The Estonian government approved on Thursday of the implementation plan for the last year of the Estonian entrepreneurship policy 2007-2013, the budget of which is 21.8 million euros and which sets raising the competitiveness of Estonian companies as the biggest challenge, LETA/Postimees Online reports.

Women only get 4.2 percent of venture capitalist funding, which is an incredible gap. A forthcoming study from Stanford's Clayman Institute for Gender Research takes a look at possible reasons, and finds that women without a technical background have a big disadvantage. 

The researchers created identical executive summaries for a startup, and modified the education (technical or non-technical) and gender of the fictional entrepreneur, and asked participants to rate the venture 's likelihood of success and their impression of the entrepreneur. 

The March 23 editorial “Misguided bipartisanship” missed the importance of repealing the medical-device tax.

Medical-device makers represent a high-tech, manufacturing-based industry that largely consists of small and mid-size businesses. It provides high-paying jobs for 400,000 Americans and is one of the few U.S. manufacturing industries successfully exporting its products around the world. Protecting jobs and innovation for patients in this important sector has been a bipartisan issue.

Starting in the mid-nineties, ecologically-minded Americans increasingly came to see farmers markets as a way to bring healthy foods to poor neighborhoods, support local organic agriculture, and even address global warming. During the Bush years, major health philanthropies joined these efforts, making new grocery stores their highest priority in combating obesity, which was disproportionately affecting the poor.

Food justice advocates were thus taken aback last April when new public health research revealed that there were more grocery stores and supermarkets in poor communities than in middle- and upper-income ones. More importantly, the studies found no relationship whatsoever between childhood obesity and neighborhood food availability. In effect, children who have more access to grocery stores and supermarkets are no more likely to become obese than children who have less. The findings — independently arrived at by two large national studies published by RAND and Social Science and Medicine — landed on the front page of the New York Times.

The National Working Waterfront Network is a nationwide network that increases the capacity of coastal communities and stakeholders to make informed decisions, balance diverse uses, ensure access, and plan for the future of working waterfronts and waterways.

What are working waterfronts?

Working waterfronts are waterfront lands, waterfront infrastructure, and waterways that are used for a water-dependent activity, such as ports, small recreational boat harbors, fishing docks, and hundreds of other places across the country where people use and access the water.

500 Startups announced recently that it would be using AngelList exclusively for startup applications to the incubator. AngelList is a service that matches early-stage startups with investors. Now Rock Health, the accelerator for health tech startups, is making a similar move, taking applications exclusively (here) through AngelList for its fifth class.

Rock Health founder Halle Tecco explains that the accelerator was already making startups create profiles on AngelList but the network has grown into a platform for startups to manage several pieces of business, and it made sense to make the switch over. She adds that it just makes the application experience a seamless process. In Rock Health’s last class, the accelerator received 1,500 applications.

The holidays are over, the weather is lousy, and we’re sober again. We made all kinds of New Year’s promises, but the big one that will change our careers, if not our lives, is the promise to ourselves to become more creative. In my new book, Creative Intelligence, I show that creativity is learned behavior that gets better with training--like sports. You can make creativity routine and a regular part of your life. That’s true for big companies as well as small startups, corporate managers as well as entrepreneurs. Creativity is scalable.

The huge national policy storm brewing over “dwindling innovation” and an “innovation shortfall” also gives creativity an even greater agency. Creativity is the key to generating economic value and getting the U.S. economy to grow fast again.

Startups provide business leadership with new products, services, and new revenue models, but leadership startups can only be built by entrepreneurs who are leaders themselves, and incent leadership in the team around them. Leadership which incents other people to be leaders is called “contagious leadership.”

John Hersey, in his book “Creating Contagious Leadership,” describes nine required skills or habits for inspiring a contagious leadership culture within a startup, as well as within other types of businesses, or even life in general. He and I believe that leaders have to make the overt decision to acquire these skills, and don’t have to be born or trained into them:

Humans are animals.  While we like to think we’re captains of our destiny, we’re far more driven by instinct than we know.  In many ways, we’re just glorified apes, even in business.

For over a century, the overriding philosophy in business has been that rational decision-making is better business. Irrational decisions, on the other hand, were to be avoided.  We’ve probably all seen bad executive decisions made based on miscalculated fears, misperceived threats, or misdirected loyalties.

