To spare you all a power point presentation, I thought I’d share some thoughts today about how and why our tech transfer system was created and the importance of practitioners continually developing best practices to maintain it.

Woody Allen said that half of life is showing up. Perhaps the other half is working with people who give you the opportunity to show what you can do.

Startups that are backed by professional financial investors almost always have a Board of Directors that consists of some set of founders, investors and sometimes independent directors.

While the management of a startup company deals with the day-to-day decision-making within the company (strategy, budgets, goals, tasks, compensation) ultimately the Board of Directors has the legal governing responsibilities for these things. This is often called “corporate governance” — in case you’ve never heard that term.

Earlier this year six Amazon Scout delivery robots rolled out in a pilot program in Snohomish County, Wash. The boxy bots, which resemble six-wheeled ice chests, carry meals, groceries and packages to homes and offices in this region just north of Seattle. They join a small-but-growing number of automated couriers trundling down the sidewalks of London, Beijing and other cities and communities worldwide. These machines must run a gauntlet of pedestrian legs, nosy dogs and cracked pavement. Which raises the question: Why are companies investing in delivery bots at all?

Image: Delivery robots from Starship Technologies roll over sidewalks in Milton Keynes, England, in 2018. Credit: Starship Technologies

Let’s define success: noun; the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.

Success is different for everyone. To some, success means having money and fame.o others, it’s creating the freedom to do whatever they want whenever they want.

I wouldn’t limit the definition of success to what society defines it to be. Success is different for each and every single person.

For me, success is having the freedom to go where I please, do what I want and be with whomever I want, whenever I want. that means spending time with the people I love the most –my family and friends.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

A veteran Israeli politician and advocate for peace with Palestinians is quitting politics. Tzipi Livni served as Israel's foreign minister and chief peace negotiator. Time magazine and Newsweek once ranked her one of the world's most influential women. Now, though, she finds herself running against political headwinds, as NPR's Daniel Estrin reports from Tel Aviv.

DANIEL ESTRIN, BYLINE: Tzipi Livni had a transformation. She grew up in a right-wing Israeli family, as she recounted in a recent speech.

“Manufacturers have a long list of needs that can’t be filled, but we have people who are working long, hard and loyally to get manufacturers what they need.”

The more business in the area, the more an area tends to flourish.

Enter economic development.

According to Sheila Pierce Knight, executive director of Jacksonville Onslow Economic Development (JOED), the mission is to stimulate economic development and promote new businesses in Onslow County.

I was scanning Twitter this past week and I came across these great Tweets by Michael Seibel at Y Combinator.

These Tweets immediately resonated. In our daily jobs we spend a lot of time thinking about “management” and not enough time thinking about “leadership.” We all have shit to get done so the immediate focus often turns to the tasks at hand and how we’re going to best complete them.

While policy discussions about technology and innovation issues often focus narrowly on iconic places like Silicon Valley or Boston’s Route 128 corridor, America’s innovation-driven, high-tech economy is widely diffused—and every state and congressional district has a stake in its success.

As a nonpartisan think tank focusing on the rapidly evolving intersection of technology, innovation, and public policy, one of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s most important roles is to develop actionable insights and proposals that policymakers can trust to foster innovation, growth, and progress for every congressional district and state in the country. Here, we provide a menu of such ideas for the administration and Congress. 

Despite the countless books and articles written about innovation, we don't have a good understanding about what drives innovation within organizations. Instead, we have multiple, often conflicting, theories about what makes innovation happen. We follow the one that resonates best with us or is in vogue. As a result, innovation efforts at many companies suffocate as they stumble along, thinking they are on the right path but not really knowing where they are headed.

When did language begin? The question is not an easy one to answer. There are no records of the event. “Languages don’t leave fossils," notes the Linguistic Society of America, "and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do.” The scant evidence from evolutionary biology does not tell us when early humans first began to use language, only that they could 100,000 years or so ago.

