Dreaming is oftentimes given a bad rep — it’s an act that either takes up too much time or invokes too little action. Part of the bad reputation comes from the notion that dreams never lead to action, as an entrepreneur, I can say with confidence that I wouldn’t be where I am if it weren’t for the moments I claimed as my time to dream. They didn’t have to be impressively great dreams — honestly most times they weren’t even close to feasible — but the fringe benefits were indisputable. The time I gave myself to dream was synonymous with the time that I didn’t judge my ideas and just let the creativity happen.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on Thursday is scheduled to announce a plan to spend $1 billion over the next 10 years to boost innovation and entrepreneurship in the state.

The plan centers on collaboration between government, research universities, communities and the private sector.

Pence was set to publicly unveil the multi-pronged proposal at the eighth annual Innovation Showcase in Indianapolis.

The Indiana Economic Development Corp. has been directed to coordinate and oversee the strategy. The governor made an executive order that transfers the Office of Small Business and Entrepreneurship and its programs—including the Indiana Small Business Development Center, Procurement Technical Assistance Center and Small Business Ombudsman—from the Office of the Lt. Governor into the IEDC.

The European Innovation Scoreboard provides a comparative assessment of research and innovation performance and the relative strengths and weaknesses of national research and innovation systems. It covers the EU Member States as well as Iceland, Israel, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey, and Ukraine. It helps them assess areas in which they need to concentrate their efforts to boost their innovation performance. On a more limited number of indicators, available internationally, it also covers Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, the Russian Federation, South Africa, South Korea, and the United States.

The European Commission today releases the 2016 edition of its Innovation Scoreboard, which looks an awful lot like the 2015 version: happy green colors to the north and west contrasted against underperforming yellows and oranges to the south and east. This has been the map of European prosperity for at least the past century and, unfortunately, it doesn't look like the trends across the continent will do anything to redress the balance. In fact, this innovation scorecard would suggest that inequalities are only going to deepen in the future.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has launched the Cancer Immunotherapy programme to expedite examination of patent applications covering therapies that activate the immune system to kill cancer cells.

The programme opened last month in support of President Barack Obama’s ‘National Cancer Moonshot’, under which an extra $1 billion will be pumped into R&D in the field, to double the volume of cancer research over the next 10 years.

Collaboration sounds great, but it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. A recent cover story in Harvard Business Review looked at the topic of "collaborative overload" and the burnout that can result. According to the article by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele, and Adam Grant, "Over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more." In many organizations, they note, the proportion of time spent on meetings, responding to emails, and on the phone hovers at around 80%.

Image: Flickr user Hiroyuki Takeda

Many directors are feeling outmatched by the ferocity of changing technology, emerging risks, and new competitors. Here are four ways to get boards in the game.

“Software is eating the world,” veteran digital entrepreneur Marc Andreessen quipped a few years back. Today’s boards are getting the message. They have seen how leading digital players are threatening incumbents, and among the directors we work with, roughly one in three say that their business model will be disrupted in the next five years.

In public places, at work and elsewhere, ideas spread spontaneously, are developed and give life to entrepreneurship. This is the ‘coffee-machine effect’, particularly prevalent it seems amongst students and academics in universities and colleges in the UK and the USA. However, the effect is older than Anglo–Saxon places of learning. Coffee, then, is (if it ever was) an ancient medicine that many people now like and enjoy drinking. Above all, it is a very pleasant drink to share with others, to sip during meetings – which gatherings, in the Age of Exploration, can be regarded as the intellectual counterpoint to geographical discoveries.

There is a lot of hype surrounding data and analytics. Firms are constantly exhorted to set strategies in place to collect and analyze big data, and warned about the potential negative consequences of not doing so. For example, the Wall Street Journal recently suggested that companies sit on a treasure trove of customer data but for the most part do not know how to use it. In this article we explore why. Based on our work with companies that are trying to find concrete and usable insights from petabytes of data, we have identified four common mistakes managers make when it comes to data.

Get ready for an epidemic of brain freeze. Yesterday (7/11), the convenience store chain 7-Eleven celebrated the 50th anniversary of Slurpees, their signature frozen beverage, by offering a free small Slurpee from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Additionally, if you buy seven Slurpees during “Slurpee Week”, which begins today and ends next Monday, you can get 11 Slurpees for free. Yes, Slurpees can have calories (at least the non-diet ones), sugar, and artificial colors and ingredients. But let’s face it, if you are consuming Slurpees, especially a total of 18 of them in one week, obesity may not be foremost on your mind. What you may be most worried about is brain freeze (otherwise known as ice cream freeze or ice cream headache), which is the intense pain in the head that results when you drink Slurpees or any cold item too quickly.

