BioHeaIth Innovation aims to transform Central Maryland into a commercialization hub by building an entrepreneurial ecosystem using the research, funding, networks and business development resources available in the region.

The market for Health Information Technology concepts and new products are moving at a rapid pace. Since the signing of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) by President Obama in 2009 that allocated $36 billion to aid investments in healthcare IT and spurring new initiatives like the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) the environment and funding available to test new products significantly escalated.

Fast forward four years—there remains to be enormous untapped market opportunity with many new products being brought to fruition and highly innovative new concepts under development by the private and public sectors.

Maryland, a significant center of the health care industry nationally and home to the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Johns Hopkins University, the University System of Maryland, and a robust private sector has emerging opportunities within the Health IT industry sector from telemedicine and remote monitoring to electronic medical records and mobile health.

Harvard University announced on Tuesday that Hansjörg Wyss had doubled down on a contribution to his namesake Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at the university with a $125-million gift.

The institute was founded in 2009 with a previous $125-million gift from the Swiss-born medical-equipment mogul, who earned an M.B.A. from the university in 1965. The initial gift was reportedly the largest individual donation that Harvard had yet received. In 2004, Mr. Wyss gave $25-million to Harvard’s business school for its graduate program.

Think entrepreneurs are only in it for the money? Think again.  New research has found that entrepreneurs have a number of reasons besides making money for starting their own business.

Entrepreneurs say the freedom to pursue new opportunities is the biggest reason for starting their own business. Additionally, entrepreneurs also say they start their own businesses to follow a personal passion while others say they do so to be their own boss. Making money was a lower priority than all those reasons among entrepreneurs in their decision to start a business.

A VC whose name escapes me once said, "There are entrepreneurs and there are Entrepreneurs!"

I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that, but I'll tell you what I think. I think the term "entrepreneur" has become more than a little overused, watered down, diluted.

That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. This is supposed to be the era of the entrepreneur. Practically everyone has a business, a brand, a blog. Everybody's a CEO of one. And yet, relatively few actually embody the true meaning of the word "entrepreneur." So what does it mean?

Innovation is key to kick-starting growth and helping economic recovery, delegates were told at the Open Innovation 2.0 Conference in Dublin Castle yesterday.

The two-day programme brings together academics, business figures and politicians, recognises leading innovators and features a free technology showcase at the Mansion House.

The business world has been watching this emerging generation with trepidation, and a lot of people haven’t been sure who would be the winners, and who would be the losers. Can Gen-Y, much less the new Generation Z (1995-2010), survive as entrepreneurs, and do they have the passion and commitment it takes to run a startup and attract investors?

My own perspective is that the recession was good for Gen-Y (Millennials), because it forced them to face reality, often for the first time in their life. In the last few years, even college grads with advanced degrees don’t have job opportunities waiting for them. But I’m happy to report that I see more and more of them impressively stepping up to the entrepreneurial plate.

From tar­geted drug delivery mech­a­nisms to super­sen­si­tive imaging tech­niques, nan­otech­nology holds many promises for med­i­cine. But advances taking place in the research lab will help few patients without suc­cessful trans­la­tion into clin­ical and com­mer­cial envi­ron­ments, said Srinivas Sridhar, Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Physics and director the Nanomed­i­cine IGERT Center, an Inte­gra­tive Grad­uate Edu­ca­tion and Research Trainee­ship jointly funded by the National Sci­ence Foun­da­tion and the National Cancer Institute.

Since its incep­tion in 2005, the center has sought to estab­lish edu­ca­tional and research lead­er­ship in the fields of nanomed­i­cine and nanobi­ology, according to Sridhar, but only recently has it begun to expand into the final fron­tier: trans­la­tion. National funding agen­cies have sounded the call for keeping the research eye on com­mer­cial­iza­tion, he said, but being suc­cessful, he explained, “requires an inno­va­tion ecosystem. It’s not just sci­en­tists and engi­neers; you’ve got to have many others, like reg­u­la­tors, CEOs, entre­pre­neurs, gov­ern­ment offi­cials, and ven­ture capitalists.”

The innovators who shake up industries the most do so by reimagining how things should look from the ground up. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs imagined a world where everyone owned a computer, not just the corporations that could afford an IBM mainframe. Twitter cofounder Evan Williams imagined a world where everyone could publish content on the Internet, not just the media companies who could afford expensive Web publishing programs.

Incremental innovations occur everywhere, but breakthrough innovations—the kind that leverage new technologies and business models to drive down costs, increase accessibility, and improve services—have tended to remain the province of the private sector. Returnseeking investors and entrepreneurs reap the financial rewards of changing the world by tearing down the structures of old industries.

An Open Letter to Daphne Koller Co-Founder and Co-President of Coursera and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University

Dear Professor Koller,

Because I share your vision of creating a world in which all have access to an excellent and empowering education, I would like to propose a new online course for you to make freely available through the Coursera platform. Its title is “The Implications of Coursera’s For-Profit Business Model for Global Public Education.”

On the heels of the $610,000 coffee date with Apple CEO Tim Cook, online charity auction platform CharityBuzz is offering lunches with some of Silicon Valley's top venture capitalists. If you'd love to share your best ideas with or pick the brains of VCs — and have the cash to give to charity — this might be the perfect opportunity for you.

