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.
More than 500 wineries from 28 countries are already part of Wine Spiral Projects, the sector’s first community focused on promoting innovation and collaborative intelligence in the world of wine.
"Wine Spiral Project" is becoming a channel to facilitate communication between wineries, suppliers who are leaders in terms of innovation and educational institutions for collaboration in R&D projects.
As you know, it is important to establish a workplace where creativity and innovation thrive.
“Open innovation” – a trendy term nowadays – can help you do this. But what exactly does “Open innovation” mean?
Henry Chesbrough, the author credited with coining the term, defines open innovation as:
“…the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively.”
By Debra M. Amidon, Founder and CEO ENTOVATION International Ltd. and Oliver Schwabe, Principal, Eurofocus International Consultants Ltd.
In an era of Big Data, we are challenged to identify signals of progress. In this kaleidoscopic economy where complexity and change are the norm, classical financial indicators are no longer sufficient. Intangible or intellectual value parameters - where knowledge, innovation and collaboration are integral - must be considered. Here we demonstrate a unique tool for social and organizational networking analysis to provide insight with a picture for strategic planning and economic development.
Samsung is already becoming one of the big heavy hitters in tech, but it’s looking to make more investments to ensure its place as the so-called “fifth horseman” alongside Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The company announced today that it is committing to investments in new technology, with the launch of its new Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC), as well as a $100 million commitment to a new Samsung Catalyst Fund, to fund development of components and subsystems. That’s all alongside the $1 billion that Samsung is investing through its Venture Americas Fund and its existing R&D centers around the world.
The new Innovation Center will be headquartered at Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley, and will be led by Samsung Electronics president and chief strategy officer Young Sohn. Today at a press conference, Sohn laid out the company’s strategy for investing in innovation over the next several years.
Entrepreneurship is all about leading – leading customers to a new product or service, leading a startup team to peak performance, and leading a new business to the market opportunity, while providing maximum return to stakeholders. Most entrepreneurs feel they have innate leadership talents, but struggle with how to nurture these abilities and measure their effectiveness.
Since I believe that a large part of leadership is personal confidence and initiative, I was drawn to a new leadership book by Robert S. Murray, “It’s Already Inside.” His focus and belief is that anyone can nurture their innate leadership abilities, to achieve business and life success. The key is learning from the life lessons of others, something you never get in classrooms.
Genome sequencing will be a routine diagnostic test for patients at the new Institute for Precision Medicine in New York City, a joint project of the Weill Cornell Medical College and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. Doctors will be searching for new genetic clues about disease by taking an unbiased survey along the genome, rather than scanning only for genes already known to cause illness.
Using next-generation sequencing equipment from San Diego-based Illumina, the researchers are aiming to find new treatment options for cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and cardiovascular disease. But a companion goal is to persuade health insurers to reimburse for the cost of sequencing the genomes of individuals, says Mark Rubin, the director of the institute, which was founded this year.
Singapore ranks as Asia Pacific's top innovative city, according to a new survey conducted by Solidiance, a strategy consulting firm based in Asia.
The comprehensive study aims to help industry players identify the best places to plant and grow their businesses. It was designed to determine whether or not a particular city had created an effective and innovation ecosystem.
Six main categories were used in this study as benchmarks to measure each city’s level of innovativeness: Human talent, knowledge creation, technology & innovation ecosystem, society, government & regulatory framework, as well as global integration and orientation towards the future.
New Enterprise Associates, a venture capital firm that's invested some $13 billion in up-and-coming companies, has launched a brand-new design mentorship program to fuel innovation in the design industry. Called NEA Studio, the 12-week program will challenge five designers at a time.
Why the focus on design? "When a consumer gets a product, it's usually because of the design of it," said Dayna Grayson, an NEA partner, to Fast Company. "I feel like, if you're really going to design a product and make it inherent at a company, it has to start at a founder level. So if the designer wants to be the founder, why not?"
There are plenty of words that one might expect the head of a national investment group to use when describing Michigan, but "miracle" isn't one of them.
Yet while meeting with local venture capital investors, Mark Heesen, president of the Arlington, Va.-based National Venture Capital Association, used the term "the Michigan Miracle."
As national investing has slowed, Michigan has gone in the opposite direction, adding firms and VC dollars invested in businesses, he said.
A remarkable shift is taking place right under our noses. The universe of electronic devices in our homes and offices has stopped expanding, and has in fact begun to shrink. At the same time, our productivity continues to rise and our information, entertainment, and learning options keep exploding. In other words, we’re getting more stuff done—using less actual stuff.
