St. Louis and St. Louis County today unveiled a new joint venture that combines some economic development efforts of the two jurisdictions.

At a press conference at the Cheshire Inn near the city-county line, St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay and St. Louis County Executive Charlie Dooley revealed the new St. Louis Economic Development Partnership.

While both jurisdictions will still have their own economic development agencies, the partnership will combine programs to foster business development, job creation and entrepreneurship.

You’ve been pitching your startup to investors for months, and, finally, you’ve got results: a term sheet (hopefully more than one) from an investor interested in funding you.

A term sheet can take many forms (a single page or up to 7 or 8), and if you’re a first-time entrepreneur, you’ll be confronted with terms and conditions that sound like they come from an alternate universe populated by lawyers. The term sheet is an outline of the eventual terms under which the investment will be made, so my preference from an entrepreneur’s perspective is for the more comprehensive term sheet covering all of the primary points of the investment negotiation.

Today the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the latest round of grant awards made under the NSF's Innovation Corps (I-Corps) effort. I-Corps is a public-private partnership to help develop scientific and engineering discoveries into useful technologies.

The three awards, totaling $11,239,921, went to three consortia of universities, which will act as I-Corps "nodes" to support regional needs for innovation education, infrastructure and research. The three consortia are:

Aubrey Shick's furry robot blinks, giggles when petted, and moves on its own.

Shick, 29, of Squirrel Hill designed the robot, Romibo, to engage children with autism without the distracting and confusing body language and facial expressions of humans.

“Children with autism are often overwhelmed by all the complexities we take for granted and our abilities to just process them without thinking,” said Shick. “Romibo helps children with autism focus on the problem at hand instead of the social complexities.”

Romibo, like hundreds of other products, concepts or ideas, was spawned on Carnegie Mellon University's 100-acre Oakland campus. More than 300 companies have gotten their start there since the mid-1990s. The spinoff companies represent about a third of companies established in Pennsylvania based on university technologies in the past five years.

It’s your startup, so you can give early partners any title you want, but be aware of potential investor and peer implications. VCs and Angel investors like to see a startup that is running lean and mean, with no more than three or four of the conventional C-level or VP titles. More executives, or other more creative titles are seen as a big red flag.

In reality, startup titles should be more about the division of labor than an executive position. The most common ones I see and salute are CEO, CFO, and CTO. A few other credible ones would include Chairman of the Board (COB), Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Some would say that if you have a title at all, you are not doing enough work.

AFTER President Obama’s recent announcement of a plan to invigorate the study of neuroscience with what could amount to a $3 billion investment, a reasonable taxpayer might ask: Why brain science? Why now?

Here’s why. Imagine you were an alien catching sight of the Earth. Your species knows nothing about humans, let alone how to interpret the interactions of seven billion people in complex social networks. With no acquaintance with the nuances of human language or behavior, it proves impossible to decipher the secret idiom of neighborhoods and governments, the interplay of local and global culture, or the intertwining economies of nations. It just looks like pandemonium, a meaningless Babel.

In part one of this special two-part episode of the Crowded Room, we speak with Sara Hanks, Co-Founder of CrowdCheck, who sat in on meetings with crowdfunding industry leaders and the SEC in Washington, D.C. this week.

Hanks tells how things went and what the future looks like for the nascent equity crowdfunding industry in the United States.

Jasper Welch – an experienced entrepreneur, business incubator manager, strategic thinker, team leader and public speaker – has been named president & CEO of the National Business Incubation Association, effective Feb. 19.

Following a year-long search process, NBIA’s CEO search committee and executive committee selected Welch as NBIA’s new chief executive based on his experience as an incubator manager, entrepreneur, leader and visionary. “As a long-term member of NBIA and former incubator manager, Jasper understands the incubation industry,” said David Terry, chair of NBIA’s Board of Directors. “He is a compassionate leader and a visionary who will bring diversity and growth to the association. Jasper is a team player and is excited about how NBIA can participate in and lead the entrepreneur support ecosystem.”

Are you a woman business owner seeking angel investor capital? Harvard Business Review recently reported on a growing trend: More women are becoming angel investors. Studies show that women make up just 10-15% of angel investors and venture capitalists.

Why does this matter? Because angel investors tend to put their money where their comfort zone lies—and unfortunately, for most men that still means investing in businesses owned and run by other men.

The good news with the growth of women angels is that the trend works both ways. As more women become angel investors, they too are likely to invest where they feel comfortable—with other women. HBR cites data from the Kauffman Foundation showing that venture capital funds that include women invest in women business owners 70 percent of the time. As women-owned businesses grow, they create the next generation of women who have the potential to become sophisticated angel investors.

When I closed out 2010, I realized I had embarked on one of my craziest journeys to date: that November, I started a venture capital firm. Now in its “terrible twos,” Detroit Venture Partners has grown to seven employees, plus three partners (including me, the firm’s managing partner). We’ve invested in 17 companies, generated more than 150 jobs, and made a noticeable impact in the technology epicenter of downtown Detroit’s urban core. Not bad for two years. However, there have been a series of growing pains; lots of potholes could have been dodged with a few tidbits of advice. The same is true for any business – before starting, find out from industry leaders what they wish someone would have told them before they started out. Here’s my list from starting our VC firm. What’s yours?

When scandals rock the business world, we all go scurrying to find big causes. Human greed. Structural economic pressures. Lax regulations. Psychological research, however, suggests that one cause may be as small as a metaphor in the mind.