Dell Inc. revealed the list of the top 25 cities in the world for female entrepreneurs. New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, London, Stockholm, and Singapore topped the list based on their ability to “attract and foster growth in firms founded by women.” 

“Innovation and job creation by women entrepreneurs is critical for a thriving global economy,” said Karen Quintos, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Dell.

Crowdfunding holds great potential for startup funding. However, since equity crowdfunding is not legal in India, this post is aimed to explore donation- and rewards-based crowdfunding. A study commissioned by the World Bank says that the global crowdfunding market could reach between $90 billion and $96 billion by 2025, roughly 1.8 times the size of the global venture capital industry today. I am really excited for equity funding being legalised in India. Which I believe will become a reality soon. Yes, I am an optimist.

From our earliest farmers developing new and better ways to feed a growing world, to today's innovative and booming medical and biotechnology industries, Minnesota's continued success as a great state for residents and businesses is rooted in our constant drive to learn, innovate and grow. Undoubtedly, Minnesota's primary competitive advantage for attracting business is in our world-class workforce, the hardworking people of Minnesota and their drive to discover. Our workers are among the best educated in the nation, with 92.6 percent earning a high school diploma, ranking fourth in the United States, and 34.3 percent having a bachelor's degree, ranking 11th in the United States.

Image: Office of the Governor - Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton

A new report on venture-capital funding in Ohio has a familiar theme: There’s still not enough of it.

Investors put $373 million to work with 167 new and developing companies in Ohio last year, according to the Ohio Venture Report 2015, a look at venture investing in the state.

“We do have a big gap,” said Tom Walker, CEO and president of Rev1 Ventures, a Columbus technology-business incubator.

‘You can’t be what you don’t see.’

There’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to including more women in venture capital, summed up by a collective chorus at a panel of Silicon Valley and Boston venture capitalists at Fortune‘s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Tuesday.

“Everyone has a role to play, including the press, existing VC firms, and entrepreneurs,” said Megan Quinn, a growth investor at Spark Capital, who was previously a partner at Kleiner Perkins. “I don’t buy the argument that there aren’t enough qualified women to be in venture capital,” she added.

Image: http://fortune.com

Over the last few years, innovation has become a ubiquitous branding tool. Whether you are a blue-chip company or a local start-up, innovation has entered the everyday lexicon of CEOs and administrative staff. Compared to prior marketing trends, innovation is not a passive buzzword—it is critical to the success of your company. Here are five reasons why your company should embrace the changing tide and innovate:

1. Global Competition

In today’s business climate, the playing field just got a whole lot bigger. Your competition isn’t just around the corner, it’s across the globe. We can credit this expansion to the internet. Clients can search for better customer service, lower prices, and faster production with a simple google search. If you’re not innovating, your business suffers because it’s no longer standing out.

Someone once told me this: “Innovation is like an apparition of the Virgin Mary: one person saw her, but everyone talks about it.” Although funny, the quote aptly captures an attitude towards innovation that exists in many companies today. Innovation – and the skills that enable it – are sometimes considered as mystical gifts, preserved for the chosen few. In other cases, innovation is feared, because it involves unregulated processes, risk taking and investments with unpredictable outcomes. In this blog post, I’d like to make a case against this kind of innovation paralysis. Every company must innovate, and with the right understanding of the word ‘innovation’, every company can.

The White House on Tuesday unveiled a recruitment agenda that envisions a tour of duty fighting hackers for the U.S. government as part of any private cyber pro's career.

"The supply of cybersecurity talent to meet the increasing demand of the federal government is simply not sufficient," officials from the White House and Office of Personnel Management said in a government blog post. "This shortfall affects not only the federal government, but the private sector as well."

Image: A view of the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center in Arlington, Va. // Evan Vucci/AP

Here's how MONEY determined which of the roughly 2,000 four-year U.S. colleges and universities deliver the most value—that is, a great education, at an affordable price, that prepares students for rewarding careers.

MONEY screened out schools with graduation rates below the median, financial difficulties, or fewer than 500 undergraduates. The remaining 705 colleges were ranked on 24 factors in three categories: educational quality, affordability, and alumni success. Plus, MONEY measured comparative value, by assessing how well students at each school did vs. what’s expected for students with similar economic and academic backgrounds, and the college’s mix of majors. Read the full methodology here.

As a startup advisor and investor, I’ve met many aspiring entrepreneurs, and I often get asked the question, “I have a great idea for a startup – do you agree that it real potential?” They don’t know that most experts agree the person is more important than the idea, yet I’ve never been asked, “I have a great idea for a startup – do you agree that I have real potential as an entrepreneur?”

Nevertheless, I’ve given a good bit of thought to some questions I might ask, or you should ask yourself, to get some indication of whether you have the right stuff to succeed and be happy in the entrepreneur lifestyle.