The American Association of Retired Persons is looking for entrepreneurs to share their ideas on how to improve healthcare for the grey-haired set in a new component to the advocacy group’s upcoming innovation conference.

The live pitch event is a being held as part of the advocacy group’s annual AARP Health Innovation@50+ conference Sept. 21 in New Orleans.

Among the criteria for entries are:

• Companies will be focused on consumer-oriented health technologies for the ’50 and over’ market. 
• Companies will have launched their product/service within one year of the Sept. 21 event date 
• Companies will not have raised more than $5 million in funding

Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants are critical for supporting emerging biotechnology companies working on promising innovation that could lead to medical advancements and breakthroughs for patients living with debilitating diseases including cancer, HIV/AIDS and Parkinson’s.

Late last year, the SBIR/STTR grant program was reauthorized as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (HR 1540). Most importantly, this reauthorization will allow small, majority venture capital-backed companies to once again compete for SBIR/STTR funds, which will open up opportunities for emerging biotechnology companies to bring innovative medical treatments and cures to the patients who so desperately need them.

A university in Denmark has created a circular dorm that will make you incredibly frustrated at the tiny double room where you spent your college years. Bet you didn’t have french windows, balconies, and a bike workshop. 

If you’re lucky, maybe you went to a college on a campus with fancy, new college dorms. If you’re not, you may have lived in a tiny box-like room in an uninspired building. Regardless of your dorm living situation (or lack thereof), it’s hard not to be envious of the students who get to live in Copenhagen’s Tietgen Student Hall (Tietgenkollegiet), a 288,000-square-foot, seven-story building designed as a communal space for residence. Among the building’s features:

The first and sure-to-be-enduring image of Mars from the Curiosity rover looks like something out of a post-apocalyptic novel. Dusty, mountainous, orange-tinged and deserted.

What the Mars landing means, however, is anything but. It's not about the end of civilization as we know it. It's about a new frontier.

In a statement released Monday, President Barack Obama said words that can be uttered only once: "Tonight, on the planet Mars, the United States of America made history."

Richard Bendis and Nish Acharya will talk about the innovation and entrepreneurship programs in Federal Government today. Nish will also discuss briefly the status of the EDA i6 competition and the noticeable increase in the quality of the proposals.

They will speak about the paradigm shift in the EDA programs from a "Bricks and Mortar" focus (hard) to a more innovative programmatic focus (soft) on innovation, commercialization and entrepreneurship.

Facebook made a lot of people millionaires but it made 10 people billionaires.

The stock opened today at $38 per share.

Using that price, Bloomberg calculated the net worth of Facebook's richest employees and investors. The

New Ways of Working, a research consortium focused on alternative workplace solutions, released its latest research report, Overcoming Barriers to New Ways of Working. Based on interviews with real estate and facility executives and managers at 14 major organizations, the report provides an inside look into the elements of a successful workplace implementation and identifies good/best practices for program success.

“We observed that, despite the rapid adoption of new ways of working in the past several years, penetration into mainstream practice remains low,” said Joe Aki Ouye, co-founder of New Ways of Working (New WOW). “New WOW’s benchmark studies consistently found the same barriers. Cultural issues of entitlement and trust scored highest among the barriers affecting workplace change.” So New WOW decided to investigate the barriers confronting organizations wanting to transition to new ways of working and how these organizations surmounted or were stymied by them.

Bizdom, a nonprofit program that mentors and funds aspiring entrepreneurs to launch and grow tech-based startup companies in the urban cores of Detroit and Cleveland, today announced it has established its Cleveland headquarters inside the 250 Huron building.  Bizdom will occupy 7,000 sq. feet inside the five-story commercial office building located at 250 W. Huron Road and situated directly below The Ritz-Carlton, Cleveland hotel. 

Bizdom is a three-month entrepreneurship accelerator that provides mentoring and invests up to $25,000 in seed funding in each tech-based startup in exchange for eight percent equity of the company. The program provides entrepreneurs with the mentoring and initial seed funding to build their product or service, market it to customers, and grow the business to a scale that merits further investments.

Saturday’s Wall Street Journal featured a “Creating” profile in the Review section of Katrina Markoff, co-founder of Vosges Haut-Chocolat, a $30 million purveyor of unusually flavored chocolate truffles and other chocolate goodies (including a line of bacon and chocolate products for all the bacon-obsessed, social media fans).

As with many other Creating columns, this one includes five great reminders (and associated questions) about what a strong creative process can look like – no matter what creative medium you are employing:

1. Use a non-traditional creative medium

Leann Jacobsen hopes establishing StartupCity Spencer, an incubator using the same name and approach of a Des Moines incubator, can put the northwest Iowa town of less than 12,000 people on the entrepreneurial map.

"With the talented people that reside here, that type of innovation can definitely happen in this part of the state," Jacobsen, president of the Technology Association of Iowa and a Spencer resident, said in a phone interview Thursday. "We really hope this is a strong demonstration of rural innovation."