This the title (paraphrased) of a keynote given last week by Jonathon Bush, the CEO of AthenaHealth, at the Xconomy Mobile Madness conference in Cambridge, Ma. What follows are my notes from the speech. The ideas are Jonathon’s. I really like what he’s saying and mostly agree, and he puts it very well.

AthenaHealth’s base business is medical practice billing in the cloud. This is an example of technology-enabled transformation of the health care business system, which we believe will be a big opportunity for entrepreneurs going forward. Founded in 1997, AthenaHealth is now a successful public company (ATHN).*

When I finished school, i took my entire life savings, $5,000, and invested it in a business. I was young. I was inexperienced. But I was an entrepreneur and proud. And in six weeks I was broke. Mark Warner

When I meet young people, especially college students, who are enthusiastic to become entrepreneurs, I'm reminded of a parable of unkown origin:

Question: What’s one way your business is giving back to the community (or globe generally) that you’d recommend to other entrepreneurs?

Question by: Ashley

VALUABLE VIRTUAL REAL ESTATE

“As a small bootstrapped startup, we don’t have enough money to make meaningful monetary donations to the nonprofits we support. Instead, we donate to them by doing something that’s easy for us but also very valuable for them. For us, that means free marketing on our site, which means a lot to the nonprofit but doesn’t require a ton of resources on our end.”

- Stephanie Kaplan | Co-Founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief, Her Campus Media

As we come to the close of Q1 of 2013, LSN has compiled some insight into three of the hottest subsectors being targeted by investors in the medical technology space. New technologies are surfacing that are changing treatment philosophies, and more importantly, medtech is attracting a whole new class of investors such as corporate venture from the consumer electronics, digital media, and telecom space. Here are the three trend areas that are changing the world from the medtech investor perspective:

Personalized medicine

Silicon Valley's most prestigious accelerator Y Combinator just hosted its Demo Day for its Winter 2013 class.  Even though this class was smaller than its previous batches, the talent was just as good.  Out of the 47 startups that presented at YC's Demo Day, Thalmic Labs really caught our attention.

The ground-breaking Innovator’s Accelerator™ learning experience will teach you how to cultivate innovation within yourself and within your organization.

Innovation can be learned. It starts here. Built on decades of research by the world’s leading authorities on innovation, Clayton Christensen, Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen, Innovator’s Accelerator will teach you skills and techniques you can apply within your organization to bring powerful ideas forward.

Over the past six years The World Database of Innovation initiative has uncovered the world’s first statistics behind the practices that allow large organizations to grow and to innovate. In collaboration with innovation leaders and other experts Uri Neren and his team found 27 management structures, processes, and cultural practices are shared by the world’s fastest growing companies that make what could be called an “Innovation Management Equation.”

Microbes in the gut may be a key to helping people lose weight, according to two tantalizing new studies.

One study in mice found that gastric bypass surgery may aid weight loss not just by reducing the size of the stomach but also by changing the composition of the microbial population. The second study found that people with more methane-producing microbes were more likely to be heavy and have a high percentage of body fat.

I’ve raised close to US$1-million for my previous startups and I’ve been asked questions that were not what I had expected to hear from the investors I was pitching to. I was expecting to be asked about my team, market segments, financial projections, go-to market strategy, exit strategy, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I was asked these questions — many of them — but it was the questions below that I wasn’t expecting. It’s also important to note that the investors who asked the following questions are the ones that I ended up having the best relationships with. You may never get asked these questions, or maybe not as directly as they are asked below, but you should be prepared and have the answers ready.

Hear ye, all you who are interested in raising capital but are sick of trying to convince the rich people to invest in your idea. Try tapping into the masses instead. Besides raising money, crowdfunding also serves a marketing purpose. It’s another way of getting the word out on your idea and to test your concept. Here’s a 10 step guide to running a successful crowdfunding campaign, with some insights from Daryl Arnold of Newton Circus. I’ve included step zero as an introduction:

Using a site that tracks dollar bills, a theoretical physicist noticed that our state boundaries are rather arbitrary, but that money tends to stay within new, more realistic boundaries.

To theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann, the borders of the United States are out of date.

"Some are kind of arbitrary like New Mexico, Arizona: They’re just kind of drawn on the map," says Brockmann. "Often, they no longer correlate with our behavior."

Specifically, they no longer correlate with how we move.