These days I see a surge of new startups as the economy seems to be recovering. If you are not starting one yourself, the next best thing is joining one as a partner, or as an early employee. It takes much the same preparation to make you the best entrepreneur, or the best job candidate. Of course experience is the best teacher, but you need to get the job to get the experience.

According to Ford R. Myers, a noted career coach, and author of “Get The Job You Want, Even When No One’s Hiring,” many job seekers and career changers make the mistake of halting all their efforts as summer approaches, believing that nobody will be hiring until early fall. He and I believe that these next few months are the perfect time for starting a new career.

Everywhere you look, people are talking about innovation. There are conferences and gurus, workshops and webinars, apostles and practitioners.

But what is it, really? It’s hard to go about the practice of innovation when there is so much confusion about what it actually is. Some have supposed frameworks (i.e. discovery/invention/innovation), but to be honest, I don’t find them particularly helpful.

Chinese entrepreneurs have named innovation as the new driver for both their enterprises and the Chinese economy, while acknowledging that challenges exist when introducing new operation models and technologies.

A survey among Chinese entrepreneurs released on Saturday shows that 91.8 percent of respondents believe innovation in entrepreneurship and technologies will be the key to supporting healthy and sustainable business development and the nation's transition from a fast-growing one to an economy focusing on both quality and quantity.

CommonAngels, a well-known startup investing group consisting of about 50 Boston-area angel investors, is in discussions to raise a new pooled fund which is expected to exceed the group's current $13 million fund, CommonAngels managing directors Maia Heymann and James Geshwiler said in an interview. CommonAngels would back roughly the same number of companies as part of the larger fund, but would be able to invest more capital into the companies, Heymann said.

When I was a 7-year-old growing up in rural Austria, I had only one dream, one shared by probably 90% of all other boys in my home country: to become a world-class soccer player.

This is probably the equivalent of football here in the U.S. or ice hockey in Canada. And playing soccer was all I did for the next 10 years. I slowly climbed my way up, making it into football academy and playing for bigger teams. And yet, after being injured and slowly developing some doubt in my abilities, I dropped out and went to a normal school.

The need for innovation in healthcare has arguably never been greater.  A range of factors, from aging world populations to rising standards of living in developing countries, are poised to drive long-run demand for innovative drugs, devices and medical technologies that can improve outcomes and reduce costs.

Ironically, however, funding for healthcare innovation remains in short supply.  As industry participants are keenly aware, life science venture capital financing – which has played a critical role in helping translate research ideas into commercially useful medical technologies – is becoming increasingly scarce.

When U.S. venture capital funds raised an aggregate $100 billion in 2000, amid an explosion in the number of VC firms, many veteran VCs predicted that such a rapid expansion would NOT be good for the industry.

With annual U.S. economic growth averaging roughly 3% during the 50 years after World War II, there could be only so many lucrative investment opportunities to be had — even in places as entrepreneurial as Silicon Valley.

"Going on about how busy you are isn’t conversation and doesn’t lead anywhere," writes iDoneThis CCO Janet Choi on her company blog, "except making your conversation partner bored, or worse, peeved."

No one wants to be peeved.

So why do we keep doing all this humblebragging about how busy we are? It's a question Choi investigates thoughtfully: She observes that people who are "legitimately occupied" with work or family rarely play the "too busy" card (clearly, we don't know the same people)--or, may even go out of their way to make a connection because they've been so swamped.

Recent scientific breakthroughs by NASA and SpaceX have increased the public’s thirst for knowledge about the stars and the science of space. Rocket launches and landings get a lot of coverage, but what about some of the everyday activities happening in space?

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, a prominent social media poster on Facebook and Twitter with great photography and music, recently recorded a video explaining how astronauts sleep in space. The video shows the sleep pod inside the International Space Station that Hadfield rests in and a sleeping bag within the pod that is tied to the wall. Hadfield also has special full-length “space pajamas.”

There was a time when investors would rush startups to market, but a shift has taken place during the past 20 years where the pace has slowed a bit. Now I find myself increasingly advising entrepreneurs to avoid putting a product to market before it is truly ready.

Seed funding and Series A rounds are intended to help startups tease out their big idea and begin laying the product development groundwork. But it seems best practices for customer validation/product management are being frequently tossed out the window. This is so counter-productive that it will almost certainly place the next funding round at risk and can sink the full enterprise.

