The National Cancer Institute’s investment in small business research grants has supported strong economic growth, including $9 billion in sales of new technologies.

According to a study released last week, 53 percent of the 444 businesses who received a Phase II grant from NCI’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) program between 1998 and 2010 developed a commercialized product or service.

Image: https://techlinkcenter.org

The latest Silicon Valley Competitiveness and Innovation Project report is a mix of good news and troubling news. The region is in a tie with Austin for the highest growth in innovation jobs, but also is experiencing a growing number of people leaving the area.

SAN JOSE — The technology boom still fuels the Silicon Valley economy, and at a pace that tops or equals all of the innovation region’s rivals — but more people continue to exit the costly and traffic-choked region every month than arrive, according to an economic report released Monday.

“It’s really remarkable that the tech job market is so strong in this area,” said Brian Brennan, a senior vice president with the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.

Early stage biotech companies and scientists interested in commercialization need great accelerator programs, not more biotech incubators.

Biotech companies and scientists who start out on the road to commercialization may need an accelerator to bring out the entrepreneurial spirit. The incubator and accelerator models are conflated all the time in biotech, much to the fury of anybody who truly understands the terms. 

On a visit to the Princeton campus recently, I asked a famous economics professor a simple question, "Are we in a recovery?"

He gave me a simple, emotionless answer, "No."

I then asked him how many of the economists in the building would agree. He said, "Every one of them." I asked him why the media reports indicate that we are in a recovery. His exact words, "I don't know."

Image: https://news.gallup.com

Organizations trying to innovate are wired to think big. They want to make a big impact, set big goals, and talk about big plans and big successes. No one is interested in anything that appears small. At first blush, this makes sense: in order to move the needle on your P&L you need to have a big success. Small is uninteresting.

You know the feeling: You’ve just left a meeting in which everyone has discussed a pressing issue, considered the pros and cons, and arrived at a plan for moving forward that everyone can agree with. You feel accomplished. You feel like your team is in harmony. You’ve achieved consensus. Hooray!

Beth was promoted to senior vice president at a Fortune 500 company. In addition to her existing responsibilities, she was given two new groups to manage. Overnight, her team doubled in size. Beth needed to hire senior executives to help manage her burgeoning division.

Within five months, she had her senior management team in place: four external hires and six internal executives who had worked with Beth for many years. Beth asked me to interview the team members to discover what each person thought about the opportunities and challenges within the business and how they felt about other members of the leadership team.

Imagine being able to assemble a team of the most talented and brilliant minds around to give you their choicest nuggets of wisdom in 18 minutes or less. How amazing would that be?

Thanks to the internet and TED talks, you have that capability at your fingertips. TED talks give audiences from around the world free, instant access to speakers who are doing cutting-edge work in numerous areas. TED, which is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, offers short, powerful talks covering topics ranging from science to business to global issues.

ANN ARBOR—The University of Michigan will make a $2.75 million initial investment into four U-M startups with potential funding of up to $20 million through subsequent financing rounds.

The U-M Board of Regents approved the investments Thursday through the Michigan Investment in New Technology Startups initiative. The MINTS fund, which is overseen by the U-M Investment Office, was started in 2011 to invest directly in technologies and ideas developed by U-M researchers.

Image: https://mitechnews.com

Back in 2007, five entrepreneurial firms tried to crack the emerging social investing market. In a multiyear study, Stanford researchers carefully tracked how the startups responded to customer feedback on early, experimental prototypes of their products.

I have been writing a series on how startup boards get selected, who sits on them and what to avoid. I will also delve into how to prepare for them, how to make the meeting effective and how to best follow up to make sure people take action.

The Kauffman Indicators of Entrepreneurship offers in-depth measures, reports, and accompanying interactive data visualizations that present entrepreneurial trends in the United States.

Image: https://indicators.kauffman.org/

There are volumes of advice on what entrepreneurs should be saying during investor pitches and meetings. Knowing what not to say can be even more important.

Before you walk into that presentation or investor meeting you ought to know your lines, your slides, your data, the questions you’ll be asked by investors, and even the questions you should be asking to stand out and find a good fitting funding partner. Yet, all that can be blown if you make the following mistakes.

The Roanoke-Blacksburg region has all the makings of a booming technology ecosystem, with a research university, federal grants, young talent, elected officials set on building a future-proof economy.

However, the only thing missing, a powerful new coalition of industry leaders say, is the booming technology ecosystem.

As Oklahomans, we live with pumps. We draw most of our water from out of the ground; we’re used to seeing pumpjacks bobbing their grasshopper-shaped heads all over the state. So, when somebody says “prime the pump” we understand the metaphor in a very real-world way.

“Prime the pump” is what i2E’s Technology Business Finance Program is all about.

An entrepreneur lifestyle that continues to gain in popularity these days is being a “social entrepreneur.” In the simplest of terms, these are people who seek to generate “social value”, rather than profits, and use traditional business principles to provide solutions to social issues

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Our 2019 ranking of the businesses making the most profound impact on both industry and culture showcases a variety of ways to thrive in today’s volatile world. Read on to learn how these 50 companies are creating the future today, plus see our top-10 lists of the Most Innovative Companies by sector, from advertising to wellness. We hope you're as inspired learning from these businesses as we were in selecting them. 

The “discovery of the 21st century” was awarded the Nobel prize two years after it was made. In 2015, the Laser Interferometre Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project finally detected what it was built to: gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of space and time—caused by the collision of two black holes.

While some have gleefully heaped criticism on New York over the demise of the Amazon HQ2 deal on Long Island, the world’s largest Everything Store might consider something new: Embrace humility and try to learn some lessons of its own.

Gone are 25,000 planned jobs and potentially billions of dollars in planned investment for the Big Apple, as has been extensively reported. The collapse of the union between a trillion-dollar company and a city of 9 million people can teach us a lot, but only if we’re willing to learn. That learning should start with Amazon, which by any objective analysis committed a series of pivotal errors