McDonald's and Walmart, the two biggest private-sector employers in the U.S., don't pay their workers much. This more or less eternal truth is making one of its increasingly frequent appearances in the news this week. McDonald's is catching flak for a "sample monthly budget" for employees that sets aside $20 a month for health insurance and no money at all for heat. (Hey, it's July.) Walmart, meanwhile, is threatening to cut back on plans to open stores in Washington, D.C., after the D.C. council voted to impose a "super minimum wage" of $12.50 an hour on big retailers.

We often write about B-school research findings in this space. Now we're going to let you take part. This video, presented by Harvard Business School associate professor Michael Norton, is a game. In fact, it's the same game Norton used in research he recently conducted, so when you play the game here, you'll be doing exactly what Norton's subjects did. The game is simple and doesn't take long.

My name is Cathi Kennedy and I am the program coordinator for the MSc in Patent Law. This week I’m attending the Association of University Technology Managers’ (AUTM) Central Regional Meeting in Indianapolis. Representatives from universities, law firms, and industry are here to exchange ideas, network, and learn about new trends and practices in the field.

If you want to move to a hot startup scene without breaking the bank, consider heading to Austin, Texas. Bonus: When the music-and-technology conference South By Southwest rolls through, you won’t have to scramble to find a hotel.

Austin ranks as the No. 1 place to launch your business, according to a new ranking by GoodApril, a San Francisco-based tax-planning startup. The ranking compares the seven hottest startup scenes in the U.S. across measures that matter most to new entrepreneurs: median tech-employee earnings, maximum personal income tax, property tax, the cost of housing and the cost of office space. Perhaps surprisingly, San Francisco, the longtime Silicon Valley startup mecca, ranks as the worst place to launch, due to high costs and taxes, GoodApril found.

My post this month on Tech Cocktail is about the frustrations that we all feel, especially entrepreneurs, when things don’t go our way and we want to lash out in frustration. This hit home for me this week with the announcement of the verdict in the George Zimmerman (Trayvon Martin) trial where it seemed that everyone, no matter their point of view, was angry at the outcome.

A buried and forgotten seawall built in 1882 may have significantly weakened Hurricane Sandy's grip on one New Jersey town, new research shows.

Bay Head — a beach town located along the northeast shores of New Jersey — lay directly in the violent path of Hurricane Sandy when the storm barreled toward the Eastern Seaboard last October. And yet only one house from the town was lost to the storm. The neighboring town of Mantoloking, on the other hand, lost more than a quarter of its houses.

The Iowa Innovation Corp. today said it’s seeking proposals from candidates interested in managing the new Iowa Innovation Fund.

The private nonprofit group is working to set up the fund, which will provide early-stage financing for Iowa-based companies with high-growth potential. Lawmakers in the last session agreed to boost to 25 percent state credits for fund investors and allow the credits to be transferred once. The tax credit amount had been 20 percent.

Biotechnology companies can access financial and management resources through venture capitalist (VC) firms. An analysis of 1,490 VC investments shows that country-of-origin (CO) of biotech companies has an effect on the participation by VC firms in various biotech subsectors. Specifically, it is found that US biotech companies tend to have higher amount received per VC firm, greater number of VC firms investing in them and greater biotech investment experience of the investing VC firms. Asia-Pacific biotech companies have consistently less VC firms investing in them and these investing VC firms tend to have less biotech investment experience. VC firms with greater biotech investment experience are also investing in European biotech companies more than those from the Americas less US. CO also correlates with outcomes in the four of the six key biotech subsectors studied. These findings suggest a strong CO effect of VC investment in biotech companies.

SINGAPORE: A committee comprising members of Singapore's entrepreneurship community has started its review of entrepreneurship in Singapore.

A release from the Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE) said the Entrepreneurship Review Committee which included venture capitalists, angel investors, entrepreneurs and institutes of higher learning, had their first meeting on July 10.

In a recent investigative article on risk-taking and entrepreneurship in the June 20 Wall Street Journal, Ben Casselman finds that Americans have become more risk-averse.  This decline of risk-taking and entrepreneurship is manifested in the decline of new business formations, start-up rates, new job creation, and fewer adults changing jobs. It is creating less churn and dynamism in the economy, important characteristics of a growing economy.    

