You hear a lot about “agile innovation” these days. Teams using agile methods get things done faster than teams using traditional processes. They keep customers happier. They enjoy their work more. Agile has indisputably transformed software development, and many experts believe it is now poised to expand far beyond IT.

Ironically, that’s where it began — outside of IT.

Startups are hard.

When you’re tempted by the possibility of a fail-proof way to accelerate your company’s growth, be wary. There are simply no shortcuts to success.

For too many entrepreneurs, this is what the idea of a startup incubator has become.

Globally, the business of incubators and accelerators has exploded. Billion dollar Silicon Valley success stories about notable incubator and accelerator alum have given rise to a false sense of guaranteed prosperity.

Image: http://techcabal.com

A Cleveland nonprofit has pledged half a million dollars to 20 different tech startups run by women or minorities through a public-private source called The Focus Fund. 

The partnership is led by Cleveland-based non-profit JumpStart alongside the Ohio Third Frontier, The Case Foundation and Cuyahoga County. 

Eligible tech businesses must be headed by women or minorities of African American or Latino descent, a group that currently receives only 3 percent of all venture capital dollars, according to JumpStart CEO Ray Leach.  

When Honda chose to put a manufacturing plant in Greensburg, a lot of good things happened for Decatur County and the surrounding area. Two points, though, merit more consideration.

First, the state agreed to rebuild the interchange on I-74 for easy access to and from the highway. The state paid for it out of the Major Moves fund created by the Indiana Toll Road’s 75-year lease.

Image: Frank Espich/IndyStar 2009 file photo 

TriFusion Devices from Texas A&M University emerged as the top startup company in the Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) Saturday at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. The annual event is the world’s richest and largest student startup competition.

Selected by 275 judges from the investment sector as representing the best investment opportunity and taking home nearly $400,000 in cash and prizes, TriFusion Devices bested 41 other competitors hailing from some of the world’s top universities. TriFusion Devices offers breakthrough 3-D printed products and services aimed at revolutionizing the health care and sports-equipment industries in powerful and profitable ways.

Image: The 2016 Rice Business Plan Competition grand prize winner was TriFusion Devices from Texas A&M University. - See more at: http://news.rice.edu/2016/04/18/trifusion-devices-from-texas-am-wins-2016-rice-business-plan-competition-2/#sthash.lnUWo7KY.dpuf 

Members of the class of 2016 are about to take their first steps on career paths. While no one can predict how they will do once they become part of the workforce, the Economic Policy Institute analyzed employment, enrollment, and wage trends to determine their economic prospects.

A paper, titled "Class of 2016," found that this cohort has better job prospects than members of last year’s graduating class. Thanks to the steady economic recovery, these young people are expected to do better than any other class since 2009.

Image: Flickr user Steven Depolo 

When financial services company Square priced its IPO at $9 a share last November, well under the $15+ price that private investors paid the year before, it was a cold shower of reality for the 6-year-old company. The share price did rise during the IPO, but at the end of the day the firm’s value leveled off to around $4 billion, just two-thirds of the $6 billion Square supposedly had been worth. Until the IPO, Square had been one of more than 130 unicorns: privately owned tech companies valued at $1 billion or more.

Everyone knows that large companies share board members, but it’s hard to appreciate just how enmeshed global governance has been for decades until you see the connections. I partnered with Meindert Fennema of the University of Amsterdam and William K. Carroll from the University of Victoria to show how companies’ boards interlock and to study the implications for when a crisis hits. We plotted shared directorships among 176 large companies in 1976 and 2013, two years that followed a major global economic crisis.

Angie Peltzer had an idea, about a year ago: What if a company were created that would let students help other students get into their dream business school instead of paying consultants thousands of dollars to do the job?

It was little more than a concept when Peltzer attended last year’s Startup Weekend Madison, a three-day marathon of brainstorming ideas and transforming them into potential companies.

