Use this form to submit information about your cutting-edge, life-sciences technology for consideration by a panel of expert judges. The ten winners will be the subject of a feature article in the December 2012 issue of The Scientist. For the last four years, the article covering this competition has been one of our most widely read. If you have any questions, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Eligibility rules: An “innovation” is defined as any product that researchers use in a lab: machines, instruments, tools, cell lines, made-to-order labels, etc. Products released on or after October 1, 2011 are eligible.

On the world economic stage, Houston is a big player. It is the fourth largest city in the United States, with a population of more than two million, and a 10-county regional population of approximately 6.1 million people, the country’s fifth largest metropolitan region. With the most recent national census, Houston is the country’s second fastest growing major metro area and is now the most culturally diverse city in the country. Among its assets are a global population, a talented and productive workforce, a comparatively reasonable cost of living and a good quality of life. Urban expert Joel Kotkin touted Houston’s “successful 21st-century urbanism,” noting abundant opportunity due to lower taxes and inexpensive real estate relative to other major cities and a continued rise in white-collar, college-educated residents. In 2008, Houston was rated number one on Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Best Cities report, and The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times are only two of many national dailies recently reporting on Houston’s robust economy and growing profile as a leading 21st century city. 

In 2009, as a graduate student that lived on a $19,000 annual stipend in New York City, I did not worry about being unable to readily afford the laptop and printer that would help me write my thesis. I would just charge them to a credit card that I could pay off after I had earned my degree and had landed a competitive postdoctoral position that would help me pay for my graduate school investments. As a postdoc, I thought that I would also be able to help pay for my aging father’s medical bills. It was a promising plan, but one that I soon realized was far from reality.

It is no secret that postdoctoral training in the academic life sciences is now lasting longer than it was just a decade ago.  Indeed, a typical postdoc is now estimated to be greater than 3 years with some lasting as long as 7 to 10 years, while the position used to average just 1 to 2 years. This increased duration has been attributed to a number of factors, including a surplus of qualified PhDs, the scarcity of federal research dollars, and a decrease in faculty appointments and positions in industry.  While extended postdoctoral training does offer an opportunity to advance a personal research program so as to be more competitive in securing future independent funding, it comes at a cost—the incredible financial challenges that accompany life as a postdoctoral fellow.

If you thought buying stock in mobile health (mHealth) companies was a good idea, it is. But if you decided to invest in the overall digital health sector - which includes mHealth, B2B apps and consumer services such as ZocDoc – you’d be brilliant. And, probably very rich.

Private financing by venture capitalists more than tripled in the first half of 2012, according to a study by financial services company Burrill & Company, as reported by Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb. This follows a June report from nonprofit foundation Rock Health that showed "skyrocketing" VC funding in the healthcare sector.

Cleveland Clinic is at it again with another commercialization-based collaboration, this time adding Toledo hospital system ProMedica to its Healthcare Innovation Alliance network.

The network was formed last year to help institutions develop and commercialize medical innovations, and The University of Notre Dame, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System and MedStar Health have all joined in the past year and a half. Through the collaboration, Cleveland Clinic Innovations will help these organizations turn their employees’ ideas into marketable products that will generate revenue, as it does for the Clinic.

Since humans live on only a small percentage of the land in the world, maps that just show that physical space don’t really tell us much about how we live. These maps--from a cutting-edge cartographer--do.

Ever since Gerardus Mercator created his iconic map of the world in 1569--the one that first enabled ships to navigate at sea without getting lost--people have been drawing maps using the same fundamental concept of conveying physical space.

Cartographers have gotten more sophisticated over time. They’ve figured out how to distort that space, how to portray that Massachusetts has more electoral votes than Wyoming, or that countries closer to the equator are larger than we think. But for hundreds of years, we’ve been tethered to the idea of looking at the world through the shape of its land. Now that there’s virtually none of that left to explore and discover, it may be time to start thinking about our world in new visual ways: not according to physical space, but to how people are distributed across it, and what their presence can tell us about global poverty, health inequality, environmental impacts, and geopolitics.

Whether the game involves competing every four years in the Olympics or every day in a business, winning brings advantages that make it easier to keep winning.

To understand sustainable success, I compared perpetual winners with long-term losers in professional and amateur sports and then matched the findings to business case studies for my book Confidence. The sports were a comprehensive mix including women's soccer, men's and women's college basketball, major league baseball, U.S. football, international cricket, and North American ice hockey.

I found that winners gain ten important advantages as a result of victory — and that smart leaders can cultivate and build on these advantages to make the next success possible.

Wasn’t it just a few days ago that I said that Europe had gone a little incubator crazy? Well, more news on that front, this time coming out of Sofia, Bulgaria, of all places: Eleven, backed by €12 million of European taxpayers’ money, gets its official unveiling today, along with announcing the first eleven startups to be accepted into the program. It also boasts some impressive partners, including Google and Springboard.

Targeting teams in Central and Eastern Europe (although, interestingly, the accelerator will accept applications from anywhere), Eleven is offering startups €50,000 in funding for 10-15% of equity with a remit to help them go from discovery to validation, taking them past an initial MVP to be seed and series A investment ready. To that end, a follow on seed investment of €150,000 will be on offer to around one third of the graduating startups for up to an additional 15% equity — so the opportunity really is their’s to lose.

