WASHINGTON, July 21, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Small Business Administration released its highly anticipated Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) online tutorials to help small businesses navigate the SBIR program. The site provides users with a mobile-compatible site to learn about the program through a combination of videos and text. This platform will provide accessible program information and training resources to underrepresented areas.  There is no registration or fee required and the courses are open to all.

The Princeton Review and U.S. News & World Report recently published rankings of university entrepreneurship. Among the top 12 schools, the two lists share but a single institution — Babson College. How can two highly regarded agencies compile lists of excellence that have virtually no overlap?

At one level, the answer is obvious: The two groups use different criteria and so arrive at different rankings. But the use of two sets of criteria that yield such wildly differing results suggests a much deeper problem. A lack of consensus regarding what to measure implies a lack of consensus about the goals of university entrepreneurship: It’s hard to measure success when you don’t know what that success looks like. So what is the role of entrepreneurship at the university?

Socially responsible investing, corporate social responsibility and the various permutations of “doing well by doing good” are relatively recent arrivals to the modern business milieu. As such, early iterations of this ideology were often an afterthought, with investors putting just a little money into social impact funds. Companies did add social responsibilities to their practice, but kept oversight of such initiatives in divisions with limited power or stature.

That’s changing. As the idea takes hold, there also arose a recognition that executing these initiatives well is neither easy nor straightforward. To educate new do-gooders, veteran impact investor Julia Balandina Jaquier has written the book, Catalyzing Wealth for Change: Guide to Impact Investing, to offer perspectives on how to tackle social responsibility endeavors. She recently spoke with Sherryl Kuhlman, managing director of the Wharton Social Impact Initiative, about her recommendations.

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

Noble Ackerson is an enthusiastic local founder — he founded LynxFit, an Alexandria-based company that helps fitness trainers create workouts for mobile and wearables. But this current iteration of the product is not his first.

By his own admission, Ackerson has seen a lot of different sides of the startup world. “I’ve been part of failed large startups, ran small successful ones, and provided technical advisory services,” he writes. In 2012, though, Ackerson found himself doing something new — participating in an accelerator program.

Image: by Flickr user cornflakegirl_, used under a Creative Commons license

With much industry fanfare last month, Dutch telco KPN announced that it had completed nationwide coverage of the Netherlands in a wireless Internet of things network. Like a traditional cellular network, but with far lower costs and energy requirements, KPN’s network can connect sensors monitoring everything from rail switches at Utrecht Central station to depth sounders at the Port of Rotterdam and baggage handling at Schiphol Airport.

A spate of similar Internet of things (IoT) networks are going up in France, Germany, South Korea, and elsewhere across the globe. Still, it remains a question whether enough fee-paying devices will connect to cover the cost of building this infrastructure (see “$32 Billion Buyout of ARM Is a Giant Bet on the Internet of Things”). 

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com 

Minister of Education, Malam Adamu Adamu Thursday said that entrepreneurship holds the key to solving the mounting unemployment challenges of the country.

He spoke on the occasion of National Conference on Entrepreneurship Education at Akanu Ibiam Federal Polytechnic Uwanna  Afikpo, Ebonyi state.

The programme was held by the institution in conjunction with the National Board for Technical Education.

Image: http://thenationonlineng.net 

In a partnership between Cray and Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services, the two bring subscription-based supercomputer power to security analytics capabilities.

The challenges of modern cyber-security are complex, so complex that a supercomputer can make a big difference. That's the hope of supercomputer vendor Cray and its partner Deloitte Advisory Cyber Risk Services. The two announced a subscription-based Cyber Reconnaissance and Analytics service that uses the recently announced Cray Urika-GX supercomputer that can provide up to 1,728 compute cores, 22 terabytes of memory and 35TB of solid-state drive storage. Perhaps, even more importantly, the Urika-GX has been designed to help enable big data workloads, including Apache Hadoop and Spark.

Image: http://www.eweek.com 

Grammy-nominated musician Viviana Guzman was playing her flute on her paddle board in Half Moon Bay, California, when a whale surfaced right next to her. 

While Guzman often plays her flute for the whales, this might be a little too close for comfort. 

Image: http://mashable.com 

Martine Rothblatt has made no secret of her goal to move beyond the pharmaceutical business model that made her first foray into the biotech world — United Therapeutics Corp. (NASDAQ: UTHR) — a striking success.

This week, Rothblatt's ambitions earned her national TV time on CNBC's "Squawk Box", as she detailed her goal to transition the Silver Spring biotech, which now mostly develops and sells pulmonary hypertension drugs on the market, into the human organ manufacturing business.

