BDC - Venture Capital and the Fonds de solidarité FTQ are pleased to announce a US$30-million commitment to Sanderling Ventures, an investment firm with a 35-year track record of building new biomedical companies. As a result of this transaction, Sanderling will create a permanent facility for the development of early-stage life science projects in Montréal, Canada. The dollars committed by BDC and the Fonds will be placed in a Canadian parallel fund to Sanderling Ventures Fund VII, which is well on its way to achieving its target size of US$250 million.

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Good news for enterprising Stanford students! Now, if you want to get a few million dollars to launch your Silicon Valley start-up and neither the Google-board-member president of your college nor your computer-science professor is willing to invest his or her own savings directly (as they often do!), you can now get money from your school itself.

There has been a sharp increase in venture capital funding of life sciences companies in the second quarter of 2013, according to a new report from PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

San Diego companies were the third-most invested in, following San Francisco and Boston.

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Arizona State University has announced that it will expand its support for student startup companies with the launch of the Great Little Companies (GLC) Network. The campus-based program, which will be managed by ASU’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group (EIG), will support up to 30 student startups each year that apply for but are not accepted into the Edson Student Entrepreneur Initiative, ASU’s student startup accelerator which supports the top 20 student startups each year. Each startup invited to participate in the GLC Network will receive $3,000 in grant funding as well as direct mentoring through the Changemaker Central locations on each of ASU’s four campuses.

There's no reality in reality television. We've all heard that before. But we keep watching, because fantasy -- particularly when it claims to be based on reality -- is highly entertaining.

I'm a huge fan of ABC's Shark Tank, the Friday night hit show about entrepreneurism. I enjoy hearing about the great innovations and even the less-than-stellar ones. I love experiencing the passion in the entrepreneurs' pitches. You can see it in their faces. They dream of making it big. I know what that dream feels like. And of course, the sharks are endlessly entertaining, with their huge personalities. Cruel or kind, they're fun to watch.

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It used to be that entrepreneurs were the renegade cowboys out in Silicon Valley. Nowadays, you have to be an entrepreneur just to get and hold a job.

Consultants and freelancers are cheaper than full-time staffers with benefits, software developers overseas cost a fraction of what they cost in the U.S. and, by 2030, robots will be able to perform most manual labor, according to an infographic (below) from San Francisco-based startup organization Funders and Founders. Even employees who are employed in large corporations are encouraged to be “intrapreneurs,” meaning that they are in many cases given company time to come up with disruptive ways of thinking about corporate organization and practices.

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When an entrepreneur invents a new technology or solves a problem in a novel way, a new company is born. Very often, companies grow, go public and end up in a boring rut where they pump out minor iterations on their original business idea. But the most exciting companies are constantly involved in launching important, new innovations. Not every company I invest in fits this description, but many do. And I love it because innovations can drive growth for a long time. Companies that keep innovating can keep growing.

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Young entrepreneurs from Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa were among 200 youngsters attending the launch today of a pioneering scheme to bring the world’s best entrepreneurial talent to the UK.

The Sirius Programme, spearheaded by UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), will enable talented graduates with innovative start up ideas to relocate to the UK and receive support to fast track their business from idea to reality.

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My goal in life is to work a job that I love.  To try to achieve this goal, my love of surfing influenced me to build my startup in the action sports market.  I figured that my familiarity with the market would be an advantage.  But as I started out on my entrepreneurial journey, I was surprised to find a number of unfamiliar challenges.  As I began to work through those challenges, however, I realized where a lot of my solutions came from: surfing!  Here are my surf lessons for start ups.

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If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? A lot of smart people ask themselves that question, especially as they struggle to keep up with the bills and worry about an inadequately funded retirement. In my work consulting with entrepreneurs, I commonly find that they spend so much time juggling the competing demands of their business that they take little time to analyze their personal saving, spending, and investing behaviors. And yet giving attention to these areas is vital if one hopes to achieve long-term financial success. 

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Investors are failing to capitalize on China’s developing education sector, which is seeing strong government spending and a wave of companies developing online tools to aid learning, especially for children.

This year has been slow, with only the second investment into a Chinese education company of 2013 due to close soon. Online education platform Fenbi.com will close around a $7 million second round in the very near future, possibly next month, said Xiang Gao, partner at IDG Capital Partners, one of the investors in the deal.

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We have a range of exotic answers to the ever-burning question, how do we become more productive? Like by making your morning routine minimalist, turning your meetings into meals, and mastering the afternoon nap--though the secret to a most-productive day may be more simple: by ridding ourselves of unimportant tasks and replacing them with valuable ones.

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Governor Dannel P. Malloy today signed new legislation creating a $200 million Bioscience Innovation Fund during a ceremonial event at the University of Connecticut Health Center (UCHC). The fund will make investments over the next 10 years in the form of grants, equity investments, loans and loan guarantees to foster innovation in smaller companies.

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Stanford University produces more alumni entrepreneurs than any other university, and now it’s created its first fund to invest directly in those early-stage companies emerging from the university community.

Stanford has established a three-year partnership with Stanford Hospital & Clinics and StartX, an accelerator for students, faculty, alumni and staff, under which the institutions will support the accelerator and create a fund called the Stanford-StartX Fund.

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The Angel Capital Association thinks it may be able to live with new government fund-raising rules. But it hopes the Securities and Exchange Commission will be flexible regarding who can invest in startups and funds. The group this week issued guidelines for verifying that only accredited investors participate in startup fundings. That is defined as having a liquid net worth minus real estate of $1 million or annual income of at least $200,000.

BY LAUNCHING A FUNDRAISING SITE SPECIFICALLY FOR ITS RESEARCHERS, GEORGIA TECH ADDS A REVIEW PROCESS AND LAB FEES TO THE CROWDFUNDING PROCESS.

Allison Jo Mercer, a researcher at Georgia Tech, is developing an adhesive based on a brilliantly sticky fish. Her work could some day translate into Band-Aids that don’t pull your hair out when you rip them off, safer bandages for serious wounds, or just a better way to stick your GPS unit to your car window. But when she looked for funding for the idea, the reality of decreased government science spending sunk in deep. “Research funding has been cut, cut, cut,” Mercer told Fast Company.

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Indiegogo CEO Slava Rubin on the growing use of crowdfunding as a method of raising money.

Going by numbers alone, hardware projects should be a win-win proposition for both entrepreneurs and crowdfunding platforms. Seven of the top ten most-funded projects on Indiegogo, a popular crowdfunding platform, are hardware projects. Cumulatively, they account for 83 percent of the total funding (a number that exceeds $2 million) garnered by such projects. Kickstarter, which is arguably the most popular crowdfunding platform today, has a similar story: hardware projects regularly rank amongst the most-funded projects across multiple categories on the site.

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There seems to be a lot of venture capital (VC) being invested in 2013, but the question is whether it may dry up.

According to a Reseau Capital report issued this morning, the second quarter of 2013 was a busy time for the VC market in Québec, with investments totalling $246 million, more than double what was invested in the second quarter of 2012.

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The education establishment is in a twit over the phenomenon called "summer slide." "Summer slide" is the loss of knowledge/competence in the summer months, according to research done by the RAND Corporation and Johns Hopkins University. "Summer slide" disproportionately plagues poor kids of color, so the recent, alarmingly low scores recorded by urban students on the Common Core tests heightened sensitivity around this issue.

Rather than acknowledging the corrosive effects of poverty, or conceding that the testing and accountability era has been a failure and has driven lousy practices, the answer is to make the least privileged kids work longer and harder while their more affluent peers summer in the Hamptons or South of France.

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