Germany has a long-standing reputation for life science innovation. However, most pharmaceutical and biotech companies are now headquartered in the US, and significantly more digital health solutions are developed in Silicon Valley and Boston than in Berlin or Munich..

GALS is part of a broader initiative of the German government to foster high-tech innovation and life science entrepreneurship in Germany. Now, these 4 start-up biotechs will be nurtured over the next 12 months, to push their business ideas to success, from from treating tinnitus patients with filtered music and preventing stroke via a mobile ECG app.

The signs of the gap—really, a chasm—between the poor and the super-rich are hard to miss in Silicon Valley. On a bustling morning in downtown Palo Alto, the center of today’s technology boom, apparently homeless people and their meager belongings occupy almost every available public bench. Twenty minutes away in San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, a camp of homeless people known as the Jungle—reputed to be the largest in the country—has taken root along a creek within walking distance of Adobe’s headquarters and the gleaming, ultramodern city hall.

(TNS) -- It seems as if every state and metro area is striving to be an “innovation economy” these days — indeed, President Barack Obama talked about it in his State of the Union address and it was a theme throughout the Greater Miami Chamber’s economic summit this week. Yet, according to some recent analyses, Florida may be falling behind.

I came to Wharton knowing I wanted to become an investor.

From Entrepreneur…

Prior to business school, I was an entrepreneur. I launched my first company from my dorm room at the University of Southern California when I was 19. I went on to create three additional companies – one of which: http://www.mbamama.com/, I am building while I’m at Wharton.

There is no job that can compare to being a founder. Seeing an idea that you conceptualized and created become a product/brand that people value is phenomenal. Despite all the perks of being your own boss, the entrepreneurial path is incredibly challenging, especially for risk averse people.

Image: http://mba.wharton.upenn.edu 

The first year of entrepreneurship is always the hardest.

You’re scared silly. You’re a nervous wreck. You’re pulsing with adrenaline. You’re running on caffeine. You’re making life-changing decisions every other minute. You’re lonely.

And you’re kicking ass.

Entrepreneurship is a form of self-punishment that few people dare to engage in, and in which few succeed.

You can’t "major" in entrepreneurship, and even if you could, you'd find it virtually impossible to learn to be an influential entrepreneur on your own.

Instead, the best lessons come from experience, and only by adopting beneficial habits on a daily ba

The Obama administration has launched a ‘moonshot’ initiative to cure cancer that will involve increasing resources – both private and public – to fight cancer and break down walls between disciplines in the oncology arena. The effort will be led by vice president Joe Biden, who lost his son to brain cancer last year, President Obama announced during his final State of the Union speech. Biden worked with Congress last month to provide the US National Institutes of Health with its strongest budget in over a decade, Obama noted. ‘Let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,’ he added.

Snøhetta’s first project was the 1989 reconceptualization of the Library of Alexandria, a lost wonder of the world. Nearly three decades later, the Norwegian architecture firm is still updating iconic cultural centers: Along with a highly publicized Times Square makeover, it’s also designing a 235,000-square-foot expansion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which reopens in May after a three-year closure. "Alexandria (involved) tons of international stakeholders," says Claire Fellman, a director at the firm. "We developed a skill shepherding a vision through a complex process." This helped the firm during its work on SFMOMA, which sits in the gentrified SoMa district. Rather than cave to commercial pressure to join the skyline-forming fortresses nearby, Snøhetta aims to open up SFMOMA to the neighborhood. The 10-story expansion, located behind the main building, features sunlit public spaces and a fiberglass facade that offers passersby glimpses of the galleries. Upon completion, it will make SFMOMA the largest museum in California—and the largest museum of modern art in the country.

Image: Modern times: Snøhetta’s evocative, $610 million SFMOMA expansion has been six years in the making. Photo: Henrik Kam

Gazelles – companies that show 20 percent revenue growth annually for four consecutive years, starting from a revenue base of at least $1 million – may be scarce on the landscape, but they are incredibly productive. The fastest-growing 1 percent of firms generate 40 percent of new jobs in the U.S. economy, according to white paper issued by 2015 Strategic Innovation Summit: Enabling Economies for the Future at Harvard University.