Image: Martine Rothblatt discusses the potential of human organ manufacturing on CNBC this week. 

No matter who wins the 2016 election, the next president and Congress will face difficult economic and innovation policy challenges, ranging from stagnant productivity growth, to questions about government limitations on encryption, to building a workforce with the skills needed in the modern economy. Join ITIF for a panel discussion at the Democratic National Convention featuring business leaders and Members of Congress to explore ways the 45th president and 115th Congress can work together to shape policies to foster innovation, boost productivity, and make the United States more competitive in the global economy. 

The goose that laid the biotech patent golden egg is in trouble with the U.S. Supreme Court. Ironically, it was the Supreme Court that helped spur the industry with the watershed Charkrabarty ruling in 1980. But what has been giveth, can also be taken away. Beginning with the 2013 Myriad decision, the Supreme Court has stripped back eligible subject matter for so-called “products of nature,” raising doubts regarding whether any significant patent protection is left for biotechnology inventions. The trend continues as recently as June 27, 2016, when the Supreme Court let the Federal Circuit decision in Sequenom stand, resulting in claims directed to noninvasive prenatal screening of fetal DNA remaining a patent-ineligible subject. How do you align your business goals and intellectual property strategy in a new thicket of legal challenges?

It took me 10 minutes to write this first sentence. Why? Because as I sat down to write this story and while I tried to think of how to open it I checked my iPhone eight times. Some of those times were for simple procrastinations such as checking the news, some were for app notifications, and one was actually for a phone call (one of the less common utilities people use their smartphones for).

Image: Flickr user Magdalena Roeseler

It’s 9 p.m. and you suddenly remember that you wanted to ask your employee about an upcoming project. Before you fire off an email, ask yourself, "Is this urgent?" If you’re sending the email simply because you don’t want to forget, your employee may not know your response expectations, and this can cause stress that negatively impacts your staff’s productivity and performance.

New GSK PARADE (patient rheumatoid arthritis data from the real world) app promises to ‘learn from real patients’.

Glaxo Smith Kline has released an app paired with a patient study developed to provide the pharmaceutical company with a wealth of information on how people cope with rheumatoid arthritis and inform new drug development. 

Most accelerators require entrepreneurs to spend three to six months in residence, which can be difficult for women entrepreneurs, particularly if they have families. So, in 2015, serial entrepreneur and former investment banker Carolyn Rodz founded Circular Board, a virtual 90-day accelerator for women entrepreneurs.

Circular Board’s first class was held this winter with 170 women and is now gearing up for a new class that will begin this September with 500 women.

Each year, the Intelligent Community Forum presents an awards program for Intelligent Communities and the public-sector and private-sector partners who contribute to them.  The awards program has two goals: to salute the accomplishments of communities in developing inclusive prosperity on a foundation of information and communications technology, and to gather data for ICF's research programs.

The world has well and truly entered the Asian Century and the innovation economy is booming, with thousands of Chinese start ups looking to be the next big thing.   Aussie entrepreneurs are cashing in on the trend; heading to China to tap into the benefits of the China Australia Free Trade Agreement, which breaks down trade barriers and makes it easier for Australian businesses to expand into the Chinese market.

After a three-year run under First Round Capital, StartUp PHL — the city initiative to directly invest in Philadelphia’s startup ecosystem — is shutting down its existing venture fund. City officials are now searching for a new fund manager as they work to establish the StartUp PHL Seed Fund II.

Though the University City-based venture capital firm will continue to oversee the investments of the first fund, First Round Capital says it will not be submitting a proposal for the RFP announced today.

Image: Roberto Torres

Our technologies are far from pristine constructions. Frankly, they’re a mess.

Our software evolves over years, or even decades, with bits and pieces being added over time. The IRS uses technologies from the 1960s, and the Space Shuttle used computer chips that were decades old. The code in our automobiles is fantastically baroque, and in many cases may be too complex to understand. Everything from our kitchen appliances and medical devices to our legal codes and bureaucratic structures are, in a word, kluges. A kluge — a term from the engineering and computer science world — refers to something that is convoluted and messy but gets the job done. Think Rube Goldberg contraption meets MacGyver, but without the playfulness. Kluges often have been adapted and constructed over a period of time, with band-aids upon band-aids, serving their function. But woe betide the person who must maintain or fix such as monster.

An entrepreneur is someone who makes a contribution to the world as we know it. And for this, they get rewarded. Sometimes in kind, sometimes in love, and of course, sometimes in money. I know that many people in the world think that it is all about money, but I am going to challenge this view today. Making a contribution to the world does not always have a number or prize attached to it. Sometimes the rewards are not things we can see.