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.
Okay. So you’re growing fast. You started out with three people and now you have 47! You’ve picked up some funding. The product is coming together. You’re hiring so fast you don’t even know everyone you see in the halls anymore. People are jamming.
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What do photo sharing, social networking, and mobile payments have in common?
They represent hot trends that VCs have piled onto in recent years without regard for how small these markets really are.
Put plainly, there’s only room for a few (successful) photo sharing apps in the world.
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Startups selected for the DreamIt Health Baltimore accelerator program will get $50,000 in seed funding and access to industry heavyweights like Northrop Grumman Corp. The defense contractor has signed on as a partner for the new health IT accelerator program, where 10 startups will be selected for the program. The first program runs Jan. 17 through May 9.
Image: BLOOMBERG
Aspiring healthcare entrepreneurs could be forgiven for assuming our most significant challenge is the need to reduce the cost of care. Investors and policy wonks alike seem to agree on the overriding need to focus on innovations that will improve efficiency and take costs out of the system.
The appeal of this approach is easy to understand: rising healthcare costs are a real problem, and business process improvement feels like something we already know how to do. Large companies like GE and Oracle ORCL -0.83% are thrilled by the opportunity to apply their process methodologies to healthcare. Management journals love the idea of improving healthcare through operational excellence. An increasing number of foundations have also joined the fray, focused explicitly on supporting innovations that reduce the cost of care.
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A question that I often hear debated these days is whether a new startup should focus on growth or profits. First of all, the glory days of “dot.coms” are gone, when investors “didn’t care” about profitability, and all the money went to growth.
Which article would you rather read? "A Synopsis Of Recent Construction in Shanghai" or "Five Unbelievable Future Buildings In Shanghai?"
Probably the tantalizing second one. It's so bite-sized and easily digestible, more like drinking a smoothie than munching on a handful of kale. We can't really help it, says New Yorker writer Maria Konnikova: "there’s little that our brains crave more than effortlessly acquired data."
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I was manning a booth at the Harvard Club of New York’s authors’ night when an older woman approached and picked up a copy of my book, Reinventing You. She paged through it for a moment, then put it down. “Too late for me,” she said abruptly, and walked away.
Over the past six months of my book tour, it’s a question I’ve heard often. Isn’t professional reinvention just for young people? What if I’m too old? How can I spend years training for something new, when I’m already near retirement? It’s true: reinvention is different later in your career. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
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If you only focus on the multi-billion dollar valuations of young companies like Pinterest, Uber and Snapchat, you might assume 2013 has been a very good year for tech startups. In reality, it has been more of a bittersweet year.
Many early-stage companies struggled to raise a Series A rounds of funding, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the "Series A Crunch," which for some meant to fight for their survival. Meanwhile, several later-stage companies like Fab and Rdio laid off large portions of their staff to rein in costs.
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Last summer, Jessica VanderGiessen did something unusual. The bioengineering student from Santa Clara University in California, United States, spent two days travelling the rough dirt roads of West Bengal state in India, testing the drinking water in rural villages for arsenic contamination.
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/44221799@N08/4545686455
For those willing to add a little bit of technology and connectivity to their home, it’s a brave new world out there, thanks to a slew of recent innovations in home automation.
By adding hardware components and software to connect them (and you) together, it’s possible to begin turning your house into a smarthome, which can save you both time and money. By allowing you to have more granular control over your home’s temperature, security system, lighting, and door locks, no matter where you are, using just your smartphone or tablet, a home automation system offers a variety of benefits for homeowners and renters alike.
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Dr. Janice Presser is the creator of the technology, Teamability®. She’s also the CEO of The Gabriel Institute where Teamability has been used to help clients focus on people to create business results. In this episode we dive into many facets of teams, including
When the economy tanks as it did in the recent recession, that’s a strong signal that things have to change, and it’s hard to miss. But most of us in business have to deal most of the time with weak signals, or change that is happening in a far more subtle way. These changes can be cultural, like the increasing need to be social, spawning Facebook and a hundred others, or technological, like the explosion of mobile devices around the world.
It was a week before a big innovation conference in Australia in which I was set to debate the negative side of the question: “Would innovation make the world a better or worse place in 2050?” We’d been asked to wear clothes that represented artefacts from the future. A quick wardrobe check confirmed that wasn’t going to happen. So instead I asked my kids to help out. I asked them each to draw a picture of what they thought the world would be like in 2050.
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Picture a person reading these words on a laptop in a coffee shop. The machine made of metal, plastic, and silicon consumes about 50 watts of poweras it translates bits of information—a long string of 1s and 0s—into a pattern of dots on a screen. Meanwhile, inside that person’s skull, a gooey clump of proteins, salt, and water uses a fraction of that power not only to recognize those patterns as letters, words, and sentences but to recognize the song playing on the radio.
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It’s a commonly cited statistic in Washington: Small businesses are responsible for creating most of the nation’s new jobs every year.
The truth is, though, it’s a relatively small fraction of those small businesses that contribute to that statistic. In fact, roughly three in four small firms in the United States are what are known as non-employer firms; other than the job the owner creates for himself or herself, no new jobs are generated by those companies.
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Battered by months of disappointing sales, networking giant Cisco needed a way to give its shareholders a pick-me-up. So the San Jose-based firm did what has become routine for many big U.S. companies in a slow-growing economy: It announced last month that it was buying back shares of its stock.
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The global semiconductor industry has recorded impressive achievements since 1965, when Intel cofounder Gordon Moore published the observation that would become the industry’s touchstone. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every two years, and for the past four decades it has set the pace for progress in the semiconductor industry. The positive by-products of the constant scaling down that Moore’s law predicts include simultaneous cost declines, made possible by fitting more transistors per area onto silicon chips, and performance increases with regard to speed, compactness, and power consumption. As a result, semiconductor-enabled products today play integral roles in virtually every aspect of modern life.
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What makes a company a best place to work? Turns out it has little to do with ping pong tables, more with meaning.
Glassdoor, the employer ratings site, has released the results of their 2014 Employee Choice Awards survey. The survey (results below), averaged employees' anonymous ratings of their companies. Rather than showing a focus on perks, compensation, and other incentives, the best-rated workplaces had a range of intrinsic motivators, like challenging work, impact upon society, and an opportunity to work with brilliant colleagues.
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Members of my leadership team have previously weighed in on the topic of diversification in high tech and specifically Silicon Valley. Now I want to lean in to this topic, in response to a piece in the San Jose Mercury News.
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