In Silicon Valley’s Unchecked Arrogance, Ross Baird (Executive Director of Village Capital) and Lenny Mendonca (Director Emeritus at McKinsey) boldly ask an important question that’s becoming a white elephant in the Silicon Valley pitch room: How can we enable great people, regardless of zip code, to solve messy societal problems?

To get to an answer, as investigative journalists would say, we need to follow the money. Baird and Mendonca ask, “How do we change ownership structures to prevent Snapchat, Instagram, and WhatsApp from distributing billion-dollar windfalls among only a couple dozen people?”

Maryland-based Brain Biosciences, Inc. (BrainBio™), developer of high-resolution portable Positron Emission Tomography (PET) instruments, and Universal Medical Systems, Inc. (UMS) of Ohio, an industry leading supplier of veterinary computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems announce the launch of the piPET™ PET scanner. The unit is designed for both small and large animals with particular emphasis on lameness diagnosis in horses. UMS will be the exclusive distributor of piPET for veterinary applications throughout the United States.

A recent report revealed a surprising gender gap: women job hop more than men and it’s getting more pronounced. While the analysts at LinkedIn who did the study said that further research was needed to determine why (it’s not about balancing family and work, as most of the job hoppers weren’t parents yet) the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) may have a clue.

Image: Flickr user Myfuture.com; App Photo: Flickr user Kristaps Bergfelds 

Ideas are wonderful. In fact, ideas are what make the world such an interesting place. Unlike other species, humans have the ability to creatively and artistically brainstorm new ideas that did not previously exist. Unfortunately, ideas are not always enough.

In the business world, you need more than an idea to launch a business, satisfy a paint point, and become wealthy.

Over the last five years, electronic health records (EHRs) have been widely implemented in the United States, and health care systems now have access to vast amounts of data. While they are beginning to apply “big data” techniques to predict individual outcomes like post-operative complications and diabetes risk, big data remains largely a buzzword, not a reality, in the routine delivery of health care. Health systems are still learning how to broadly apply such analytics, outside of case examples, to improve patient outcomes while reducing spending.

Crowdfunding has been growing explosively, with over $2 billion raised via equity and reward crowdfunding in the United States in 2015 alone. (This video explains the different types of crowdfunding.) However, crowdfunding is more than another way of raising funds. In connecting creators and entrepreneurs directly with customers and funders, it transforms the opaque and oligarchical market for early-stage fundraising into a more democratic, open one.

Business has taken me to Asia, Europe, Minnesota, Boston, Colorado, and several other U.S. cities in the last two months. Sounds pretty awesome right? While parts of being the Founder of an international startup are great, it’s also a grueling endeavor that will test your mind, body, and soul. Everyone that lives in the startup world has heard the clichés about embracing failure, pivoting, relentless pressure, long work hours and the highs and lows that come with building a business.

If your new logo design causes even a fraction of the confusion that Uber's recent rollout did, you might want to take a step back and consider alternative options. Even better, weigh all future possibilities before you start designing. Rushing such a critical element of your branding is rarely the right move.

Nearly a decade ago, AOL cofounder Steve Case was at a conference when a promising young entrepreneur "sheepishly" approached him to share how Case had unintentionally helped turn him into a coder.

As Case recalled in a recent interview, the man approached him and said: "I just want you to know that I learned to program when I was 13-years-old by hacking into the AIM system."

Image: Steve Case, the cofounder of AOL, talks about meeting Mark Zuckerberg for the first time and the future of tech in this wide-ranging interview.IMAGE: AP PHOTO/KEITH SRAKOCIC 

The Turnbull Government has today announced $280,000 to bring one of the world’s top startup accelerators to Australia to help our local startup entrepreneurs expand and grow their businesses.

MassChallenge is partnering with Microsoft Australia and the Australian Government to strengthen the nation’s startup ecosystem through idea-pitching competitions, startup boot camps and local and international mentoring.

What precisely is social entrepreneurship? Ask three people to define it, and you’ll get three different answers.

This isn’t to suggest the movement is shrouded in mystery. There are accepted understandings of it. Social entrepreneurs are agents of change. Their reason for existing is to tackle problems confronting society.