If you want to look to the future in crowd financing, you might want to look to Israel. From Jerusalem, an innovative crowd-funding platform has been built up over the past 16 months led by serial entrepreneur Jon Medved. Feeding off the strong base of Israeli tech innovation, OurCrowd has raised $30.5 million to expand its reach internationally into promising markets such as China and Australia, grow its team, and build its investor network.

How maddening is drug development? Sometimes, all the scientific literature in the world leads you one way, and your own data take you another. That’s why even experienced drug hunters often need a little luck to succeed. Just ask longtime industry veteran John Knopf, who had no idea his Cambridge, MA-based Acceleron Pharma, would end up battling a gene therapy company to be first to market with an approved treatment for a devastating blood disorder called beta-thalassemia.

Tim Draper began submitting signatures Tuesday for his ballot measure to split California into six states, likely destining the initiative, once widely laughed off, for the November 2016 ballot. In a news conference outside a Sacramento County elections office, Draper criticized California for its relatively high poverty rate, low educational attainment

Henk Mooiweer and his colleagues at Shell GameChanger usually gather behind closed doors when evaluating new investments in energy startups. But recently they opted to participate in a sort of public casting call for energy entrepreneurs that, if the pitches looked interesting, Shell would immediately pledge $25,000 of in-kind advice and assistance to help bring the idea to the proof-of-concept stage.

Dr. John Christy is an outlier on what the vast majority of his colleagues consider to be a matter of consensus: that global warming is both settled science and a dire threat. He regards it as neither. Not that the earth is not heating up. It is, he says, and carbon dioxide spewed from power plants, automobiles and other sources is at least partly responsible.

The face of innovation in Oklahoma is shifting. Not surprisingly, the sources of those innovations tended to cluster around the Tulsa and Oklahoma City metropolitan areas and in places like Stillwater and Norman where we have comprehensive universities with a large amount of research occurring each day.