Here we highlight selected innovation related articles from around the world on a daily basis. These articles related to innovation and funding for innovative companies, and best practices for innovation based economic development.
Holy glowing genes, Rudolph!
If we didn’t already know that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was special, that shiny proboscis of his could have resulted from the one-in-a-million transfer of genetic material from a brilliant colored coral found in the Red Sea.
Perhaps it entered his mother’s bloodstream when she scraped against the coral during a crash water landing while pregnant with Rudolph and then the DNA was passed to her unborn calf.
Coined in 2013, the term ‘unicorn’ in the venture capital industry has come to signify a company valued at $1bn or more. There has been a boom in the number of firms acquiring unicorn status in the past few years, with 276 firms achieving valuations of $1bn or more since 2013. With large amounts of venture capital available to them, many companies are choosing to remain private for longer and later into their growth cycles, pushing valuations higher and driving growth in the number of unicorns. Despite unicorns representing a small fraction of the total number of venture capital-backed companies, they account for a considerable proportion of deal value thanks to their larger funding rounds.
Michigan backs Insight Venture Partners for $100 mlnState of Michigan Retirement Systems in the third quarter committed heavily to venture capital and technology-related investment funds, putting almost $250 million into four vehicles, an investment disclosure from the retirement system shows. The largest of the four commitments went ...
The Falcon Heavy is SpaceX's next big rocket, capable of bringing payloads and even people deep into the solar system.
The rocket looks effectively like three Falcon 9 rockets strapped together, and it's been in development for quite a long time.
SpaceX's insistence that it would launch the rocket and subsequent delays over the years have been something of a joke in the spaceflight community for a while now.
Image: ELON MUSK/SPACEX
Xconomy New York — Vicki Sato, a longtime Boston biotech entrepreneur, laid out a challenge for New York life sciences in 2018. “Stop being an initiative,” she said. “Start being a player.”
Sato, addressing the throng of attendees at Xconomy’s “New York Biotech: The Future Is Now” conference last week, has skin in the game. She’s now co-chairing an advisory council, along with Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, that steers a $500 million New York City government-backed plan to spur biotech progress in New York City (LifeSci NYC). The plan dovetails with a $650 million initiative to similarly advance the prospects of New York biotech statewide. It’s all part of a concerted effort to put New York in the same breath as biotech hubs in Boston and San Francisco—but there is still a long road ahead before that is a reality.
Sequoia Capital is looking to raise a $5 billion investment fund.
The legendary Silicon Valley venture firm, known for its stellar investment returns, is in the early stages of raising its next global growth fund.
Recode’s Kara Swisher first reported the news of the fund. She’s hearing that Sequoia is targeting $5 to $6 billion. We’re hearing that right now it’s looking more like $5 billion. The fundraising is expected to get underway in the first quarter of 2018.
Today, many companies see open innovation — a process for sharing knowledge and ideas with other organizations — as a core part of their strategy for developing new offerings. Examples include L’Oréal working with Renault on an electric “spa” concept car and auto-parts makers Delphi and Mobileye joining forces to produce an autonomous driving system. Many companies have found that such partnerships generate cost savings and creative insights.
In 1997, a young FCC lawyer specializing in internet policy wrote an influential working paper that predicted the explosive growth of the internet and what it meant for regulators. Back then, dial-up internet access was the norm. In three years, regulators would worry that AOL’s merger with Time Warner would lead to market domination — a reasonable fear at the time that seems misplaced in today’s broadband world. Google was still a Stanford research project, Facebook did not yet exist and most people had flip phones; Apple’s iPhone would not be unveiled for another decade.
This week we’ve been reminded about the formidable financial power of the empire founded on Donald Duck. But when Walt Disney had the idea for Disneyland, he had to dig deep into his own pocket to get the idea going. You see, his brother Roy started out by thinking it was a crazy idea, and he got the board of The Disney Company to oppose the idea. In the end, Disneyland was the creation of just one person, not of a giant corporation; and it was a really risky bet.
Many entrepreneurs still don’t understand that building a business culture today of doing good, like helping people (society) and planet (sustainability), is also a key to maximizing profit. Employees and customers alike are looking for meaning, not simply employment and commodity prices. Every company needs this focus to attract the best minds and loyalty in both categories.