SparkLabs, a new startups accelerator based in Seoul, South Korea, has launched with the goal of strengthening ties between Korea’s entrepreneurs and the rest of the world. SparkLabs will provide a similar model to Y-Combinator and TechStars while focusing on Korean startups in the Internet, online gaming, mobile, and digital media sectors. Among its mentors are Vint Cerf and Mark Cuban.

PRESS RELEASE:

SparkLabs (www.sparklabs.co.kr), a new startup accelerator in Korea, is seeking to fill the critical gap for Korea’s entrepreneurs who seek connectivity, knowledge and mentorship as they work to expand into the U.S. and other locations across the globe.

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.

The university system is critical to the Innovation Economy in Boston. Not only do schools supply the region with well-trained creative class workers in fields like engineering, science, design, and architecture; they also serve as R&D labs, generating new technology research; and as catalysts for the marketplace of ideas that fuels entrepreneurialism and a growing ecosystem of start-up companies. In addition, universities provide a place for that all important cross-pollination of ideas across industries and practices, which drives ongoing and sometimes unexpected innovation.

The Obama Administration today announced the winners of the multi-agency Rural Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge to spur job creation and economic growth in rural regions across the country.
 
Economic development partnerships and initiatives in Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia will receive awards ranging from nearly $200,000 to over $1 million from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Delta Regional Authority (DRA) and the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). The winning projects will promote job creation, accelerate innovation and provide assistance to entrepreneurs and businesses in a wide range of industrial sectors, including advanced manufacturing, agribusiness, energy and natural resources, technology and tourism.  

How do you get two different cultures – universities and private enterprise – to work together and collaborate to develop industries and create jobs?

In my previous post, I talked about the role of universities as a hub of innovation and technology research. However, translating university research into successful products and solutions has its challenges.

When will you get your robot butler? When will we first set foot on Mars? These and countless other questions about the future are answered in this amazing chart of where technology is headed in the next 30 years.

Can speculation about the future of technology serve as a measuring stick for what we create today? That’s the idea behind Envisioning Technology's massive infographic (PDF), which maps the future of emerging technologies on a loose timeline between now and 2040.

An experienced VC would have heard thousands of pitches in his day. The good ones would tell you that they have developed a “pattern recognition”. After a while, they are able to determine (at least in their own minds) what startups would succeed or fail in a matter of minutes. There’s obviously lots going on in a pitch – verbal and non-verbal communication, chemistry etc. In this post, I will outline both platforms and tools startups should consider to improve their pitching success, before they get into the VC’s office.

In mid-2010, the already frenetic Todd Park was in overdrive. President Obama had just signed the Affordable Care Act into law, the most significant reform of the American health care system since Medicare. It was Park’s job to figure out how government could use technology to make the law’s implementation as smooth and fruitful as possible. 

As the Health and Human Services Department’s first chief technology officer, Park had a broad mandate but not a lot of staff. The idea behind the new position, he says, was to act like a “lean startup” smack in the middle of a mammoth federal agency, pulling together tools and resources on the fly to meet a particular need. 

According to the third-quarter Kauffman/LegalZoom Startup Confidence Index, released today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and LegalZoom, expectations for the U.S. economy declined overall, but there is a significant optimism gap between older entrepreneurs and those between the ages of 18 and 40.

Almost 40 percent of startup owners now believe the economy will deteriorate over the next 12 months, an increase from 36 percent in the second-quarter survey and 31 percent in the first-quarter survey. Entrepreneurs who were somewhat confident in future profitability fell from 43 percent in second quarter to 40 percent in the third-quarter survey, and those who lacked confidence in improved profitability edged up from 18 percent to 21 percent.

However, 98 percent of the 18- to 30-year-olds and 83 percent of the 31- to 40-year-olds are confident or very confident that their businesses will realize greater profitability in the next 12 months.

Buried deep in Start-up Act 2.0, a bill to boost high-tech start-ups, is a bad idea that will hinder commercialization of inventions developed at U.S. universities. Called the "free agent" provision, this clause would allow university professors to choose their own technology-transfer agents rather than have them use their university's technology-transfer office, an approach that has been in place since the passage of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act

Congress can do better. Rather than undermining an effective system in the vain hope of squeezing more commercial technology out of academic institutions, our elected leaders should focus on a proven solution: Simply provide more research funding to academic scientists and engineers.

If you want to be more successful — at anything — than you are right now, you need to know yourself and your skills. And when you fall short of your goals, you need to know why. This should be no problem; after all, who knows you better than you do?

And yet your own ratings of your personality traits — for instance, how open-minded, conscientious, or impulsive you are — correlate with the impressions of other people (who know you well) at around .40. In other words, how you see yourself and how other people see you are only very modestly correlated.

Last month, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) announced it was accepting applications for the newly created Pure Michigan Venture Fund (PMVF). The fund, which has $5 million to invest and will seek an additional $4 million from the legislature, is targeting first- and second-generation venture capital firms that have raised at least $1 million from three unrelated investors, but not more than $25 million. “We’re looking for firms that will be helped by a big anchor investment,” says Mike Flanagan, the MEDC’s manager of equity capital programs. Credit Suisse has volunteered to review applicants to the PMVF; after a 90-day process, they’ll recommend finalists to the state.