Jacobsen (right) said Spencer has a strong agricultural and manufacturing base, but needed something to attract young creatives. Her personal passion for the community and professional knowledge of technology are intertwined in the project.

Today’s workforce is extremely competitive. When comparing resumes it’s easy to get lost in all the bullet points of software literacy and past responsibilities. If you really want to separate two seemingly qualified employees, bring them in for an interview and ask a simple question, “Have you ever participated in sports at an elite level?”

“Current research indicates that individuals who have competed in elite level athletics, i.e., collegiate, international, or professional level competition possess higher levels of emotional intelligence than their non-athlete counterparts,” says Richard Mendelson, I.O. psychologist and founder of Dynamic IO Consultants, a consulting firm specializing in human capital management and other services.

Hedge fund manager James Altucher recently wrote about how multitasking can kill you. Neuroscience shows that our brains simply weren't created for it. Yet many people continue to live hyper-connected lives, essentially creating 24/7 workweeks — no matter how unhealthy it is. This excellent infographic by OnlineUniversities.com shows how acutely information overload affects productivity: 

More than 100,000 people from 147 countries and all 50 states have engaged in Babson College’s crowd-sourcing effort to extend the dictionary definition of the word “entrepreneurship.”

In the first six months of the Wellesley business school’s “Redefining Entrepreneurship” campaign, visitors to define.babson.edu have posted more than 2,000 text and multimedia definitions of the word.

Among those contributing have been Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Nike Foundation CEO Maria Eitel and former U.S. State Department adviser Steven Koltai.

Giant stockpiles of personal data, whether Web browsing logs, credit-card purchases, or the information shared through social networks, are becoming increasingly valuable assets for businesses. Such data can be analyzed to determine trends that guide business strategy, or sold to other businesses for a tidy profit. But as your personal data is analyzed and handed around, the risk increases that it could be traced back to you, presenting an unwelcome invasion of privacy.

A new mathematical technique developed at Cornell University could offer a way for large data sets of personal data to be shared and analyzed while guaranteeing that no individual's privacy will be compromised.

If we think back over the past decade, software has done a great job of making inefficient markets more accessible and efficient.  eBay made it easier for buyers and sellers to find and exchange products.  One of our portfolio companies, TaskRabbit, is creating a marketplace for labor that efficiently connects those who need tasks completed with those that can perform the work.  Kickstarter is enabling, and making it easier for, the world's most creative people to turn their dreams into reality.

But, software and the web have yet to make connecting private companies with seed-stage capital more efficient.  There are some burgeoning platforms, like AngelList and Gust, that are moving in this direction; but the transactions still happen offline,  and usually require large blocks of capital.  If someone is looking to invest $1,000 in a private company, it's still virtually impossible.

Many entrepreneurs, policy makers, and academics wonder where small business owners get the money to expand their businesses. Thanks to the efforts of researchers at the Census Bureau, we know the answer.

Above, I have created a chart that shows the fraction of small businesses with employees in need of expansion financing that obtain different types of capital, using data from the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO), an effort to collect data on:

Robert J. Sternberg has written 40 books and at least 1,400 articles and chapters over a career in which he has juggled jobs as professor, provost, and president of the American Psychological Association.

As a psychologist who has studied the way people accomplish goals and stay motivated, he probably has a better insight than most other prolific scholars into what it takes to get things done when distractions tug and self-doubt creeps in. He's one of several experts The Chronicle asked for tips on the traits and habits of people who are particularly effective at accomplishing their goals in academe.

One of the biggest myths I still see in the community of new entrepreneurs is the assumption that “All I need is a good idea, and some investor will give me the big money I need to build the business.” In reality, investors fund good business plans, not big dreams. It’s all in the execution.

A related myth is that it takes a lot of money to start a business. Investment requests of $500K and $1M seem to be the most popular. In reality, most business today can be built and reach breakeven for much less than these amounts, maybe $10K-$50K, with the exception of some medical related ones, and high technology content solutions.

Rajat Bhargava and I have been working together since 1994. We’ve been involved in creating seven companies together (the most recent ones are MobileDay and Yesware) and, while most have been successful, we’ve had a huge number of positive and negative experiences along the way. We’ve mostly had a lot of fun and, when we haven’t, we always made sure we figured out what went wrong.

Minda Zetlin just put up an interview with us on the Inc. Magazine site titled 4 Signs You Should Say ‘No’ to a VC which I thought was excellent. She explores the entrepreneur – VC relationship and suggests four warning signs for an entrepreneur when interacting with a VC.

If you want to understand the global economy, look at an aerial photo of the world at night. It is, quite literally, enlightening: Unlike typical maps, delineated by so many politically drawn boundaries and pastel tones, the world after dark sheds light on what unites us, beyond the city or suburb or state in which we live.

At night, the mega-regions of our global economy — areas like greater New York, Boston and Philadelphia in the U.S., or London, Paris and Lyon in Europe — are aglow, thanks to their interconnected cities and suburbs, highways and train lines, businesses and industries.