In the classic book by Christoph Lueneburger, “A Culture Of Purpose,” he details how to build this new culture, and why it is becoming more instrumental in bringing about success, as well as sustainability, in organizations as diverse as Unilever and Walmart.
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t’s not easy to understand how other people perceive us. We are often uncertain, confused, or even completely unaware of what we project. And this lack of self-awareness can be career-limiting.
Consider a former client of mine who was angling for the C-suite but had received feedback that his colleagues considered him negative and difficult. He was stunned; he considered thought of himself as analytical and thorough and assumed everyone understood that he pushed back in order to get to the best answer. He was also unaware that he had a habit of grimacing while processing information, which looked to others like annoyance.
The subscription business model is booming. Previously dominated by the likes of newspapers, magazines, gyms, utilities, and telecommunications firms, more products and services are being offered to more people through subscriptions than ever before. Business-to-consumer subscription businesses have attracted more than 11 million U.S. subscribers in 2017, and the industry as a whole has been growing at 200% annually since 2011. There are over two thousand consumer-focused subscription businesses capitalizing upon customers’ diverse tastes.
“It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.”—Steve Jobs
I just spent several days in discussions with a small group of the top people in a technology company where I am on the board. The topic: should we launch a completely new service that we believe will have a huge market potential? The issues: it will take significant time and money to finish and launch it and we haven’t done any market research.
This reminded me not only of Steve Job’s wisdom on this matter but also of the story of the cordless vacuum cleaner. According to Alexandra Wolfe’s article in the Wall Street Journal, market research found that people weren’t especially interested in them. James Dyson’s response to that?
At work, I’ve encountered two very different types of people: those who look for purpose and meaning in what they do and others who have realized the effort is futile. For those of us who find ourselves squarely stuck in the first group, we’re left with the difficult task of figuring out how to achieve such an elusive thing. This discomfort especially plagues my generation and is the driver, I believe, behind the growing interest in entrepreneurship. Meaning might just be found in starting your own venture. Even so, many have had that thought, few have actually executed on it.
Sam Sisakhti had a great idea. He wanted to start a company that would sell clothes designed by independent fashion designers all over the world -- effectively breaking down the big barriers that many talented upstarts face when trying to get their clothes to market. In his head, he was thinking: This is the next Amazon.
And at first, people seemed to agree that Sisakhti did indeed have a great idea. He and his partner booked a meeting with a venture capitalist to pitch their company UsTrendy.
Image: UsTrendy
If you feel like you've hit a wall and can't move forward, sometimes you need to switch up your routine to get going again. In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Ben Angel suggests one change you can make is to listen to different music. If you always listen to the same tunes during your commute or workout, it can be reinforcing your current habits. Angel says to try finding new music to help stimulate your mind, or bring back an old playlist you made during a time you felt successful to return to that mindset.
New Delhi: Organisations globally are heavily investing in innovation centres and while the US remains the market leader, innovation centres are rapidly coming up in India and Singapore, says a Capgemini report.
According to Capgemini's Digital Transformation Institute's report released today, Silicon Valley is no longer the default option for firms seeking to open an innovation centre. Globally, it now accounts for only 13 per cent of innovation centres compared to 18 per cent in 2015.
Bioscience is a significant contributor to Iowa's economy, and the state should capitalize on its competitive advantages by establishing a public-private Iowa Bioscience Development Center, according to a report issued Tuesday.
The study, commissioned by the Iowa Economic Development Authority, also proposes that Iowa increase capital available for investment in bioscience companies; ensure continued legislative support for existing innovation ecosystem development programs; and improve connectivity and collaboration between key stakeholders.
WALLDORF, Germany, Dec. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The SAP® Startup Focus program won first place in the Startup Europe Partnership (SEP) "Europe's Corporate Startup Stars," an initiative promoted by the European Commission to recognize Europe's top startup-friendly companies, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced today. The awards were presented during a ceremony yesterday in Brussels.
Imagine a world in which the human resources function as we know it vanishes and is replaced by automation, outsourcing, and self-organizing teams. Or a world in which top talent is fought over so fiercely that the most adept tech workers hire agents to negotiate and manage their careers.
