Senators should be aware of a critical fact, as they debate immigration reform: If we don’t want foreign-born talent in the United States, other countries are more than happy to take the talent, and the innovation potential that goes with it, off of our hands.

“I’m here to send the message that Canada’s open for business—we welcome the entrepreneurs that America is turning away” said Canadian Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney at Stanford Law School this week. His message to Silicon Valley’s immigrant entrepreneurs: “If you’re thinking of doing a start-up in North America, why don’t you come to Canada? You can do so permanently. Create the wealth there, create the jobs in Canada, bring your huge human capital to Canada, and contribute to our economy.” The Canadian government even purchased a large billboard on Route 101—the main thoroughfare between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, which says “H-1B problems? Pivot to Canada”.

My neighbor Adam is a so-called Millennial. That means, according to those who follow pop culture today, that he is between the ages of 19 and 30. (He's 21.) Adam will be entering his senior year of college in September at Penn State. He was born the same year that Bill Clinton was elected president. He never knew Michael Keaton as Batman and he's never heard of Murphy Brown. He grew up watching Rugrats on Nickelodeon and Arthur on PBS. He has always had a cell phone and can't imagine a world without the Internet. Growing up, he only had to deal with 150 Pokemon characters (compared to 600 today).

Every time you purchase a painting, use a hand-made serving bowl, attend a live musical performance, or watch a film, you are supporting a creative economy of artists, performers, and filmmakers that contribute to a more sustainable society. With hundreds of artist, individual, and business members, the Rocky Neck Art Colony (RNAC) in Gloucester, Massachusetts is perhaps the poster child for what its president Karen Ristuben sees as the creative economy. “We’re doing everything that a non-profit organization can do to support artistic entrepreneurship,” she says. “Without a community like us, individual artists have close to zero chance of having an impact on the public at-large and our economy. People have to create. What’s life without art?”

Life moves pretty fast….. sometimes it’s best to sit back and reflect on your priorities.

The unintended consequence of a startup can be acceleration of everything around you.  It happens so fast, in fact, you end up losing perspective on more important aspects of life.  It’s easy to get out of bed each day, focus on what’s in front of you, go to bed only to get back up the next day to do it all again.  If you are not careful you will find yourself sprinting and spinning in place, making no forward progress at all.

Equity crowdfunding has a large and growing base of global supporters and advocates. Every few months we see new developments in securities-related legislation, and activity kicking off in countries around the world that are advancing crowdfunding for businesses.

On the flip side, equity crowdfunding has also had a host of angry or concerned detractors- some of which are in the angel establishment.

Who will win this year’s MassChallenge? The Boston accelerator is set to get its fourth session underway with the announcement of the 128 new startups that will participate. A quarter of them are life science or health IT companies, and some of them sound particularly promising.

Benevolent Technology for Health, for example, is focused on making an affordable, self-adjustable prosthetic device for the developing world. DS Labs Inc. is developing a discreetly worn breast pump. Sensulin LLC could have a glucose-responsive insulin for type 1/type 2 diabetes patients. And Vecoy Nanomedicines won the pitch contest at FutureMed with its nano-scale “virus traps” to kill infections.

Fenwick & West LLP, one of the nation's premier law firms providing comprehensive legal services to high technology and life science clients, today announced the results of its First Quarter 2013 Silicon Valley Venture Capital Survey.

The survey analyzed the valuations and terms of venture financings for 118 technology and life science companies headquartered in the Silicon Valley that raised capital in the first quarter of 2013.

Vibram vice president of product design Peter Von Conta met resistance during every step of the process while launching the FiveFingers running shoe, a product that nearly everyone in the shoe business thought was destined for failure. As the critiques got louder, Vibram dug in its heels and launched one of the most successful products ever created in its 75-year history.

“The worst piece of advice that I’ve ever had is someone telling me I couldn’t do something,” says Von Conta. The FiveFingers were so successful that they caught the eye of NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neal, who asked for a custom pair to put on his size 23 feet. Once again, Von Conta was presented with a seemingly impossible task.

Most people cringe at the thought of these two terms used in the same sentence, and it falls into the same scary category of kids and drugs. Why?

We don’t like what we don’t know or understand. Parents don’t like the thought of their kids embracing social media because they don’t fully understand the benefits and dangers. In many cases, they also don’t understand the social platforms to their full extent. Education is key for the parents as well as the kids. Not to mention teachers! Everyone involved needs to understand the pros and the cons.

David Karp, who sold Tumblr to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, is one more in a line of twenty-somethings and even pre-twenty-somethings whose technology innovations have made them a fortune.