From now until June 11, you can bid on power lunches to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of the Greater Bay Area. More than 20 venture capitalists, including Tim Draper, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Shervin Pishevar, advisor for Menlo Ventures; and David Lee, co-founder and managing director of SV Angel, are offering lunches.

In an impressively short time, Kickstarter has quickly become the go-to high-impact mashup of crowdsourcing sensibility and entrepreneurial endeavor. If you've got a genuinely creative idea — or even a "me, too with a twist" — Kickstarter's "crowd funding" platform offers a genuinely innovative way to finance creativity and innovation. Since its 2009 launch, Kickstarter claims that more than 4.1 million people have pledged over $619 million to fund over 41,000 projects. It's exciting.

But Kickstarter's inspiration and effectiveness at facilitating "just-in-time creative communities" — or what has also been described as "impulse patronage" — poses a provocative challenge to the C-suites of global organizations worldwide: Where are their Kickstarters? Why aren't leaders tapping the crowdfunding capabilities of their own innovation ecosystems to stimulate their people and ideas?

Stop for a minute and savor cocoa's accomplishments: battler of stroke, diabetes, and heart disease; booster of blood flow; and now, research suggests, calmer of the mind.

While there are many excellent qualities to chocolate, research at an Austrailian university shows that the polyphenols in chocolate can make people feel more calm and contended.

So what else can the lovely stuff do?

You probably heard that a happy employee is a productive one who can boost the bottom line. How much? Here are some numbers:

• 33% higher profitability (Gallup) 
• 43% more productivity (Hay Group) 
• 37% higher sales (Shawn Achor) 
• 300% more innovation (HBR) 
• 51% lower turnover (Gallup) 
• 50% less safety incidents (Babcock Marine Clyde) 
• 66% decrease in sick leave (Forbes) 
• 125% less burnout (HBR)

I was a 21 year-old entrepreneur when the dot-com bubble burst in 2001.  Given the unprecedented volume of dying startups, investors and other business partners became less and less inclined to partner with new companies — especially those led by young founders.

But I felt compelled to win over potential investors, customers, and team members. If I didn’t succeed, neither would my venture.

Here are some of the tactics I used to help establish my credibility as a young founder, and grow my business in spite of my age:

Important post by Joe Bartlett on VC Experts last week: Joe's take on the future of both angel investing and venture capital fund formation.

It will be, Joe says, aggregation of capital by funds formed online, which permit investors to cherry pick what deals they want to participate in (indirectly, through an investment-specific fund).

The no-action letters secured recently by FundersClub and AngelList validate (most) of the necessary legal framework, but Joe sees the successful funds of the future as perhaps being more niche specific - "each Super Platform will aggregate investment opportunities by specific categories … e.g., medical devices; robotics; solar power; wind power; bio-pharma; clean tech; spin outs from a specific academic center's lab ...."

The Affordable Care Act, aka health care reform, aka Obamacare, is spurring a massive creation of new business opportunities.

So says Bryan Sivak, the chief technical officer and entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department of Health and Human Services, the cabinet-level agency that regulates the $2.8 trillion U.S. health care market. Sivak joined VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference today via a video conference (see photo above).

Just one of the areas that’s becoming fertile ground for entrepreneurial innovation: the health insurance exchanges mandated by the law.

The Public Health Service Act indicates that the purpose of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) is to advance translational sciences by coordinating and developing resources that leverage basic research in support of translational science; and by developing partnerships and working cooperatively to foster synergy in ways that do not create duplication, redundancy and competition with industry activities.

A handsomely designed 23-page report came by snail mail the other day: The Minneapolis Creative Vitality Index Report 2013. (a slightly revised pdf here) It's all about the economic contributions creative industries, from art-making to theater to interior design to sound engineering in recording studios, make to Minneapolis. And it's full of statistics and infographics that go into detail: which creative occupations are in growth mode, which art sectors produce the most retail sales, even which Minneapolis zip codes contain the highest concentrations of creative-sector jobs.  

Produced by the City of Minneapolis, the report was written by Gülgün Kayim, the city's recently appointed  Director of Arts, Culture, and Creative Economy, and Anna Muessig. Economic Development Consultant.

After a slow start last year, M&A activity in 2012 picked up during the second half of 2012, bringing the total value of activity to a level just 1 percent below 2011. The continuing economic uncertainty in Europe reduced European deal volume further, although activity there showed a remarkable rebound in the fourth quarter. Deal volume in Asia declined as well. In the Americas, however, deal volume notched up, leading the global M&A market with 48 percent of volume.

Deal premiums remained high. Although global stock-market valuations recovered materially during the year, with the S&P 500 index increasing by more than 10 percent, the average premium paid by acquirers hovered around historic levels—comparable even to the average paid during the M&A boom driven by the high-tech industry at the turn of the century (Exhibit 1).

The mood was bullish Tuesday at the Michigan Growth Capital Symposium Tuesday at the Marriott at EagleCrest in Ypsilanti, and not without good reason.

Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs alike say they are excited that, although investments and fund growth are down nationally, Michigan has continued to make strides both in the amount of deals made and capital available.