For the graphic proof, check out the two pictures above, showing my own array of digital gadgets. The first one was taken in May 2005. The second was taken yesterday.
There might be some productivity-minded part of you that scoffs at the whole idea of reading about how to be more productive. After all, why would you read about doing when you could do?
Well, you can tell that part of you to stop being so addicted to being right and acknowledge that you can work smarter, not just harder. And when you can tap a multitude of perspectives of how to work smarter, you can get extremely productive.
Alice Boyes at Psychology Today has done that by gathering the productivity insights of a range of psychologists. Let's unpack a few here.
When we last wrote about Socialmatic, the concept for a web-enabled instant camera that uploads your snaps to Instagram and prints them out using an on-board printer, it was but a twinkle in the eye of Italian inventor Antonio De Rosa. The patently ridiculous industrial design, which is based on Instagram’s iOS icon, seemed as technically impossible as it was functionally unnecessary. And it seemed even less likely to materialize after De Rosa’s IndieGoGo campaign failed to raise funds necessary to produce the camera, last year.
A year or so ago, I was creating a lot of infographic-style resumes for clients. It was in demand, and I enjoyed it because it was a great way to combine my expertise in resume writing and HR, with my creative background in art & design. And then I realized that ideology was more about me than it was my customer. People were buying them – a lot of them. And then I stopped offering them altogether. Pulling the plug on a highly profitable product is a tough call, but a necessary one if you want to continue to retain your customer base, and be providing the best quality product for their investment. And that’s it – while it looked nice, and even communicated well, graphical resumes simply aren’t what hiring managers want to see in 9 out of 10 cases. I create tools to help people get hired quicker, not make them look creative.
I grew up looking up to Bruce Lee, as does every Asian boy with a heart. He’s the quintessential modern-day Asian hero. And I’m going to take a page out of the master’s book:
I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.
That’s perfect advice for Asian startups. We’re not in a startup to live up to Silicon Valley’s expectations.
Blowing up a new sales recruit isn’t hard to do, if you know how. From what I hear from my professional sales buddies, there’s a lot of it going around! Here’s the formula:
While the accelerator and incubator models are nothing new, the enthusiastic involvement of big corporations now jumping into the fray gives college start-ups a leg up.
Young entrepreneurs have it made. While most start-ups are struggling to find resources, funding, mentorship, and talented employees, college start-ups have no shortage of incubators, accelerators, college entrepreneurial programs, and a pool of super-talented classmates to help them get off the ground. And with a number of high-profile college start-up successes--Michael Dell and Mark Zuckerberg--the ranks of undergrad entrepreneurs continue to swell.
Every entrepreneur has an idea for transforming a market with innovative new technology, or transforming society with a new process. But unfortunately, most of these ideas fail at the execution level, or are not truly innovative. Entrepreneurs who have been really transformative, like Steve Jobs and Walt Disney, seemed to know how to deal with all the right elements.
Jeffrey A. Harris, in “Transformative Entrepreneurs,” provides examples of key elements of transformative ideas and leadership abilities that separate the winners from the losers. I found his observations, like the following, to be inspirational for those of us chasing an entrepreneurial dream:
A devout Sikh, Suneet Singh Tuli, 44, has found his own way to live by his religion’s central belief of sarbat da bhala, or “may everyone be blessed.”
He wants everyone in India to be on the Internet.
To that end, Tuli’s London company, DataWind, is building very inexpensive tablet computers, which it assembles in China or with the help of support staff at its India offices. The idea, Tuli says, is to pair cheap tablets with ad-supported wireless service as a way to bridge the digital divide between poor and rich countries.
You are stressed — by your deadlines, your responsibilities, your ever-increasing workload, and your life in general. If you are like me, you even stress about how much stress you're feeling — worrying that it is interfering with your performance and possibly taking years off of your life.
This might sound a little crazy, but what if it's the very fact that we assume stress is bad that's actually making it so bad for us? And what if there were another way to think about stress — a way that might actually make it a force for good in our lives? Well there is, according to new research from Yale's Alia Crum and Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage.
Since Paul Graham launched Y Combinator in 2005, the field of startup incubators and accelerators has exploded in the U.S. and overseas, with new entries emerging in all manner of oddball shapes and sizes, from a 80,000-square-foot space in San Jose, Calif., dedicated to tech companies hoping to do business in China, to a program that offers entrepreneurs cash to develop their business in Chile.
There are accelerators for green tech, health tech, ed tech, the cloud, and every other tech flavor du jour, and accelerators everywhere from Baton Rouge to Durham, N.H., as cities across the country lay claim to the title of the Silicon Valley of (insert industry here).
