DURHAM, N.H.—The angel investor market in 2018 saw an increase in market participation in more companies but at smaller amounts, according to the latest angel market analysis by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire.

Total investments in 2018 were $23.1 billion, a decrease of 3.4% over 2017, and 66,110 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding, an increase of 7.4% over 2017. The number of active investors in 2018 rose to 334,565 individuals, an increase of 16%.

“The change in total dollars and the number of investments resulted in a deal size for 2018 that was smaller than in 2017, reflecting lower valuations,” said Jeffrey Sohl, director of the UNH Center for Venture Research. “The increase in number of investments likely offsets a decline in activity by institutional investors in seed and start-up deals and the smaller deal size may have partially contributed to the increase in angel investors.”

Kerry Ann Rockquemore is out to change the way you look at angel investors.

“When most people think of angel investors, they aren’t thinking of youngish women of color,” says Rockquemore, founder of the National Center for Faculty Development & Diversity in Detroit.

The numbers support her belief. Women make up only 22 percent of all angel investors in the U.S., according to a November 2017 study by the Wharton Entrepreneurship and Angel Capital Association.

Image: https://www.smartbusinessdealmakers.com

Imagine spending your whole career working on a question to which you don’t want to know the answer. We know that greenhouse gas emissions can and do warm the planet, but we don’t know one very basic thing: how hot, exactly, is it going to get? The main reason for this, of course, is that human behavior is so hard to predict. How will the people of the late twenty-first century get their energy? Will they need as much as we do, or will they have reconciled themselves to fundamentally different lives?

A company's journey from launch to acquisition is rarely a straight path. It involves overcoming many challenges and obstacles, especially for a pioneering gene therapy company. In this special report, Spark Therapeutics' journey offers some interesting insights into the evolution of a life science business and how it finds an exit.

Security concerns, limited time, and no budget are some factors that can stop companies from innovating. Tom Merritt examines the top five roadblocks to innovation and how to overcome them.

Innovation is essential to so many things for a business, including success and longevity. Being innovative isn't easy, or everyone would do it. Half the battle is knowing what's in your way. So let's look at five barriers to innovation, so you can clear them away.

Though emotions are often fleeting, they can have a lasting impact on your health. Stress, for example, may heighten the risk of both chronic and acute health conditions, while happiness can improve wellbeing.

Now, a small new study published in the journal Psychology and Aging suggests that anger, far more than sadness, is linked to negative health effects in older people, potentially by contributing to inflammation and chronic disease.

Nearly fifteen years ago, in 2005, we published a Harvard Business Review article with our colleagues which introduced a new approach to personal and professional development: the idea that receiving affirmation is a powerful way for us to grow, particularly when it comes in the form of stories describing moments when we are at our best. In this article we introduced the Reflected Best Self Exercise (RBSE), a tool based on our academic research which is now used by thousands of people globally in corporate trainings, team building, executive leadership programs, and in graduate and undergraduate courses in a variety of disciplines.

My company, MDI Ventures, is a US$140 million corporate venture capital (CVC) firm backed by Indonesia’s largest state-owned telecoms conglomerate Telkom Group.

The firm, which has been around since 2015, refers to its fund as ‘evergreen,’ meaning each year Telkom Group may replenish or increase the size of the fund depending on market conditions. To date, we are the largest such fund for startups in the archipelago.

If 2017 was a banner year for biotech venture capital, 2018 blew it out of the water. Last year, private biotech companies reeled in a grand total of $16.8 billion, eclipsing 2017’s then-record $12.1 billion by 39%. And it wasn’t just the total spent that smashed records: The average per financing round increased too, and so did the proportion of enormous megarounds. 

The average raised per financing was $42.7 million, which—once upon a time—would have been impressive. This figure is three and a half times the average round in 2013, which stood at $12.6 million.

Image: Although the number of venture capital rounds fell to its lowest in a decade, larger deals made sure the total raised in 2018, $16.8 billion, surpassed 2017's record. (Eli Richman/FierceBiotech) 

The new legislation would bolster the national network of Manufacturing USA institutes by expanding job training programs and providing support for entrepreneurs.

On May 10, U.S. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Chris Coons (D-DE) announced a new bipartisan bill whose intent is to increase America’s global competitiveness in advanced manufacturing. The Global Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing Act would expand the national network of Manufacturing USA institutes.

In my role as President and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce Association of Alabama, I’m reminded daily that science and technology research plays a critical role in our state’s economic growth. [The Huntsville area has attracted thousands of new jobs and billions of dollars of investment in recent years, with Boeing and Blue Orgin being the most recent economic development announcements, because of the defense and space industry’s research at the Marshall Space Center and Redstone Arsenal.

There are some things you simply never want to say at work. These phrases carry special power: they have an uncanny ability to make you look bad even when the words are true. Worst of all, there’s no taking them back once they slip out.

I’m not talking about shocking slips of the tongue, off-color jokes, or politically incorrect faux pas. These aren’t the only ways to make yourself look bad.

North Carolina is home to more than 890,000 small businesses according to the latest statistics reported by the N.C. Small Business Administration. These may look like a local ice cream shop or a vintage boutique, or even a charming inn or a mom-and-pop eatery. It seems like everywhere you turn there’s a small business.

Alexis Borisy, Third Rock Ventures partner, discusses the fund's biotech investment strategy on "Bloomberg Technology." (Source: Bloomberg)

Effective time management is dependent, in part, on how creative you are.

Creativity means taking novel approaches to problems and issues. If you or your team follows the same routine every day, you could be wasting large chunks of time. When you use creative approaches to the tasks at hand, it often leads to new, time-saving breakthroughs and possibilities, whether they're in your job or in your career marketing program. 

After spending more than a decade as a marketer at companies like Google, Square and Cover, Arielle Jackson has assembled a collection of tested strategies and essential advice in her marketing toolkit. And luckily for the readers of the Review, she isn’t afraid to share the goods, whether it’s a simple, but powerful framework for positioning or a set of essential brand building exercises.

Whether you are a supporter of more or less Europe, one thing is clear: citizens want change. Debates about which way forward have become highly polarized between defenses of the liberal, values-based order on the one hand, and emergent nationalist populism on the other. Indeed, both Hungary’s Viktor Orban and France’s Emmanuel Macron agree it is “high time we speak seriously about Europe’s future”, but their respective visions for that future could not be more different.

An American explorer who set a new record for the deepest ever manned sea dive says he saw a plastic bag and candy wrappers at the bottom of the ocean.

Victor Vescovo, 53, visited Challenger Deep, which is the deepest known point in the ocean in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean on May 1, according to CNN. Details of his trip were released on Monday. His team said he set a new record for the deepest solo dive in history, venturing to depths of 35,853 feet.

Image: http://time.com

Do start-up accelerators work?

Take a look inside the Manchester hub of the UK's largest programme, NatWest Enterprise Accelerator.

Across the country and around the world, cities, research universities, government labs and other actors are reformulating the way anchor institutions can help lead technology-based economic development as the geography of innovation shifts.