The Queensland government has released a new strategy, touted by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk as a blueprint for the sunshine state's future to "drive jobs growth and solve some of the state's largest challenges through innovation".

The Building our Innovation Economy -- Advance Queensland Strategy (Draft) [PDF] is an extension of the existing Advance Queensland initiative, which was launched nearly four years ago during the 2015-16 state Budget.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to run an organization. I was excited about the possibilities ahead of us and the goals we could realize. However, instead of receiving unanimous enthusiasm for what I thought was an exciting vision, some team members found fault with my ideas and judged me personally. They said my agenda was too ambitious and self-serving. Some thought I wasn’t listening to what my constituents wanted.

When most people think of entrepreneurs, they imagine individuals toiling away on their product in a garage or dorm room, struggling to survive until they can secure enough funding to launch their business to the moon. But contrary to popular belief, not every successful entrepreneur fits the Hewlett-Packard mold or the young Mark Zuckerburg stereotype.

Since its launch in 2013, the MIT Innovation Initiative has been the driving force behind several projects designed to support MIT’s entrepreneurial community — but the new Proto Ventures Program may be its most ambitious effort yet.

By bringing in domain experts to explore transformational technologies and pursue business opportunities with the campus community, the program gives MIT a new way to generate impactful companies that the Initiative’s leaders say is unlike anything else in higher education.

After a long winter, the 2019 MLB season - and the chance to experience live baseball - is finally here.

By analyzing the behavior of MLB shoppers on SeatGeek, we were able to map "MLB Fandom" across the country. See below for an interactive map of the most popular team in every U.S. county, and a breakdown of the most interesting stories that it surfaces.

Image: Courtesy of SeatGeek

These are boom times for gene therapy, an innovative type of medicine that works to treat disease at the genetic level to offer a longer-lasting treatment and potentially even a cure.

The Food and Drug Administration has seen a "noticeable uptick" in the area, Dr. Peter Marks, the agency's top official overseeing gene therapy, said on Thursday at the Gene Therapy for Rare Disorders conference in Boston. Marks heads the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

If you're a government — say, the Chinese government — looking to spur more innovation in your country, how do you do that? You can think of innovation as a ladder of sorts. It might start with imitation and then progress to adaptation, like tweaking a foreign idea to develop it for a local market. Finally, hopefully, you reach invention, perhaps even big, industry-changing ones. But the steps needed to climb that ladder can be elusive and murky. There's only so much governments can do, says Regina Abrami, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Marketplace’s Tracey Samuelson talked to her about China's efforts at state-sponsored innovation. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

When it comes to the extremes of the startup spectrum, three-time founder, investor and New York tech ecosystem advisor Jeff Wald has seen it all.

“I’ve counted Fred Wilson as an investor, raised over $60 million in funding and sold my startup WorkMarket to ADP,” says Wald. “But before all that, earlier on in my career, I had a startup implode, leaving me bankrupt, depressed, and on the verge of moving back in with my parents. And while I’m really proud of WorkMarket’s success, it wasn’t smooth sailing. At one point, the board forced me to get a leadership coach. After four years, my co-founder left the company.

The superstar effect is real, and in this new competitive environment, strategy matters more than ever.

The rapid growth of very large global companies is fueling widespread debate about “superstar” effects and superstar companies. The McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) recently published its first findings in a series of research papers on this topic. One motivating factor for our ongoing research is that even as the debate grows, it is marred by confusing definitions, errors in measurement, and incomplete data—and as a result, the evidence remains inconclusive.

Geo-economic developments are illustrating the power of global partnerships but also the constraints of current systems. As Japan begins its presidency of the G20 for the first time this year, there is an opportunity for the international community to reaffirm its commitment to a cooperative approach toward economic growth and to update our trade system so that it is more resilient and responsive to new technology.

The 2019 IPO market has the potential to make history as one of the largest on record with the expected parade of "deca-unicorns" started by last Friday's IPO of the rideshare company Lyft (LYFT) and denim titan Levi Straus (LEVI) the previous week. This influx of IPO activity will bring with it a surge of shares for distribution at lockup expiration to the elite ranks of investors with a limited partnership interest in the iconic Silicon Valley venture capital firms that have funded these firms in the private markets.

Charlie Munger has a two step filter through which he makes his every decision making problem to pass through. 

