singapore, Beijing, and London.

“Beijing now has a deep-rooted innovation ecosystem,” JLL says in its Innovation Geographies report. “It has nurtured the most unicorns outside of Silicon Valley and is the third largest destination for venture capital funding.”

Jerry Yang rode out the late 1990s the same as every other tech king brought up in Silicon Valley’s adolescence: shrewdly building the web with millions in venture capital.

As the internet took off, Yang’s fledgling search engine was freshly minted with $100 million from Masayoshi “Masa” Son. Yang quickly became Silicon Valley’s poster child, building one of the biggest internet companies the world had ever seen — Yahoo — worth $125 billion at its height.

As a business advisor and technologist, I often think about the large array of opportunities for entrepreneurs as technology seems to be evolving faster and faster. Yet I still too often hear the question, “Can you give me a really sure-fire idea for starting my own business?” My standard answer is that ideas are a dime a dozen, and success is all about smart execution, not ideas.

The Eindhoven University of Technology should promote itself much more clearly as the example of the innovative university. According to Dr Daria Tataj, Eindhoven has everything to grow into a global centre for high-tech knowledge and research. “With the right network strategy and focus on high tech and digital technologies, the Brainport region can prevent Europe for an economic and strategic decline.”

Image: https://innovationorigins.com

It often takes a number of intermediate steps to move from a scientific discovery to a consumer product. A few decades ago, many larger and even mid-sized corporations spent a lot of money on research and development laboratories, which focused on all of these steps. Some of these corporate laboratories like those at AT&T, Du Pont, IBM, and Xerox were nationally and globally famous. But the R&D ecosystem has shifted, and firms are now much more likely to rely on outside research done by universities or small start-up firms. These issues are discussed in "The changing structure of American innovation: Cautionary remarks for economic growth," by Ashish Arora, Sharon Belenzon,  Andrea Patacconi, and Jungkyu Suh, presented at conference on  "Innovation Policy and the Economy 2019," held on on on April 16, 2019, hosted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, and sponsored by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Buildings are social and cultural spaces where society’s biggest aspiration are built. Buildings influence people, their beliefs and their aspirations. As they go obsolete, old buildings are replaced by newer living spaces that go on to last for decades. Considerable money, time and effort go into constructing buildings, and a greater sum, into maintaining them. The larger question is, therefore, what happens after they are built?

Sharp jawline, doe-brown eyes and fluttery eye-lashes; Sophia, the world’s first AI-powered humanoid is quite a stunner with impressive features. Besides looks, she boasts of an admirable sense of humour. Designed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics, Sophia has many human values like wisdom, compassion and kindness. She is also capable of expressing her emotions, holding eye contact, recognizing faces and understanding human speech. Well, Sophia is not the only humanoid robot the world is gushing over. There is Nedbank’s fully programmable hospitality-bot Fabio, the bipedal humanoid Atlas, and, of course, the adorable tomato-feeding Tomatan.

Everyone is fascinated with predicting when the market will turn, especially venture capitalists. Perhaps now that Game of Thrones is over, we can put a merciful death to the refrains of “winter is coming” that seemed so much more clever seven seasons ago.