We've seen this before. In the 1990s, young techies with purple hair, ponytails, and earrings (that was the men) disrupted boardrooms; in the 2000s, they wear hoodies. College dropouts such as Mark Zuckerberg have quickly created empires. Parents or future parents-in-law have lent their kitchen tables and garages, as Sergey Brin's mother-in-law-to-be Esther Wojcicki did for Google.

On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook testified in front of the Congressional Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations as a part of their look into the company's corporate tax practices — according to Sen. Carl Levin, the chairman of the committee, "Apple successfully sought the holy grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere." I asked Mihir A. Desai, a professor and dean at Harvard Business School, a professor at Harvard Law School, and the author of a 2012 HBR article on taxing businesses, a few questions about how this investigation fits into a larger debate about the corporate tax code. Our edited conversation is below.

An interview with Michael Raynor, director at Deloitte Services LP and coauthor of the article Three Rules for Making a Company Truly Great.

Astronomers have seen it coming. Starting this summer—possibly this month—a large cloud of gas and dust and perhaps a star will begin to ricochet through the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy, the home of a supermassive black hole. The ensuing celestial fireworks should reveal much about the mysterious central core of the galaxy, a region kept shrouded in darkness by dust and distance.

Scientists have long wondered why the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, unlike the black holes at the center of other large galaxies, is perplexingly quiet. It doesn't seem to be gobbling up matter at nearly the rate we would expect.

Results Matter...especially when it comes to spending huge amounts of time and money setting up a new business location. That's why it is important to locate the operation in a city or region that knows how to grow its economy and has the track record to prove it.

For this year's Leading Locations study, Area Development analyzed economic and work force data for 380 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) — both for 2011–2012 (recent performance) and 2007–2012 (duration of the Great Recession). The goal was to identify which cities across America are emerging from the recession as economic front-runners — and why.

Cognoptix announced that its Sapphire II eye test identified Alzheimer’s patients via a beta amyloid signature in their eyes in a 10-subject proof-of-concept clinical trial, according to a company press release.

See Also New approach to services improves access to eye care in ... Vision Council educates Congress on low vision in veterans ... New WCO president: Access to care a primary goal ... The Sapphire II is an in-office, drug/device diagnostic system designed as an aid in the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease pathology. A ligand or contrast agent and software-controlled optical instrument allows for noninvasive detection and assessment of Alzheimer’s by measuring its hallmark, beta amyloid, in the supranuclear region of the lens of the eye, the release said.

The new $5.5 million innovation center in South Boston’s Innovation District will be known as District Hall.

Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino revealed the name this morning during a tour of the 12,000-square-foot facility that’s billed as a first for the city and the only freestanding innovation center in the world.

Located at 75 Northern Ave., the center will provide a place for entrepreneurs and mentors to gather, collaborate and create jobs, according to Menino.

Everyone who has any stake in creating virtual content, whether developing it, marketing it, producing it or simply writing about it, has one dream: That their content goes viral.

Within minutes, your video, blog or picture is seen by thousands of people. In a day, you’ve notched up over a million views. But when fortune blesses you with this bounty, how do you react? What do you do? You’ve got millions of customers at your door; what’s your next step?

The world we live in is changing at a dizzying rate and sectors including energy, technology, entertainment, communications, finance, sports, manufacturing and engineering are all experiencing shifts on a seismic scale. Many of the innovative advances of the past ten years, from smart phones to digital cameras have become commoditised and creativity has become the currency of success. In this article author Matthew Griffin shows demostrates how large and small organisations alike can build lean, agile, high performance innovations teams and brance any shift successfully

The job description “data scientist” didn’t exist five years ago. No one advertised for an expert in data science, and you couldn’t go to school to specialize in the field. Today, companies are fighting to recruit these specialists, courses on how to become one are popping up at many universities, and the Harvard Business Review even proclaimed that data scientist is the “sexiest” job of the 21st century.

Data scientists take huge amounts of data and attempt to pull useful information out. The job combines statistics and programming to identify sometimes subtle factors that can have a big impact on a company’s bottom line, from whether a person will click on a certain type of ad to whether a new chemical will be toxic in the human body.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted it would happen, and now it’s happened. Tesla, the electric car maker, has paid off the DOE loan that allowed it to build a factory and start building and selling its Model S electric car. And it’s done so nine years ahead of schedule, according to the company (see “Musk Says Tesla Will Pay Off Its Loans in Half the Time”).

To pay off the loan, it wired $451.8 million to the government today. The money comes from last week’s stock and convertible senior notes offering of $1 billion, which in turn came after the company’s stock had shot up in response to the announcement that it was profitable for the first time ever last quarter and after Consumer Reports said that the car was the best the organization had ever tested.