Economic development is something every nation desires, for overall economic prosperity should result in the general well-being of its people. Business incubators and innovation hubs are a very practical tool for bringing the best ideas to life and to a point of scale and commercialisation.

Traditionally, the majority of entrepreneurs have been logical thinkers, problem solvers, with full attention to details. These are the stereotypical left-brain engineers. Yet I see a big shift from the knowledge age, with its left-brain foundation, to a critical focus today on visualization, creativity, relationships, and collaboration, which are more in the domain of right-brainers.

There are parts of running a business that are absolutely essential. And while you know that these things, such as protecting company data and identifying your target market, are important, actually doing them can be a bit more difficult. Luckily, members of the online small business community have you covered with these top business tips from the past week. Read on for the full list in this week’s Small Business Trends community news and information roundup.

Entrepreneurship is a demanding profession. Once you get involved in a business you own a stake in, most of what you do will ultimately have a reflection on your self-image and long-term reputation. Successful entrepreneurs learn how to figure out ways to make a positive impact on the world around them.

We all want to innovate bigger, faster, cheaper and more consistently.  One way to do this is to learn from our past mistakes or successes, or better still, the mistakes and triumphs of others.  However, to broadly reapply lessons across different opportunity spaces, we need to find underlying insights that can transfer from one domain to another. There are many ways to do this, but I find that looking at innovation through the lens of cognitive, memory and behavioral biases allows me to see patterns, and useful generalizations that can be broadly reapplied. I’ve therefore picked seven common innovation mistakes, that I learnt the hard way, and have then used some biases that I haven’t previously discussed to help make them generalizable.

After a decade-long drought, there has been a rush of tech IPOs in the U.S. and Europe, and Index Ventures has been able to observe this at close hand through our investments in companies like Arista Networks, Criteo, Etsy, Hortonworks, Just Eat, King and Zendesk.

A few weeks ago, we invited a number of these startups-turned-public-companies and their advisors to our London offices to share their experience and best practices with the next generation of companies. Members of our finance, operations, and communications communities heard top tips from CFOs and general counsels as well as practitioners from the London Stock Exchange, leading investment banks, law firms and PR advisors.

Quick test: How much do you know about your city’s startup community? Do you know who your most successful startups are? Do you know where in the city they’re based? Do you know the companies’ histories and where they’re trying to go in the future?

Some of you may know this information pretty well; others, barely at all. If you’re among the latter, you may find that learning more about startups in your city isn’t always easy. Often, we don’t hear about our most innovative homegrown businesses until they’ve already morphed into major companies.

This week, reporters Neil Versel and Stephanie Baum will join Chris Seper to review insights from the recent Health Datapalooza conference in Washington, D.C. On Wednesday, Neil spoke to former VA CTO Peter Levin, and will touch on the development of Blue Button and current efforts for increased patient engagement.

These topics, as well as other important news from the week that was in healthcare, are on deck for MedHeads at 4 pm Eastern today on Google+ and the embed below.

Eager to leave the daily grind and be their own boss, more and more Americans are now working on their own as freelancers. As of September 2014, 53 million Americans work as freelancers — that’s more than a third of the total workforce! Some of these freelancers choose to create a formal business entity, while others remain sole proprietors (the default business structure if you never set anything formal). Selecting a business structure is an important decision, and often one filled with anxiety as new freelancers are worried about being open to a lawsuit or paying too much in taxes.

Innovation is critical to the success of a business, or an individual, coming up with a new product, service, method or procedure. And we 've all heard the cliché regarding innovation, that it requires thinking outside the box.

In early May, Elon Musk introduced the world to something very new and innovative -- batteries and systems to store renewable energy and provide power to just about everything. The invention, however, is not the most amazing part. It is scale and risk that Musk and Tesla has taken to challenge the status quo and invent an innovative way to satisfy the world's growing energy requirements that have, until recently, been dependent on a depleting and environmentally damage resource -- fossil fuels. In addition to the economic challenge, he is taking a big political, social and competitive risk -- going up against very powerful and entrenched forces that are invested in the past. In short, he is showing the world that he is not afraid of failing.