Starting a business is usually the result of a personal dream or need. Investors tell me that they invest in people, more than the idea. Customers buy from people, not from a company, at least at the startup stages. That’s why it’s important to build a personal brand, in parallel and before your business brand. This will kick-start your business, and improve your odds of success.

So you’ve got a startup. How sexy of you, how innovative, how new. Well I hate to burst your bubble but startups are a dime a dozen these days, it’s the new black and wearing it doesn’t make you special. In such a competitive sphere such as the tech scene (in Africa or around the world) being a startup isn’t enough, you have to figure out how to stand out in the crowd. One way to do just this is to present your company, your idea or product, to whomever your audience member(s) might be at any given time, with confidence and passion (and some panache never hurt anyone). You need to know the art of the pitch.

I don’t have a particularly complicated job. I’m a copywriter and sometimes I create content that ends up on the internet. You would imagine this would be pretty simple for my parents to explain to their friends. Not so – the other day I caught my mom telling someone that I do ‘something with websites’. Although I would like to claim the wide variety of awesome this mysterious website-ery must entail, it’s simply not true. You can’t really blame her though; modern-day career options are much more diverse than they were a generation ago and it’s hard to keep up. Doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, those are simple to explain and understand. But when it comes to titles like ‘User Experience Designer’, ‘Online Reputation Manager’ and ‘Social Media Content Editor’ things go a bit wonky. I sincerely think my grandparents must secretly wonder whether we’re making all this up to cover for the fact that we spend our days tinkering on a glorified typewriter.

"What do you know now that you wish you had known at age 20?"

That's the question Benjamin Ling (who you should definitely follow on Twitter), a partner at venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, posed to to his Twitter followers two weeks ago. 

Innovators are dynamic individuals who have changed the world we live in. While a certain set of characteristics cannot really define an innovator, one cannot deny that great innovators do share certain traits. Let us take a look at a few of them.  1) Taking failure in their stride  Innovators fail more times than they succeed. While an idea may look flawless on paper, it may not work in reality due to technical problems or unavailability of resources. But innovators do not give up. It is their lot to take the bitter pill of failure repeatedly before they experience the sweet taste of success. 

The Greater Boston startup scene is beginning to resemble the NICU at Mass. General — incubators everywhere. The latest is OpenIncubate, which launched Thursday, offering funding and workspace to entrepreneurs committed to open-source computing.

OpenIncubate is actually a small new network of open-source accelerator programs backed by venture capital firms in Massachusetts, California and Texas. Locally, Battery Ventures will provide financing and host teams at its Waltham office.

I’ve quickly discovered that an entrepreneurial endeavor that sounds sexy and successful when explained in 30 seconds over a beer can be far from it.  This past year I worked on a new startup, Maculens, which produces an optical coating that reduces discomfort and glare from oncoming headlights at nighttime. There’s a little science involved but it’s not rocket science, and the revenue model is a lot more straightforward than social-anything; we make product and then sell product.

Healthbox, a leading business accelerator focused on healthcare technology and technology-enabled companies, is expanding its accelerator program to Nashville this fall with anchor partner BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee. Healthbox is strategically building local partnerships in key cities to stimulate a pipeline of new solutions, while creating a global community of leaders passionate about improving healthcare. This is the second new Healthbox location revealed in 2013; another one was launched in Boston in April, preceded by one in Chicago in 2012.

Failure can be devastating, but business owners who dust themselves off after a decision gone awry are often better for it. Learning the hard way can lead to better processes, stronger hires and improved customer retention, to name a few upsides.

We asked several successful entrepreneurs from the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) to share which decision of late had truly terrible consequences—and what they learned from it.

Friends tell you what you want to hear. Mentors tell you what you need to hear. When the message is the same from both, you don’t need the mentor anymore. In that sense, you should think of a mentor more like your advisor who has done all he can. You always need the friend.

Also don’t confuse a business mentor with a business coach. A mentor’s aim is to teach you what to do and how, in specific situations, unlike a coach who helps you develop your generic skills for deciding what to do and how. The mentor helps the entrepreneur fill an experience gap, and a coach helps fill a skill gap. Both may be required.