Essentially he divides the realm of decision making in to two: Real and Subconscious.

1. Understand the forces at play : For every decision to make there are certain factors which govern the choices (rational), it is important to understand these real factors/interests, motivations and probabilities working behind those choices. That is the only way to make a rational choice, to understand the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of forces playing underneath them.

Image: https://nextbigwhat.com

PASADENA, Calif., April 1, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE:  ARE), an urban office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative life science and technology campuses in AAA innovation clusters, today announced the launch of new strategic agtech business initiatives to provide much-needed infrastructure and capital to the rapidly growing agricultural technology (agtech) industry and address the challenge of advancing human health by improving nutrition. Alexandria's timely launch includes the opening of the Alexandria Center® for AgTech – Research Triangle, the country's first and only integrated multi-tenant, amenity-rich agtech R&D and greenhouse campus, located in North Carolina. The campus opens with a fully leased first phase, a 175,000 RSF redevelopment at 5 Laboratory Drive in the heart of the Research Triangle, the most important, dense and diverse agtech cluster in the United States. The company has already initiated development of the campus's second phase, a 160,000 RSF property at 9 Laboratory Drive, further expanding the office/laboratory and greenhouse space at the Alexandria Center for AgTech. Construction and pre-leasing of this future value-creation development project are underway with expected delivery in 2020.

Don’t worry about the best age for you as a woman to start a business? Because the infographic from Missy Empire proves age has nothing to do with it. The willingness to go for it seems more important.  Women entrepreneurs can succeed whether they are in their teens or older. The “Top 30 Female Entrepreneurs” infographic below lists women who have succeeded in their respective fields. Sure, fashion and cosmetics make up 63% of the fields on the list. But the remaining 37% come from different industries.

Could NBA athletes be the next victims of automation? Probably not, but a new robot created by Toyota has the skills to beat a professional basketball player in a shooting contest.

Toyota's Cue 3 is a 6-foot-10-inch robot built to shoot basketballs. The robot uses sensors on its torso to judge the distance and angle of the basket and uses motorized arms and knees to execute set shots. While Cue 3 can't run, jump, dribble, or execute any other basketball fundamentals, it does have an amazingly accurate shot.

Image: https://www.businessinsider.com

When it comes to grading, less is more. So say a number of scholars who have shared their recent experiments with “ungrading” in blog posts and on other social media, sparking renewed discussions about the practice.

“My core hypothesis was that student learning would actually be improved by eliminating instructor grading from the course,” Marcus Schultz-Bergin, assistant lecturer of philosophy at Cleveland State University, wrote of going gradeless this semester in a personal blog post that has since been shared on the popular philosophy site Daily Nous.

When it comes to Houston's innovation ecosystem, there's a lot to discuss. From accelerator programs to role of educational institutes, the third annual Houston Open Innovation Conference covered it all on Thursday, March 28.

I had the pleasure of attending the full-day conference, which was a meeting of the minds of Houston innovation. To catch you up and rid you of your fear of missing out, check out these five overheard quotes from the day.

In December 2017, Congress enacted The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the “Tax Cuts Act”). Included in that tax legislation is what has come to be called the opportunity zone incentive (“OZ Incentive”): a host of dramatic new tax incentives designed to promote the infusion of capital into low-income areas in all fifty states and U.S. territories. In a breathtakingly short time by funds-world standards, the OZ Incentive has spurred the creation of a new private funds asset class that is focused on taking advantage of these tax benefits. The OZ Incentive has generated excitement across a range of industry participants: traditional private fund sponsors, real estate and merchant banking firms, family offices, and impact and sustainability investors, to name just a few. 

More than $150 billion in federal funding is invested in R&D annually in the United States. A key question is whether or not we are getting the maximum return on that investment.

Right now, the answer is that we could do better (1). Although technology transfer from 1996 to 2013 has contributed $518 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product and $1.1 trillion to the U.S. gross industrial output—with an impact of producing 3.8 million jobs for the U.S. economy(2)—there are still many promising new technologies in government and university laboratories with no clear path to commercialization.

Alex still remembers the gut punch he felt when he was told he might have to leave the country he grew up in.

After nearly a decade in America — first attending a Massachusetts boarding school, then a Connecticut college — Alex walked into an immigration lawyer's office near the end of his senior year, thinking it might finally be time to inquire about switching from his temporary student visa onto some sort of permanent status.