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.
Entrepreneurship is great due to the high correlation between effort and success. If you want autonomy and believe you have what it takes to create income out of thin air, go for it! There’s nobody to blame for your failures, just like there’s nobody to reward but you for your victories.
Image: http://www.financialsamurai.com
Through the Open Innovation Challenge, the American Heart Association hopes to get closer to its goal of improving Americans’ cardiovascular health by 20 percent by 2020.
The key to crowdfunding success? Pull at the heartstrings of your audience.
That’s what the New York City affiliate of the American Heart Association aims to do in its first-ever Open Innovation Challenge, a program that is part of the AHA’s Health Science Innovation and Investment Forum.
Image: bilderheld/Flickr
Physical activity in midlife seems to protect from dementia in old age, according to a study carried out at the University of Eastern Finland. Those who engaged in physical activity at least twice a week had a lower risk of dementia than those who were less active. The protective effects were particularly strong among overweight individuals. In addition, the results showed that becoming more physically active after midlife may also contribute to lowering dementia risk.
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Like death and taxes, there is one thing about being a legal entrepreneur that is predictable…
Your business will plateau.
It will become overwhelming, lose its joy, and make you less money. Basic economics. When you grow, you have to spend more money to add “capacity” to serve the business you’re earning. That capacity reduces profit, and possibly your salary. You wonder, “Is it worth it?!”
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The legal industry has not been particularly well known for innovation and forward thinking. This massive industry, however, is presently in acute distress.
News in recent years has highlighted the cracks in the traditional law firm business model, as clients have begun pushing back against stratospheric rates and significant inefficiencies.
Image: Clyde Robinson/Flickr
The Heartbleed security flaw was fixed in the newest version of OpenSSL, but you should still change your passwords on all of the sites affected by the bug.
If you’re still not sure which sites were affected, we have the perfect chart for you, created by the “digital forensic specialists” at LWG Consulting. Major sites ranging from Facebook and Google to Pinterest and Flickr were affected. Luckily, many financial institutions were not.
Image: http://heartbleed.com
FluGen Inc., a Madison company developing a new flu vaccine and a new way of delivering vaccines, hopes to raise $3 million for the next phase of a clinical trial.
Yet the company can't turn to the state-backed venture capital fund created last year to spur economic development, because the Legislature barred the fund from investing in many biotechnology companies. The ban was pr
The New York World’s Fair of 1964 introduced 51 million visitors to a range of technological innovations and predictions during its run. Fifty years later, some of those ideas have turned out to be commonplace in our world. Others? Not so much.
Image: The Unisphere, right, the best-known symbol still standing from the 1964 World’s Fair, as well as the ring of pillars that once housed the New York State Pavilion, in the Queens borough of New York. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File) Read More: A 1964 World’s Fair Innovation Scorecard | http://nj1015.com/a-1964-worlds-fair-innovation-scorecard/?trackback=tsmclip
Since the response was so great on my last article, “10 Valuable Lessons Learned from The Top Business Books,” I thought I’d share more lessons learned from business books gathered from my personal network. In fact, business books have been on my mind a lot lately due to the 2014 Small Business Book Awards, as well as the recent Google+ Hangout, “Best Business Books.” If you missed the hangout, you can view the replay. I’m the kind of person who would rather read a book than attend a seminar or webinar, or even ask someone for help. So naturally, I’ve learned plenty from business books. It turns out my clients and contacts feel the same way.
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The entrepreneur’s challenge is to effectively communicate their value proposition, not only to customers, but also to vendors, partners, investors, and their own team. Especially for technical founders, this is normally all about presenting impressive facts. But in reality facts only go so far. Stories often work better, because humans don’t always make rational decisions.
For those looking to score a job at a hot tech startup or a coveted spot with a tech behemoth like Facebook or Square, the job search scene has an up-and-coming competitor to the traditional career fair: hackathons.
