The United States has always been a nation of entrepreneurs, the upstarts who take risks and challenge the established order so they can build a better life. But Americans today are less likely to change jobs, relocate, or start a company than in recent decades. This decline in entrepreneurship is one of the fundamental challenges of our time—with far-reaching implications for all Americans.

William Crane, founder and CEO of IndustryStar Solutions LLC, is quietly building an amazing team – and fast growth business – in Ann Arbor.

IndustryStar’s innovative Supply Chain as a Service - virtual supply chain team enabled by patent-pending cloud software - lowers staffing costs, provides a variable cost structure as opposed to fixed, and allows companies to instantly scale and ramp down real time. The company’s recent client wins include electric bus OEM Proterra, powertrain Tier I supplier Blackburn, and consumer electronics company Cycleboard.

“Ex-Continental CEO Larry Kellner, all 6’5” of him, used to fly in middle seats in the back. He told me this at a party and I about spit out my cocktail.”

This quote from Mike Holovacs, a hospitality expert, jumped out at me when I looked at my latest email from Quora. It’s his response to a question someone had sent in asking if airline CEOs fly commercial.

Many first-time founders seek advice when thinking about what ideas would be great for a startup company and receive the wrong advice that you need to focus on a billion-dollar idea. There are very few ideas that are obviously a billion-dollar idea from the start. So what should you do?

Buried in the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act of 2015 is a requirement that the Securities and Exchange Commission review and revise Regulation S-K to scale or reduce the reporting burden on smaller registrants. As part of this initiative, on June 27, 2016, the SEC issued proposed rules soliciting comment on an increase in the thresholds for qualifying as a "smaller reporting company." If adopted, the proposed expansion of smaller reporting company eligibility would substantially lessen the reporting burden for an estimated 780 additional registrants.

THE HOUSE AND SENATE. Beacon Hill Roll Call records local senators' votes on roll calls from mid-July sessions.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT PACKAGE (S 2423): The Senate approved (39-1) $743.9 million in capital spending over a period of three years for a range of economic-development initiatives. The biggest item is $330 million for the MassWorks infrastructure grant program, which is promoted as one-stop shopping for cities and towns and other eligible public entities seeking public infrastructure funding to support economic development and job creation. Municipalities could use the money for a variety of things including housing construction, city and town center revitalization projects and mill redevelopment opportunities.

It’s almost the stuff movies are made of.  A young professor charged with teaching a new university course in health care entrepreneurship meets a brash sophomore interested in taking the class. But then, quixotically, the undergrad decides to skip the course and asks the professor to mentor him and his fellow sophomore business partner as they figure out the complexities of entrepreneurial practice on their own.

Image: http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu/

Right now, I’m sitting at a coffee shop in Bucharest, Romania, with my laptop and an Americano. For the past five months, I've been traveling through Europe and the Middle East while simultaneously building a marketing agency I can operate from anywhere in the world.

As many people are finding out, digital technology makes it easier than ever to work across borders. From Chiang Mai, Thailand, to Madrid, Spain, "digital nomad hubs" are popping up across the globe.

Image: Flickr user IK's World Trip

Entrepreneur in Residence programs have grown in popularity at venture capital firms, law firms and businesses, and now even the U.S. government wants the opinion and insight from the wild west of startups.

David Portnoy served as Entrepreneur in Residence at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services until just weeks ago, and took the opportunity at the recent MIT CDO event to offer his advice on what the government can learn from lean startups about launching initiatives.

Portnoy was tasked with the Demand Driven Open Data initiative during his stay, which provided a “transparent mechanism” to inform “public data owners what’s most valuable.”

At Human Longevity Inc. (HLI) in La Jolla, California, more than two dozen machines work around the clock, sequencing one human genome every 15 minutes at a cost of under $2,000 per genome. The whole operation fits comfortably in three rooms. Back in 2000, when its founder, J. Craig Venter, first sequenced a human genome (his own), it cost $100 million and took a building-size, $50 million computer nine months to complete.

Venter’s goal is to sequence at least one million genomes, something that seems likely to take the better part of a decade, and use the data generated from them—along with information about some of the DNA donors’ health histories and the results of other medical tests—to find better ways to treat and prevent a range of disorders common among aging people, from cancer to heart disease.