What’s your best tip for hosting a successful in-person meetup for other entrepreneurs in your community?

The following answers are provided by the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Healthbox, a leading business accelerator that fosters early-stage healthcare companies, and their anchor partner Florida Blue, announced the opening of applications today for a 16-week accelerator program located in Jacksonville, Fla.

Adding to the success of their 2012 accelerator programs located in Boston, Chicago and London, Healthbox is expanding to Florida to support entrepreneurs throughout the state, expose the local healthcare community to new and innovative solutions and help the two segments work together.

Cyclist Lance Armstrong has apologized for using performance-enhancing drugs to win seven Tour de France titles. He attributed his cheating to a determination to “win at all costs.” Psychologist Marc Hauser of Harvard University, who once wrote an article entitled “Costs of Deception: Cheaters Are Punished…,” is now out of a job after the U.S. Office of Research Integrity concluded that he “fabricated data, manipulated results in multiple experiments, and described how studies were conducted in factually incorrect ways.” Sixteen banks have agreed to settlements or are under investigation for manipulation of the Libor, an interest rate at which banks may borrow from other banks, in what is said to be the largest financial scam in the history of markets.

Without a doubt, the venture capital industry has experienced the worst quarter it has had in a decade.Many companies found it very difficult to raise money for start-ups. Even if risk was commonplace in the market, very little of it was seen in venture capital markets. Many advocates though are hoping that the many IPOs now available would buck the trend and show that things would soon be better. 

Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) project, which President Obama announced in his State of the Union address in February, will be a decade-long effort to understand the nature of thought (See “Why Obama’s Brain-Mapping Project Matters.”) The project, which inevitably evokes the Human Genome Project, will demand billions in research funding and require the coöperation of many government agencies, universities, and foundations. Miyoung Chun, a molecular geneticist and vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation, has been coördinating communication among those involved since planning began 18 months ago. 

Fewer and fewer entrepreneurs are starting social startups. Why? Fizzling IPOs and disappointing return on investments mean that social is no longer the investor darling it once was. The facade has fallen. While some have warned against a coming social media bubble, it took volatile social startups like Groupon, Zynga and Facebook to make up-and-coming entrepreneurs think twice about starting a social-centric venture.

OVERIT MEDIA'S EMPLOYEES CAN TELL THE TIME BY WHETHER THEY’RE DOING LEG LIFTS OR TRICEP DIPS. AND THEY’RE CONVINCED THEIR WORKOUT PROGRAM IS GOOD FOR THE COMPANY’S BOTTOM LINE.

About a year ago, Jen Graybeal, the managing director at Overit Media, received an email from her friend who was getting married. Her friend had asked Graybeal to be a bridesmaid, and though the wedding wouldn't be for several months, her friend had already selected bridesmaid dresses, including a link to J. Crew’s website. Graybeal hurried to buy the dress online, since it was on sale. But when the black silk taffeta dress came in the mail, Graybeal, who’d recently had a baby, found that she didn't quite fit in her old size.

'Railway Mania’, a frenzied period of speculation on railway shares in the 1840s, left investors nursing hefty losses. But it did provide much of the infrastructure – albeit on grossly uncommercial terms – on which countless subsequent fortunes were built. More than half of the length of today’s rail network was built with money raised before the crash.

Now that Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Merck, and Sanofi have either scaled back or (in the case of GSK and AZ) abandoned any further Central Nervous System (CNS) R&D, the hand-wringing has begun, with distinguished professors like Dr. Steven E. Hyman writing alarmist editorials about the imperiled future of psych meds and articles in the media talking of a "crisis" in psych-med research. (The opening sentence of a recent editorial in Schizophrenia Bulletin was: "Psychopharmacology is in crisis." The headline of Dr. Hyman's piece is "Psychiatric Drug Development: Diagnosing a Crisis.")

Amongst the younger generation in the UK, unemployment is at record levels and the prospect of a ‘lost generation’ is real as youth unemployment reaches the highest numbers since records began.

But the UK population is nothing if not enterprising and the ‘means of production’ is now truly in the hands of the individual with entrepreneurialism and single start-ups soaring as the numbers of ‘traditional jobs’ decline.