Brazil's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies

Believe or not in the new corporate mantra: Innovate or Die, here is a list of companies promising rapid growth that you must have on your radar. The top 10 most Innovative Companies in Brazil:

1. Bug Agentes Biologicos
   

   Brazil's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies - @Fastcompany
   
   
2. Boo-box
3. Grupo EBX
4. Stefanini
5. Embraer
6. Petrobras
7. Predicta
8. F*Hits
9. Apontador
10. Vostu

The list was compiled by Fast Company magazine. Launched in 1995 by two former Harvard Business Review editors, Fast Company is one of the main reference in the business of innovation, with over 434 thousand followers on twitter ( @fastcompany ).
Only Bug Agentes Biologicos and Boo-box, the top two Brazilian most innovative companies, made to the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies worldwide. Both expect significant growth in the very near future:
Boo-Box, advertising system for social media, is the 45^th most innovative company worldwide: with 31 thousand publishers and 280 thousand websites , it shows 3 billion ads every month to 65 million people and expects to grow exponentially by having a stronger presence in Latin America.
Bug Agentes Biologicos, ranking 33^rd worldwide, is a  supplier of predatory insect eggs and parasitoids used for natural protection of crops. It presents a natural alternative to harmful agricultural pesticides and aims Brazil’s $7 billion pesticide market:

Bug’s timing feels right. Brazil is the world’s third-largest agricultural exporter (behind the United States and EU); it recently passed the U.S. as the largest consumer of pesticides. Yet the country has begun to phase out the more noxious chemical pesticides Brazilian farmers use despite diminishing effectiveness. Bug has the only alternative approved by Brazilian agricultural, health, and environmental ministries. It’s currently at 100% capacity with plans in 2012 to double the acreage it covers.

Other than these polemic lists, one of my favorite Fast Company ventures is the 30secondmba website. Although the name is self-explanatory, here is a sample of 30secondMBA : “ Mark Zuckerberg answers How do you generate innovation?”
Besides introducing 30secondsMBA , Zuckerberg’s speech reinforces the idea that innovating does not necessarily include doing something really new; that would be invention. Many entrepreneurs wanna-be focus on inventing instead of innovating. They want to create something really new to launch their startups. Well, it is not really necessary to do so! To prove my point let’s take a look at the top 10 Brazilian startups:

1. Peixe Urbano (collective shopping site)
2. LikeStore (enabling purchases via Facebook)
3. SambaTech (online video)
4. BuscaPe (price comparison and owner of a chain of ecommerce websites)
5. Baby (children’s items ecommerce)
6. OQVestir (ecommerce- women’s clothing)
7. Clickon (collective shopping site)
8. Shoes4You (shoes rental)
9. ViajeNet (tool for booking travels online)
10. Vostu (games on social networks)

The list was compiled by American Business insider, one of the best 25 Best Financial Blogs in 2011 according to Time.
Brazil’s hottest startup, Peixe Urbano, which means “Urban Fish” in Portuguese, is innovative but not inventive.  Described by Techcrunch as Groupon Clone, Peixe Urbano was one of the first collective shopping site in Brazil. The three Brazilian  co-founders, including Julio Vasconcellos, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford Business School, admit they were inspired by Groupon.
Today, Peixe Urbano is so successful that it won one of Silicon Valley’s most prestigious prizes early this year, the Best International Startup Crunchies award.
My point is: entrepreneurs wanna-be, keep on mind the difference between innovating and inventing. Creating something new is not always necessary when launching a startup.  Improving a process or refining the original concept instead of focusing in the next BIG idea may be the surest way to succeed.
In case one argues that innovating is not as appreciated as inventing, let’s remember that the prize of the Best International Startup was given by Techcrunch, the same entity that described Peixe Urbano a Groupon Clone.



http://www.forbes.com/sites/ricardogeromel/2012/02/21/brazils-top-10-most-innovative-companies/

Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Arthur B. McDonald

OTTAWA, ONTARIO — The Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) congratulates Arthur B. McDonald, a particle physicist and professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., who has been named the co-winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. The award, announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences today, will be shared by Japan’s Takaaki Kajita, a physicist at the University of Tokyo.
The Academy recognized the researchers for their discovery of the nature of neutrinos, some of the smallest and most abundant particles of matter in the universe. For years, these subatomic particles were considered to have no mass, a notion that supported the standard model of particle physics. However, in separate observations made in 1998 and 2001, Kajita and McDonald noticed neutrinos changed in ways that required them to have mass, even if this mass was remarkably small.
McDonald made his observations at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), now commonly known as SNOLAB. The particle physics facility is located two kilometres below the Earth’s surface in a nickel mine in Sudbury, Ont. It is the second deepest underground facility in the world. Since 2002, the SNOLAB has received funding through the CFI, most recently through the 2015 Innovation Fund.
McDonald’s discovery, combined with the similar conclusions made by Kajita in Japan’s Super-Kamiokande detector, have inspired particle physicists around the world to investigate the properties of neutrinos, along with other subatomic particles. Their observations have dramatically altered our understanding of the origin and behaviour of matter in the universe.


http://www.innovation.ca/en/AboutUs/News/NobelPrizeinPhysicsawardedArthurBMcDonald