The OneStart Americas competition, a partnership between Oxbridge Biotech Roundtable and SR One, the venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline, officially launched on November 4 at UCSF. The kick-off event was followed by similar events held this month in Los Angeles, San Diego and Boston.

Congressman Chris Collins' legislation to help scientists commercialize their ideas passed through the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology today. The TRANSFER Act of 2013, which passed with bipartisan support and has the backing of local and national research universities, will now go to the House Committee on Small Business for approval.

"This legislation addresses what we as a committee have heard time and time again: There is a valley of death - a place where innovative new ideas die because there is no path to commercialization," said Collins, R-NY-27. "This legislation mends that valley."

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By Katlyn Grasso W’15, 2013-14 Neff Entrepreneurial Intern Fellow at WomenElect, Buffalo, NY

How did you find the position?

I was introduced to the founder of WomenElect in the summer of 2012 through the Buffalo Niagara Partnership. After learning about her vision for the company, I strongly identified with its mission and asked to join the team.

What was your motivation for working at a start-up this summer?

I have always pursued nontraditional internships because I like to put myself in challenging situations that foster personal growth. As a young entrepreneur, I wanted to learn how a successful business is built and apply those lessons to my own ventures.

Is Peanut Butter Pop-Tart an Innovation? That is the provoking title of a great article by Dennis K. Berman in the Wall Street Journal this week on companies confusing product upgrades with breakthrough innovation.

Companies, having to cope with stagnating economies in the last five years, are looking for new ways to grow their businesses. They're looking for new products, markets, business models, customer groups and distribution channels. As a consequence the word innovation is everywhere these days. They have 'Global Innovation Centers', 'Innovation Academies', 'Innovation Portals', 'Innovation Scoreboards', 'Innovation Systems', 'Innovation Boosters' etcetera. Furthermore 6 out of 10 CEOs state in a 2013 survey of PWC that innovation is their primary focus or one of their priorities. So you might conclude there's a big effort within companies to be innovative. But are they really?

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INNOVATION ACT PASSES: NOW WHAT? — The big picture, from Erin: “Supporters of a bill to crack down on so-called patent trolls cheered its passage by the House on Thursday and immediately began to push for Senate action on the measure. The House passed the Innovation Act by an overwhelming vote of 325-91, just six weeks after it was introduced by Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.). The swift action marked a stark contrast to the years of negotiation that led up to the last congressional patent overhaul, the America Invents Act, in 2011...Supporters say Thursday’s lopsided vote in the House sends a signal to the Senate as it starts to shape its own bill...But opponents caution that...the substitute amendment offered by leading House Judiciary Democrats John Conyers (Mich.) and Mel Watt (N.C.) received significant support, even though it ultimately failed.”

Computer scientists have worked out a way to make computer viruses airborne, just like their biological cousins. The researchers, from Germany's illustrious Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics have built some proof of concept software which uses inaudible audio signals to communicate, a capability that allows the malware to covertly transmit keystrokes and other sensitive data even when infected machines have no network connection.

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In many ways, you are your habits. Research shows that nearly half of our actions are habitual. But habit change is a small deal: the tinier your habit, the easier it is to establish.

If we're trying get better at big picture stuff--like by getting more productive, creative, or generally awesome--research shows we need to make the change as small as possible.

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From our genomes to Jawbones, the amount of data about health is exploding. Bringing on top Silicon Valley talent, one NYC hospital is preparing for a future where it can analyze and predict its patients' health needs--and maybe change our understanding of disease.

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After the release of my first book, FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and Outperforming the Competition, I was interviewed by Bloomberg TV and asked a question that pointed to the necessity for unleashing creativity in the workplace.

The question was, “If someone were to arrive on earth from Mars and did not know anything about FedEx, what’s the one thing you’d tell him that was the key to FedEx becoming a global success story?”

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Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx, changed the way global business functions, and it started with a simple, “What if…?”

While an undergraduate in 1965, Smith thought, “What if there was an airline dedicated to express cargo?” He wrote a paper for an Economics class that described a shipping service that used a hub and spoke system to speed packages to their ultimate destination. Upon returning from Vietnam, he launched FedEx in 1971 and would soon revolutionize global business practices.

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Every entrepreneur seeking funding loves the challenge of getting customers and investors excited, but dreads the thought of negotiating the terms of a deal with potential investors. They are naturally reluctant to step out of the friendly and familiar business territory into the unfamiliar battlefield of venture capitalists from which few escape unscathed.

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You can't just be a good modeling monkey to impress your bosses. Along with financial modeling skills, it is essential to be able to speak the language of the industry one wants to be successful in. Without the appropriate language, it would become increasingly difficult for people to do business in an industry. And it is the same with the PEVC industry as well. Some of the important terms which are necessary to know in the PEVC industry are given below:

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If you, as an entrepreneur, email a VC firm, it’s a crapshoot whether they’ll even open it, much less read it. If you’ve got some heavy hitter, celebrity entrepreneur or investor making the introduction for you, your chances improve astronomically. So start making friends with the right people. That was one of the key takeaways from a panel of venture capitalists, led by Andrew Romans, general partner at Silicon Valley’s Georgetown Angels and author of the book: The Entrepreneurial Bible to Venture Capital: Inside Secrets from Leaders in the Startup Game.

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After the rise in popularity of crowdfunding startup products, it was inevitable that the concept would morph into something a bit different. Into this. Bigcolors lets regular people invest in startups and even trade shares in them as if they’re listed companies like Apple or Google.

With all the buzz about the role of social media in almost every industry, it shouldn’t be surprising that it has increasingly become a significant part of the college admissions process.

A Zinch survey last year found that 68% of students used social media to research schools, and 38% said they used it as a research tool when deciding where to enroll. This has prompted college and universities to use social media as an informative recruitment tool, with 97% of schools using social media in their online recruitment efforts (up from 37% 10 years ago), according to the National Association for College Admissions Counseling.

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I think it’s time we had a little chat. It’s been coming for a while now, but the time is right. You see, it’s not you, it’s me. I’ve been using the word “digital” like it’s a tangible thing you can see and feel, a finite object that may be complex in the way it works but still describable through some universally accepted definition. I was wrong to assume this so after thinking about it, it’s become clear to me that we all think different things when the word “digital” pops up in conversations or is used to describe what it is that we do.

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In his visit to China, Vice President Joe Biden spoke of a need for people to 'breathe free' to achieve innovation in science and technology. China's hopes for 'independent' innovation rest on allowing such freedom.

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I had been up most of the night driving through snowy, icy Illinois to keep the van warm while my mate slept in the back. We had no sleeping bags, so we were freezing. Finally, exhaustion overcame me and I pulled up into a car park.

Suddenly, a terrible bumping and the sound of my friend screaming. I thought we were in an earthquake, or a nightmare.

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Yesterday Bootstrap Labs, the California-based accelerator that transplants international startups to the Valley for a six-month training-and-mentorship program, announced it would launch a localized outfit – BootstrapAccelerator Korea, a spinoff branch to be run out of Seoul.

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A new nonprofit accelerator is hoping to use the power and influence of technology startups to solve pressing urban problems. Through a four-year program, Tumml offers a select group of civic-minded entrepreneurs $20,000 in seed funding and the chance to learn from some of the brightest minds in local government, tech and socially conscious organizations and companies.

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