Back in the day, Nolan Bushnell invented Pong, founded Atari and created Chuck E. Cheese. But now he says that new tools and cultural norms are enabling creativity in ways never before possible - and offers hints on how to make your company more creative.

We spoke on the occasion of the release of Bushnell's new book: Finding the Next Steve Jobs, written with Gene Stone (more on the book's unusual publishing model later).

As many people know, Jobs worked for Bushell at Atari in the mid 1970s before moving on to Apple. Bushnell uses Jobs as a symbol of creativity at tech companies: "Steve Jobs showed that an innovative company can create the highest market cap company in the world." Despite Jobs' passing in 2011, Bushnell says today's best companies are far ahead of where we used to be.

Many of the changes in the healthcare industry outlined by the Affordable Care Act and HITECH Act call for shifting to healthcare IT for helping physician practices run more efficiently to helping guide clinical outcomes. But the shift from paper based to digital records isn’t just happening among providers. It is carrying over into other industries that healthcare intersects such as pharmaceuticals, medical devices and more robust collaborations with payers.

Andrew Khouri of Quaker Partners, who also mentors Blueprint Health accelerator companies, highlighted some needs in healthcare that are creating interesting investment opportunities and some investment trends at a recent event at the University City Science Center. Khouri acknowledged the “industry is in turmoil” because there’s uncertainty about how the changes will work in practice from the transformation of payment models to setting up health insurance exchanges. But there’s so much momentum to reduce costs and improve outcomes that there is a lot of opportunity.

The Series A crunch has left the realm of Bigfoot and Nessie and is entering the realm of truth, at least according to Fenwick & West.

The law firm released the results of its 2012 Seed Financing Survey today, which found that the number of startups obtaining Series A financing after a seed round declined significantly in 2012.

“Of the companies funded in 2011, 27% had raised a Series A financing by the end of the following year (2012), while 45% of the companies funded in 2010 had raised a Series A financing by the end of the following year (2011),” the report said.

Einstein spent nearly all his time thinking, and very little time doing. Today, we do just the opposite--and it's working against innovation. Here's how to get your ratio right.

While Einstein said he had no special talent aside from being passionately curious (and being possibly the smartest person ever), he also knew how to make time for insight--a skill that's scarce in our present cult of stimulation. Innovation consultant and author Jeffrey Phillips tells this tale:

When asked how he would spend his time if he was given an hour to solve a thorny problem, (Einstein) said he'd spend 55 minutes defining the problem and alternatives and 5 minutes solving it. Which is exactly opposite of what the vast majority of executives today would do.

Do you feel like you send your emails into a black hole? Let's get to the point: You need to start with the conclusion.

"Vagueness is the opposite of useful," Geoffrey James writes for Inc. "The clearer the goal, the more convincing your e-mail will be."

That's why, James says, you need to ask yourself what exactly it is you're asking before you let your hands touch the keyboard. You're writing the email to elicit a decision from the recipient--so what's the point of your prompt? Where is the co-investment? And what is a conclusion anyway?

James has an idea:

Your conclusion is a statement of the decision that you want the recipient to make, based upon the contents of your e-mail.

With more than 60,000 health-related smartphone and tablet apps already available in the iTunes App Store and Google Play—the Android app marketplace—it’s clear that consumers are going to be getting more and more of their health information, and possibly even diagnosis and treatment, from their mobile gadgets. In Washington, DC, last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held three days of hearings aimed at clarifying whether and how the Food and Drug Administration will regulate this burgeoning universe of mobile medical apps and devices.

While FDA officials said a lot at the hearings about what they don’t plan to regulate—for one thing, they aren’t going to treat smartphones and tablets as medical devices just because they can run medical apps—they didn’t say as much about what they will regulate, and the agency’s draft guidelines on mobile medical technology may not be finalized until this fall.

In today's competitive job market, hopeful employees want to know what qualities lead one job candidate to prevail over dozens of other capable contenders. If we consider the recent appointment of Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio to the highest post in the Catholic Church, then humility, servility, and meekness may top the list. Numerous anecdotes about Pope Francis' unassuming nature have surfaced since his selection, including stories of him rejecting a chauffeur-driven car and images of him washing the feet of women. Perhaps the lesson here is that job seekers should reflect on their own relative insignificance, and strive to convey modesty, restraint, and vulnerability in the interview process.

Every engineer who has invented some new technology, or is adept at creating solutions, believes that is the hard part, and it should be a short step to take that solution to market as an entrepreneur. In reality, that short business step embodies far more risk, and a poor technology solution is not near the top of most lists of common reasons for business failures.

In fact, a Duke and Harvard survey of over 500 technology companies showed that only 37% of their leaders even have engineering or computer science backgrounds. Clearly, engineers should think twice before assuming they have an advantage over the rest of us toward being an entrepreneur.

Yahoo announced Monday it has acquired mobile news aggregator Summly, the latest in a string of acquisitions for mobile product talent. The price of the acquisition was $30 million, according to AllThingsD.

Summly is an iPhone app designed to allow users to quickly find news they're interested in. It aggregates and displays snapshots of articles from a variety of news sources using artifical intelligence and natural language processing (more about that here). Users can separate them into customizable categories, like "Art and Design" or "Apple."