Image: https://hbr.org

Good help is hard to find. At least that’s what one-third of hiring managers say, and the talent shortage isn’t just in technical fields. Good sales reps, managers, executives, and financial professionals are among the most difficult to find, according to a 2015 survey by Manpower Group.

Sought-after people have a good mix of hard and soft skills, and those skills are always changing because today’s business climate is in constant flux. If you’re looking to get hired, hire someone new, or grow your company, here are eight skills that will help you do it in 2016:

Recent shifts in technologies, demographics, and markets have created a new normal for manufacturers. Those that adapt quickly will emerge more innovative and agile than their competitors, but not without undergoing a transformation in everything from the people they hire to how they create value. Every day, hundreds of senior executives rely on MAPI for solutions to these type of challenges, which often don’t fit neatly into an organization chart. These are the big-picture issues, or megatrends, that are dramatically reshaping our industry and that MAPI is uniquely positioned to help its members navigate.

What US city is home to the world’s largest private research institute, the largest land-grant university, the Midwest’s largest venture capital firm, IBM’s premier data analytics center, the United States’ #1 science museum, #1 metropolitan library, #1 zoo and Victoria’s Secret?    Smart and sexy – that’s Columbus, OH, USA!  And you’re invited to join US there for the ICF Annual Summit and Awards, June 13-17, 2016.

Entrepreneurs are an ambitious, determined, and at times blindly optimistic bunch.

While irrational optimism is undoubtedly a good thing (and absolutely necessary) when you're running your own business, it can expose you to a lot of potentially damaging tendencies.

Image: http://entrepreneurs.about.com

When Square went public in November 2015 at around $3 billion — a significant discount to the $6 billion it raised in 2014 — some media outlets spoke openly of the extinction of the “unicorn,” as tech companies that achieve a billion-dollar-plus valuation in the private markets have come to be called.

First things first: There's really no such thing as un-creative entrepreneurship. Building a company means putting something new into the world and bringing dormant ideas to life. It’s a nonstop exercise in overcoming self-doubt and embracing self-expression.

That's something entrepreneurs tend to forget at our own peril, but it's something I was reminded of while reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest book, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. Part inspiration, part how-to, it offers up both a philosophy of creativity and advice for living a more creatively fulfilling life.

If I learned anything from The Princess Diaries, it is first, to never go for the conventionally hot guy, second, that eyebrows really do have the power to transform your entire face, and finally, that courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. And it’s like, okay Eduard Christoff Philippe Gérard Renaldi, prince of Genovia, that’s a lovely sentiment, but can you say easier said than done?

Raise your hand if you think a quick scan of Facebook or the news is the most common source of distraction at work. Turns out, social media and web surfing still don’t hold a candle to chitchat or a coffee break as the biggest time sucks in the workplace.

According to recent analysis of an online survey taken by 1,005 U.S.-based full-time workers conducted by BambooHR, traditional workplace distractions trump digital pursuits when employees are on the clock.

It’s not just parents that continually misuse words and use embarrassing phrases. The thing is that business owners are often just as guilty when it comes to using phrases they think mean one thing but are not entirely appropriate for the situation in which they are being used.

Here are 12 zingers that I personally use incorrectly all the time. Fix them so you don’t embarrass yourself in front of customers, employees, and/or investors:

Motivation can be hard to come by, especially in the face of challenges or difficult work. When you’re thinking about implementing that new idea, or starting that new company or beginning that new regimen -- this is the new year, after all -- it’s easy to talk yourself into procrastinating. Or worse, avoiding your goal altogether.

It’s a big week for robot cars. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is in Detroit today to talk about how the Obama administration plans to smooth the path to getting autonomous cars on the road. The year 2020 keeps being reported as a year when that might happen, though that’s now less than four years away.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com