Readyforce, a career network for college students, aims to hone in on hackathons as an outlet for job seekers. The platform streamlines the process of connecting students with companies and organizations recruiting those with computer science and computer engineering backgrounds. Readyforce's new platform, HackerHub, launched this spring. Readyforce CEO Alex Mooradian hopes the hub will serve as a one-stop shop for student leaders and companies.
Image: FLICKR, MORTEN WULFF
Facebook's $2.3 billion deal for Oculus VR left the 9,522 backers of the startup's online fundraising campaign with T-shirts and trial products.
Oculus initially raised cash on Kickstarter, a service that rewards donors with test versions of its wares and other token compensation.
Newer crowdfunding sites are giving investors the chance to earn something else: money. CircleUp Network offers equity in private companies, while Funding Circle lets investors buy company debt. College graduates can turn to Social Finance to refinance loans with help from alumni.
Social media has become a fundamental tool of social change all over the world. Nowhere is this more evident than the middle east. Platforms such as Twitter and Youtube played a major role in the Arab Spring, the civil uprisings in 2010 that spread from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Yemen and beyond.
But the event most heavily covered by social media is the civil war in Syria, which has now raged for almost three year. The conflict has been extensively recorded on videos which are regularly uploaded to YouTube and then tweeted around the world. All sides in the conflict seem to be engaged with numerous social media accounts.
Image: http://www.technologyreview.com
Engineer and entrepreneur William Hsu, co-founder of the accelerator MuckerLab, explains why entrepreneurship has become math, in many ways. Borrowing a baseball analogy, Hsu also explains why successful entrepreneurs should pursue as many "at-bats" as possible.
This question may be familiar to you if you struggle, like so many of us, with time management. We may be clear in our minds about what we need to do, but for whatever reason we can’t seem to implement real changes in our behavior.
As a time coach, I’ve seen over and over again that when people hit this road block, it’s time for them to stop and examine their emotions. Our analytical minds may resist this idea, viewing the ominous forest of feelings as suspicious at best, and terrifying at worst. We may even find ourselves thinking that acknowledging the role our emotions play in our time management (or as I like to call it, “time investment”) makes us look weak.
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Innovation and Entrepreneurial Initiatives, Pershing Yoakley & Associates, P.C.
Access to capital is one of the key priorities of Tech 20/20, the Knoxville-Oak Ridge region’s oldest venture development organization that will soon celebrate its 20th anniversary.
Recognizing that a significant gap existed in this region for early stage funding, the organization has led the creation of something called The Lighthouse Fund.
President Obama always wears the same thing. Which is part of his secret to getting so much done.
As he told Vanity Fair:
"You'll see I wear only gray or blue suits," (Obama) said. "I'm trying to pare down decisions. I don't want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make."
For founders, taking funding is about more than adding working capital — it acts as a catalyst for things to come. It provides a third-party validation that attracts the interest of media, customers, and potential executives you want to hire.
Before taking funding, however, you have to know if you’re ready to light that fire. More importantly, founders need to have a specific plan for what to do with all that cash because too often, startups go guns blazing after a Series A just because it’s the logical next step. Here are several questions to consider before your big payday.
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When competing in an innovative new market the benefits of an early lead can’t be over-estimated.
When August Dvorak patented a simplified keyboard in 1936 tests proved its design was faster, and less prone to mistakes than the original QWERTY model. Despite these superior characteristics it was a commercial failure. Betamax video recorder had a similar fate when it competed for custom against the VHS model as did CP/M when up against MS/DOS.
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Leaving the corporate world means ditching those stressed-out long nights and enjoying life more. Right?
How’s that working out for you?
There’s no shortage of overstressed, sleep-deprived entrepreneurs. Building a company is an uphill battle. It takes time, energy, motivation, persistence, and a little bit of luck. There’s no clock-in and clock-out times. No five o’clock “close-of-business.” No one to tell you where your work life ends and where your personal life begins.
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