As things stand, Europe is still not innovative enough. The European innovation scoreboard for 2015 shows us a way to improve this, pointing out that there is much to be gained in the field of regional innovation.

So, at this year's week of innovative regions in Europe (Wire) conference in Riga, the focus on regional research and innovation will again be at the heart of our discussions. 

There is a growing need for more innovative projects in the regions and a smooth cooperation between the regional, national and European actors involved. 

Entrepreneurs who require funding for their startup have long counted on self-accredited high net worth individuals (“angels”) to fill their needs, after friends and family, and before they qualify for institutional investments (“VCs”). New crowd funding platforms on the Internet, like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, as well as the Jobs Act of 2012, are expected by many to ramp up regular people’s ability to fund new opportunities and kill the need for angel groups.

Button up shirts, wireless mikes and a puddle of spotlight. At first glance rehearsals for Fledge “Demo Day” look like any start up pitch event around town. But these entrepreneurs aren’t promoting apps and gadgets. They’re pitching businesses that will further development of their home countries — from Argentina to Zambia.

The Class of 2009 may have graduated with the burden of recessionary economics weighing down their diplomas, but this year’s college and high school grads are not much better off. So says the Economic Policy Institute, which just released a report on jobs and unemployment for young adults entering the workforce.

Your big travel plans might seem like a waste of money. What will you come back with, besides some photos on your phone and a few memories. If you bought a TV with that money instead, you'd watch it every day. While that might seem more valuable, it's been determined way beyond reasonable doubt that experiences are more likely than material goods to lead to happiness. Since this new truth was first unearthed back in 2003 by psychologists Tom Gilovich and Leaf Van Boven, pioneering researchers have been joining the dots of previous work and conducting new studies to work out why: why are experiences so much better than material goods at making us happy?

When PayPal founder and tech investor Peter Thiel first beckoned young people to drop out of college and become entrepreneurs, the alternative he offered was pretty controversial, Thiel Foundation CEO Alana Ackerson says.

About 100 college-age people applied in 2011 to join the first group of 20 awarded the Thiel-led foundation’s Thiel Fellowship, which comes with $100,000 and a support network of mentors to help the ex-students turn their creative projects into startup companies.

ROCKVILLE, Md., May 20, 2015  -- Today, Relevant Health, a newly launched innovative health technology startup accelerator focused on bringing products to market, announced that it is now accepting applications from health tech startups for its Fall 2015 class. Additionally, the accelerator launched its website and the portal to its streamlined application process. U.S. and international startups are encouraged to apply.

Relevant Health's five-month program involves an intensive product-focused curriculum that gives founders of health tech startups the skills to define, develop, position and launch a viable health tech product. The new accelerator will be based out of a brand-new cowork space in the Rockville Innovation Center, centrally located in the heart of the Montgomery County (Maryland) life sciences corridor. Companies admitted to the accelerator will have access to the cowork facility along with other support that includes up to $50,000 in funding, mentorship, development support from a pool of software engineers, and access to the local health tech ecosystem.

The crunch is a daunting, if surmountable, barrier for coastal startups. For startups in Middle America, it is the Valley of Death.

Stranded between funding trends, these regional startups are left without the resources they need to define their companies as long-term investments. Unlike consumer-facing startups, which are difficult to justify being located away from the coasts, many of these startups have a “reason” to have been launched in the middle of the country. They are B2B software startups (almost always SaaS) and are poised to disrupt the mainstays of American industry — manufacturing and energy, among others — but are stalling before the A-stage for lack of further funding opportunities.

Image: http://venturebeat.com

SAN JOSE -- Companies in Silicon Valley are planning a hiring spree this year, an indication that the economic upswing in the Bay Area has a long way to travel before it runs its course, according to a survey of the region's chief executives released Tuesday.

The job boom in the counties of Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, southern Alameda and northern Santa Cruz looks robust at least through this year and next, but the employment expansion is accompanied by woes such as housing and traffic that will hurt the region's ability to attract a high-caliber workforce, according to the annual CEO Business Climate Survey by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.