Entrepreneur accelerator programme, Unreasonable Institute, is on a 100-day epic cruise around the world with 11 startups hoping to scale their businesses globally. The cruise is dubbed Unreasonable at Sea. According to the Institute its role is to “get world-changing ventures and entrepreneurs what they need to scale their impact”. The ship left San Diego in early January and plans to dock in Barcelona in April, with a few pit stops in-between. One of those stops is in Cape Town. During the stop, a pitching session hosted by SAP, an enterprise application software company, will see 11 startups that were chosen out of 1 000 hopefuls from more than 100 countries, pitch to judging panel made up of the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, Prince Fahad Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, serial entrepreneur, Kamran Elahian, Simon Carpenter, COO of SAP Africa and Marc Balkin of Hasso Plattner Ventures.

There’s one career decision that separates those who get remembered and have a major impact on the world from those who get forgotten.

And sadly, 99% of people will go through life never achieving this one simple goal.

It’s determining which word or two you want to “own” as your personal brand—among your office mates, within your company, in your industry and beyond.

Successful commercial brands are great at grabbing ownership of words in our minds. Volvo means safety. Google is synonymous with search.

Thinking about joining the crowd? We know, your mother probably told you not to get mixed up with the wrong kind. But according to MedStartr’s Alex Fair, there’s a lot right with the mob mentality growing among today’s entrepreneurs; crowd communities are creating equitable springboards for promising startups. That’s right, we’re talking about crowdfunding. After all, there is strength in numbers— especially from those that come with dollar signs.

Last April, things became a bit easier for US startups and small businesses thanks to the JOBS ACT and its legalization of rewards and donation-based crowdfunding and the near-term promise of equity-based crowdfunding legalization. The ink on the Act may be less than a year old, but the positive impact deriving from the emergence and explosion of such funding sites and online platforms is already evident and quite substantial for some. And it looks promising for those in healthcare as well.

We all keep hearing that Gen Y’s are the “entrepreneurship generation,” but new research states otherwise. I worked with Monster.com on a new study focused on multi-generational worker attitudes to uncover the state of entrepreneurship through the eyes of different generations of workers. The report found that 41% of Gen X employees (ages 30-49) and 45% of Boomers (ages 50-69) consider themselves to be more entrepreneurial, compared to only 32% of Gen Y workers (ages 18-29 years). Previous research showed that 46% of Gen Y’s want to start a business within the next five years (Employers Insurance). They view themselves as less entrepreneurial because they aren’t in the best position to take a financial risk; they have the least amount of money but the most amount of debt from student loans. Many are still living with their parents and aren’t buying cars or homes.

VCs are no longer the go-to source for start-up capital, it was said at the GSA's Entrepreneurship Conference at the British Museum.

  A presentation from the Dublin start-up DecaWave, which has a technology which can locate indoor objects to a precision of 10cm, said that the company had raised $20 million with not a penny coming from VC sources.

Lately, a lot of startups have closed their doors because they've run out of cash. Investors are less willing to give them money now than they were one year ago, thanks in part to Facebook's disappointing IPO. This inability to raise millions of dollars needed to take a startup from an idea to a growing venture is known as the Series A Crunch.  How bad has the Series A Crunch gotten?  Awful, one New York investor told us.

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.”

Last Friday, the Global Entrepreneurship Congress adjourned in Rio de Janeiro, ending a week of intense sessions that engaged over two thousand people from 130 countries in discussions around building stronger entrepreneurship ecosystems back home. While the Congress included Global Entrepreneurship Week host country delegations, investors and entrepreneurs, it opened last Monday with a new session for policymakers and researchers. The experiment was a success and ended with a commitment by organizers to make government policy a mainstay of the annual Congress in the future.

The “GEC Policy Summit: Start-up to Scale-up” on the opening day of the 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Congress was an unusual opening for a gathering that started as a grassroots movement. However, government sets the rules and incentives, and both top down policies and bottom up movements and networks are vital for entrepreneurs to flourish. A dominant theme of the GEC in Rio has been how they communicate and leverage each other’s strengths and create synergies.

Every Harvard student who opens a laptop to catch the latest episode of "Girls" owes a debt of gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg.

The Facebook chairman and his dorm-room buddies, who created the $64 billion social-media site at Harvard in 2004, sparked a startup culture at the university that's still gaining momentum.

One campus-hosted company, Tivli, is using software and TV-network deals to offer the HBO series and other fare to students. The startup is not only breaking a longstanding restriction on cable in Harvard's housing, it's also vying to reshape how pay-TV is delivered.

If you are running a small business and have been around for any length of time, give yourself a pat on the back. I’ve been running my small business for 16 years now and believe me, I’m thankful each and every day. I especially feel that way after coming across this small business infographic on some of the most tried and failed small businesses.

Did you know that recent studies have shown that 50 percent of small businesses will fail within the first year? How about the fact that a staggering 95 percent will close their doors before they hit their fifth year of operation? That one seems a bit hard to believe but in today’s economy, it could be true. Here are some additional stats that may surprise you:

Baxter is a new type of worker, who is having no trouble getting a job these days, even in a tight economy. He's a little slow, but he's easy to train. And companies don't hire him, they buy him—he even comes with a warranty.

Baxter is a robot, not a human, though human workers in all kinds of industries may soon call him a colleague. His plastic-and-metal body consists of two arms loaded with sensors to keep his lifeless limbs from accidentally knocking over anyone nearby. And he has a simulated face, displayed on a flat-panel computer monitor, so he can give a frown if he's vexed or show a bored look if he's waiting to be given more to do.