Matthew Guidarelli is an adviser for entrepreneurs across industries; he supports their venture development throughout the startup lifecycle — helping founders build world-positive companies that combine profit & purpose.

He was previously part of the leadership team and participated in the evolution & expansion of the Harvard Innovation Labs. He tells us more about that, and about his new venture, Folly Ventures.

Image: https://www.innovationexcellence.com

Every startup founder knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Yet we always dream that we are the exception to the rule. So once in a while it’s good to look at some facts to temper our imagination.

Image: https://blog.startupprofessionals.com

Indicators of Innovation, a report issued today by the New Jersey Business & Industry Association, shows New Jersey at a challenging crossroads in its efforts to reclaim itself as the “Innovation State.”

The study uses data to analyze 12 indicators of innovation under three major categories imperative for creating a successful innovation ecosystem – capital, talent and business. Compared with six other regional states, however, New Jersey is struggling to compete, the report finds.

Image: https://www.insidernj.com

CES is best-known for spectacles like roll-up TVs, foldable displays, and ping-pong-playing robots. But beyond all the eye candy, the tech industry’s annual trade show in Las Vegas brings plenty of smaller-scale innovations. These are the ideas that will actually matter to people, in large part because they’ll show up in real products that you can buy at reasonable prices.

Image: The CES announcements that are fun to experience—like this one—aren’t necessarily the ones that are most meaningful as parts of your life. (Photo: courtesy of CES)

SEATTLE, Jan. 10, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- By the end of 2018, the venture industry deployed $130.9 billion in US-based startups, surpassing the all-time high in 2000 and illustrating the maturation of the VC ecosystem, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. The quarterly report is the authoritative source on venture capital activity in the US entrepreneurial ecosystem and is jointly produced by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), with support from Silicon Valley Bank, Perkins Coie and Solium.

It all started around 304 BC when Zeno, a wealthy merchant and founder of Stoicism, sailed from the Mediterranean  port of Piraeus, known for its notoriously stormy weather. Zeno  was shipwrecked and lost everything, but when he finally arrived in Athens, he famously discovered philosophy.

A large portion of your competitive advantage and your potential value to investors is the size of your intellectual property portfolio. When someone says Intellectual Property (IP), most entrepreneurs think only of patents. In reality, patents are only one of at least eight items that should be in your IP portfolio. You need all these before you start looking for funding.

Productivity is always a hot topic, and you can find a plethora of tips and tools to help you get more done. If your workspace is running interference with your intentions, however, you could be derailing yourself without even knowing it. While certain elements seem like they’re fixed, almost anything can be changed in a space to help improve your productivity, says Anja Jamrozik, PhD, behavioral scientist and consultant for the flexible workspace provider Breather.

Brianna Wronko has an engineering degree from an Ivy League school and is the CEO of a health-care diagnostics company. Until this week, she never thought she’d be stuck holding business meetings in a San Francisco hotel bathroom.

But with every restaurant, lobby, public park and cafe within walking distance of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference’s headquarters packed by thousands of attendees, meeting space was at a premium. One hotel restaurant was charging $300 an hour to sit at a bare wooden table. 

Learning how to network effectively is an invaluable skill to have when it comes to discovering job opportunities and making career connections to get ahead. But such socializing doesn’t come easily to everyone. In her new book, former communication executive Karen Wickre offers introverts advice on how they can build long-lasting relationships to enhance their careers. She was an editorial director for Twitter and a senior media liaison at Google, among other jobs. Wickre, who describes herself as an introvert, recently joined the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on Sirius XM to talk about her book, Taking the Work Out of Networking: An Introvert’s Guide to Making Connections That Count.

Early-stage life sciences companies in Wisconsin have a high success rate at winning federal grant dollars that fund research and development for their products.

You may think that hiring a business coach is admitting defeat, or implies that you don’t know what you’re doing.

After all, most people usually only turn to a personal trainer if they can’t get into shape on their own.  

Surely your business is doing just fine – you don’t need someone else telling you how to run it.

But seeking a bit of guidance is not a sign of weakness, it’s actually a smart move.  Remember – knowledge is power. It pays not to assume you know everything.

In San Francisco, it took a team of arborists a year to map every street tree in the city–124,795 in total. In New York, a similar tree count with volunteers took nearly two years. A new algorithm, by contrast, uses AI and satellite data to map a city’s tree canopy in just hours.

“You can use either aerial imagery or satellite imagery to do basically the same task, but a lot faster,” says Aidan Swope, a Caltech undergrad who created the algorithm as an intern at the tech startup Descartes Labs.

Image: Baltimore - Image: courtesy Descartes Labs

If you’re a founder or aspiring entrepreneur, perhaps you’re looking to round out your reading list for 2019 with a few inspiring business reads. We asked entrepreneurs to offer their book recommendations for the new year, including both recent releases and older favorites. A number of CEOs lauded the first book on this list–one you might have already picked up over the holidays–but keep reading for other titles you may have overlooked.

Image: https://www.fastcompany.com

Like virtual reality before it, augmented reality is the newest, hyped-up technology ripped straight from science fiction that technology companies worldwide are trying to bring to life. But unlike most fledgling companies in the burgeoning AR space that are still dealing in half-finished prototypes and experimental proof-of-concepts, Chinese startup Nreal has arrived on the scene this week with a surprisingly capable pair of AR glasses scheduled to hit the market later this year.

Image: Photo by Nick Statt / The Verge

Pharmaceutical companies are starting to see the retail supply chain as more than just a way to get drugs from point A to point B. It can be an opportunity to ensure better products and services and create a competitive advantage with consumers – but only if data is connected and well managed.

In the future, cyborg birds may help monitor ocean currents and help ground-truth satellite data. It may sound like an odd prognostication, but a study released on Thursday in Scientific Reports lays the groundwork.

Scientists slapped small GPS units on Scopoli’s shearwaters, a common seabird found throughout the Mediterranean and east Atlantic. Rather than tracking their flights, they tracked where they went when they settled on the sea surface in the Balearic Sea that sits off Spain’s east coast.

Image: Photo: SEO/Birdlife

With the rise of the gig economy, many more people are now having to consider the tax implications of working as independent contractors. When you are an independent contractor, the IRS considers you a business owner, even if you contract full-time for one client.

Thousands of US scientists are heading into their fourth week of enforced leave, the result of a prolonged government shutdown that began on 22 December.

The Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) are among the science agencies that have stopped processing grant applications, cut off access to key data sets and temporarily shuttered federal labs and offices.

Cheetahs are the world’s fastest land mammal. These feline sprinters can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in three seconds flat. Explosive speed enables them to take down an antelope, but when they’re not hunting, cheetahs expend as little energy as possible.

In fact, researchers found that cheetahs burn about 2,000 calories per day -- the same as an average-size man. “I guess both humans and cheetahs rest a lot to offset high-energy activities,” biologist Johnny Wilson told National Geographic.