Image: http://www.openculture.com

It was like navigating traffic in an electric-powered egg on wheels.

The canton of Schaffhausen is just 30 minutes away from the Swiss city of Zurich, but the municipality of 81,000 residents is home to less than one percent of the country’s population. It’s a beautiful and historic place to visit, home to big businesses and tourist attractions alike, but no one’s about to mistake it for an economic powerhouse.

Image: Credit: Dylan Love

The National Institutes of Health believes that the U.S. is missing out on important scientific discoveries in smaller states such as Maine because they lack the resources to move those discoveries out of laboratories and into the marketplace.

It recently awarded a $3.5 million grant to create a technology transfer accelerator program for biotech startups in Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, Delaware and New Hampshire. The goal is to spur development and commercialization of human health-focused bioscience discoveries in those states.

Image: https://www.centralmaine.com - Kevin Strange

A single fact throws much of what we think we understand about entrepreneurship into confusion: over 90% of successful entrepreneurs make less money than other people who perform similar tasks and similar responsibilities, even after ten years of running their business. For example, an entrepreneur who owns a restaurant will most likely make less money over ten years than a person who manages a restaurant of a comparable size.  This leads to a curious paradox: entrepreneurship, as a powerful engine of job creation, is an important economic activity, but economics can’t help us understand it—or even make sense of it.

I recently received an email from a former student of mine, Mrin. It was a thoughtful debrief on why she had decided to shut down the company I had been coaching her on last year for the Edward L. Kaplan, ’71, New Venture Challenge, an annual start-up competition and accelerator program sponsored by Chicago Booth. The experience was a difficult one for her, and she told me she had trouble disentangling the failure from her personal identity. In her own words, which she has given me permission to share, “I’ve never been more aware of how much I don’t know. And, at the same time, I’ve never learned so much so quickly. Shutting down the company has had me grappling with feelings of failure while questioning my self-worth and abilities.”

Here’s how you can prevail against unimaginative recruiters and employers.

Born to a Dalit family, Megha was raised in Southwest India and learned English in her convent school. As a child, she aspired to be a fashion designer or a cardiologist, but her parents insisted that she become an IT engineer.

Charles Andres, Ph.D., RAC, is an associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He focuses on patent prosecution, strategic patent counseling, IP due diligence, drug and medical device FDA regulatory counseling, invalidity and non-infringement opinions, life-cycle management, Supreme Court and Federal Circuit amicus briefs, and related business matters.Charles Andres, Ph.D., RAC, is an associate in the Washington, D.C., office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. He focuses on patent prosecution, strategic patent counseling, IP due diligence, drug and medical device FDA regulatory counseling, invalidity and non-infringement opinions, life-cycle management, Supreme Court and Federal Circuit amicus briefs, and related business matters.

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Established companies have to innovate for the future, while running their core business.This is a reality that is now accepted by the majority of corporate leaders. A report by McKinsey notes that 70% of senior leaders view innovation as one of the top three drivers of growth in their companies. Contemporary leaders are now encouraging their teams to be more innovative.   

Whether you’re starting your first business or you’ve been working in your niche for decades (but have a great idea), the truth is that there is always something to learn in the business world. No entrepreneur is invincible and no good leader is a superhero – they’ve learned their lessons by working hard, making mistakes, and building upon their experience.

If you want to become a successful and respected leader, there are a few things you can do. Below, I’ve rounded up some of the attributes that all good entrepreneurs have in common.

Tech accelerators and incubators have become a right of passage for many tech companies and there are hundreds of these firms across the world helping and sometimes hindering, the early stages growth of technology companies. It's now estimated that there are 7,000 accelerators in the world. 

Despite Edinburgh having spawned a number of tech startup success stories; Skyscanner, Fanduel and Freeagent to name a few, the city has for a long time lacked a pure tech accelerator with the ability to invest in startups and help them power through those tricky first six months, instead of just offering mentoring and free office space.