Image: Illustration by Rebecca Clarke

A new research report predicts that annual revenues from smart city projects will grow to nearly $89 billion by 2025. However, it found most smart city initiatives are focusing on solving peripheral issues, with few big projects tackling core city problems.

Navigant’s “Smart Cities” report, annual smart city revenue is expected to grow to $88.7 billion worldwide by 2025 from $36.8 billion in 2016.

Image: http://readwrite.com

Health Information Technology (Health IT) is a dynamic, multifaceted sector that has the opportunity to dramatically influence delivery, efficiency, patient care and cost for healthcare markets worldwide.  Health IT can be described as the use of a suite of products and services designed to improve and coordinate patient care, address growing health costs and confront the long-term burden of disease through the use of technology. Countries at all levels of development and sophistication in the healthcare and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sectors can derive benefits from implementing Health IT in their jurisdiction. 

Image: http://www.trade.gov

The Internet of Things (IoT)—a term used to describe the set of physical objects embedded with sensors or actuators and connected to a network—offers numerous opportunities for the federal government to cut costs and improve citizen services. Moreover, because the Internet of Things generates positive network externalities, widespread adoption by the government will spur commercial adoption. While early adopters in the federal government have already demonstrated the potential of this technology with projects that improve public safety, reduce energy use, enhance military capabilities, and improve worker health, overall adoption across federal agencies is still very low.

So you want to have a digital platform. It’s only natural — all the cool kids do. Billion-dollar startups built around digital platforms are drawing customers, employees, and investors. And despite their relatively short existences, digital platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest, and Snapchat are wreaking havoc on traditional businesses.

When downtown department stores were common, shoppers could head to 9073 Center St. in Manassas for household goods, or as an ad in a 1929 issue of the Manassas Journal said, for “show boat” dresses.

The current owners of that brick building, however, hope to attract a different kind of customer: entrepreneurs.

Image: Manassas officials recently approved a $200,000 grant to help turn the first floor of the Hynson building at Center and Main streets into a co-work space and business incubator. (Jonathan Hunley/For The Washington Post)

I hate clutter. Growing up, my favorite book (and the only one I kept from my childhood) was The Boxcar Children, a story of four orphans who live in an abandoned train car with few belongings. I didn’t realize it until I became an adult, but this book resonated with me because I’ve always had minimalist tendencies. Less is definitely more.

Then stuff happens: Marriage, kids, pets, and, while it’s hard to admit, keeping up with the Joneses. Suddenly, our closets, cabinets, and drawers were bursting with things we never knew we needed.

Meetings. The bane of many of our existence. They suck up time and are often unproductive or don’t yield the results we expect. I want to talk about a specific type of meeting today — a Board Meeting — but this could easily apply more broadly. A find many board meetings highly unproductive in that they are often just a date in the calendar where management is set to update its investors and other board members of its performance over the past time period.

Innovation: A World of Ambiguity

Innovators like you operate in a world of ambiguity. Every situation you face has some uncertainty, and you need to be prepared when unexpected things happen. If you’re not prepared, your strategy may derail and you end up losing competitive ground in the marketplace.

Sometimes those unexpected events happen internally. The priorities in any organization are constantly shifting. You may have had everyone’s full support for your programs only to find out that something’s changed, and now some other parts of the business are getting more attention.

Image: http://www.innovationinpractice.com

If you are one of the new age of entrepreneurs who hates the thought of doing a business plan as a first step in starting your new venture you will love this message. More and more professionals agree that a better strategy is to explore and fine tune your assumptions before declaring a specific plan with financial projections based only on your dream and passion.

Storage density of 500 terabits per square inch --- 500 times better than the best commercial hard disk drive July 18, 2016

Scientists at Kavli Institute of Nanoscience at Delft University have built a nanoscale data storage device containing 1 kilobyte (8,000 bits) with a storage density of 500 terabits per square inch (Tbpsi) — 500 times denser than the best commercial hard disk drive currently available. Each bit is represented by the position of one single chlorine atom.

Image: STM scan (96 nm wide, 126 nm tall) of the 1 kB memory, written to a section of Feynman’s lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” (credit: TU Delft/Ottelab)