Contesting theory, which my colleagues and I pioneered helps explain the cognitive roots of poor decision-making in competitive situations. The key to this theory is recognizing that abstract human experiences are mentally processed through metaphors. Invariably and unconsciously, we understand the abstract through the concrete. For example, we often interpret organizations (an abstract idea) through use of an organizations-are-plants metaphor. So we talk about "branch" offices, "pruning" the workforce, and "growing" the bottom line. When a person in love says, "look how far we've come," she is thinking of love through a journey metaphor.

LEGENDARY DESIGN STUDIO FROG HELD AN INTERNAL COMPETITION TO CONCEPTUALIZE THE MOST INNOVATIVE WEARABLES. HERE’S WHAT THEIR STUDIOS WORLDWIDE CAME UP WITH.

Wearables are taking over. Whether it’s the Jawbone Up or an Apple iWatch, gadgets that live on our bodies will give rise to a level of data about ourselves and our environments that we’ve never had before. But is there more to the equation than fancy pedometers, GPS devices, and calorie-counters. Can wearables really do something new?

Regardless of their level of experience or expertise, most entrepreneurs can agree that unicorns are majestic, magical creatures that absolutely do not exist — never have and never will.

So, it seems a little ridiculous when I hear people talk about stacking their startup’s roster with only unicorns — aka A Players — while completely dismissing anyone for employment that’s considered a ‘B player.’ Those people need a reality check when it comes to hiring.

I’m a three-time entrepreneur and I’ve hired over a hundred people — often under duress because my small company was light on work one day and overloaded the next. Moreover, I usually find myself looking for tech talent that is hotly pursued by companies much larger than mine. I don’t think this an uncommon practice for startup founders.

Yesterday, Calvin Goforth, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of VIC Technology Venture Development™ (VIC™), announced the formation of the VIC Investor Network, a new fund that will significantly accelerate and expand technology venture development in Arkansas. The VIC Investor Network will place $250,000 start-up capital into every new portfolio company that VIC forms. Start-up capital is the most difficult funding to acquire. The VIC Investor Network funding will allow VIC to jumpstart its new portfolio companies and significantly shorten the average company development time.

Dr. Goforth made the announcement at VIC’s offices, following a presentation by Mitch Horowitz, Vice President & Managing Director of Battelle Technology Partnership Practice of Cleveland, Ohio. Mr. Horowitz led an in-depth 2012 Battelle study entitled Arkansas' Knowledge Economy Initiatives. He spoke about the importance of technology based economic development for Arkansas’ future economy, the benefits of the state’s incentive programs for encouraging such development, and he introduced the unique role VIC plays: “VIC fills key challenges and gaps for technology based economic development efforts by bringing together the initial management, product development, business development, and administrative teams needed to launch successful companies based on university inventions.”

Nobody knows how to breathe more deeply than champion free-diver Stig Severinsen, whose yoga-inspired breathing techniques allow him to hold his breath for 22 minutes. That said, you don't need to get anywhere near that to get benefits from better breathing. We asked Severinsen to share three ways that breathing can help lowers stress, improve athleticism, and heal what ails you.

Relax Severinsen calls breathing an "accurate and honest barometer" of a person's emotional state. Train your breathing to maintain your calm and lower stress levels.

In 2002, 56% of health insurance claims were filed via paper processes and 44% were filed electronically, according to a report by America's Health Insurance Plans.

The report found that 25% of claims were filed via paper and 75% of claims were filed electronically in 2006. Three years later, 18% of claims were filed via paper and 82% of claims were filed electronically. According to the report, 4% of claims were filed via paper in 2011 and 96% were filed electronically that year.

With internal farms, walls that convert CO2 to oxygen, and even the ability to personalize itself based on your DNA, this concept for the building of the future is a sight to behold.

Read more amazing visions of the future in our Futurist Forum. 2050 is far enough off to imagine the urban environment will be very different from today. But, from current trends, we know a few things are likely. Three-quarters of people will live in a city, or 6.75 billion of the projected 9 billion global total. Everyone will have grown up with the Internet, and its successors. And city residents will have access to less natural resources than today, making regeneration and efficiency more of a priority.

What kinds of industrial production can bring innovation to the American economy? An intensive, long-term study by a group of MIT scholars suggests that a renewed commitment to research and development in manufacturing, sometimes through creative new forms of collaboration, can spur innovation and growth in the United States as a whole.

The findings are outlined in the preview of a report issued by a special MIT commission on innovation, called Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE). Among the approaches the report recommends are new forms of collaboration and risk-sharing — often through public-private partnerships or industry-university agreements — that can enable a wide variety of firms and industries to grow.

EquityNet has published a free crowdfunding industry report containing statistics and trends based on U.S. businesses that used EquityNet from 2007 to 2012 to seek equity-based crowdfunding from accredited Reg D investors. The report provides insight into how crowdfunding will appear under the deregulating provisions of the U.S. JOBS Act in which millions of non-accredited investors will be able to invest in privately-held businesses. Presented in the form of an embeddable infographic, the report presents some of the first statistics available on the original form of equity crowdfunding that involves the use of funding platforms such as EquityNet by accredited investors.

"If you're busy doing free work because it's a good way to hide from the difficult job of getting paid for your work," Seth Godin exhorts, "stop."

A guru of self improvement, career management, and all points in between, Godin outlines the decision-making between working for free and holding out to get paid--important food for thought in a user-generated economy.

But first, we need to define terms.