State Sen. John Fonfara had some simmering questions about Connecticut's economy and its future. Lots of questions, he said, related to the intersection of tax policy, entrepreneurism and job growth — the latter pair he believes could be harnessed to keep more young talent at home and kickstart the state's lackluster economy. To find answers, the Hartford Democrat, who co-chairs the influential Finance, Revenue & Bonding Committee, beginning last summer took a months-long "walk in the desert,'' gathering feedback from residents, employers, private and public colleges, his Capitol colleagues, and state- and municipal-agency heads, among others.

Image: PHOTO | CONTRIBUTED State Sen. John Fonfara (right) talks to Hartford Denim Co.'s Melisa Hadvab (left) during a visit to a cluster of innovative small businesses in Hartford's Parkville neighborhood.

PORTLAND, Maine — Rural counties are faring progressively worse in recent recoveries from economic downturns, according to a new study, as new business increasingly gravitates toward the country’s largest metropolitan areas.

Economic Innovation Group, a think tank founded by Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and investors, last week released its findings based on analysis of census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data on business and job growth.

Image: BDN File L.L. Bean planned to close its Bangor call center near Bangor International Airport a month earlier than first scheduled, officials announced Jan. 28, 2016. 

Believe it or not, even large and mature companies often initiate entrepreneurial efforts inside their own companies, and they look for employees who have the right attributes to make this happen. If you want to explore the world of an entrepreneur, without jumping ship, this would be the way to do it. Entrepreneurs working inside big companies are called “intrapreneurs.”

There’s nothing like an overcrowded inbox to make you long for the days of smoke signals and carrier pigeons.

But unless you’ve been living under a rock without a Wi-Fi signal, email plays a huge role in your work and personal communication. In fact, we’re willing to bet you have yours open in another tab right now.

Email is so prevalent that last year, workers worldwide collectively sent and received about 112.5 billion business emails each day, according to The Radicati Group, a technology market research firm. The average user sent and received 122 work messages daily. (Now that would be a lot of pigeons.)

Freedom and control are common factors that motivate people to leave traditional employment to start a new business. If you yearn for the opportunity to be in charge, set your own hours and design your daily activities, prepare yourself for some of the harsh realities of finding entrepreneurial success. Here are a few key things to consider as you evaluate whether running your own business is the right move.

Being a parent isn’t easy. Being an entrepreneur isn’t a walk in the park either. But being both a parent and an entrepreneur can be enough to put in in non-stop therapy sessions. Okay, maybe it’s not that bad. But it’s still a challenge, isn’t it? You work hard to grow your business because you want to build a legacy you can leave to your children. At the same time, you’re trying to make sure you’re doing a good job of raising your children. Both take tons of work, and both are incredibly rewarding.

As an entrepreneur, you haven’t got the time or money to pursue all customers in your market simultaneously. You need to pick a target market to go after. How should you do this? Academic research and practitioner expertise suggests that you focus on five factors as you pick a target market.

KUALA LUMPUR, May 31 — A new study by General Electric indicates that compared with their peers globally, Malaysian executives are generally optimistic about what the future would bring in the age of the industrial Internet.But while these optimistic sentiments were captured in the biennial 2016 GE Global Innovation Barometer Survey, GE Malaysia chief operating officer Azli Mohamed conceded that the gist of the survey centred on the perception ‘innovation readiness’ instead of actually measuring how innovative companies actually are.

Image: GE Malaysia chief operating officer Azli Mohamed. — Digital News Asia pic

If large corporations are from Mars , then startups must surely hail from Venus. While the founder of a small but ambitious startup catches the bus or underground train to work and shares coffee-making duties with the rest of a close-knit team, the corporate CEO arrives by car, takes the elevator to the fifteenth floor interacts mainly with a handful of senior executives. And while the early-stage entrepreneur may struggle to fund the next stage of R&D or the increase in payroll required to take a product to market, the head of a successful corporate rarely has to spend much time worrying about available resources.

A growing number of startups today want to position themselves as the equivalent of an ‘Uber for trucks’ or ‘AirBnB of co-working spaces’ or a related analogy with another successful startup. Cross-industry innovation is on the rise as never before, as demonstrated by Ramon Vullings and Marc Heleven of innovation consultancy 21 Lobsterstreet in their book, Not Invented Here: Cross-Industry Innovation (see my book review).

Image: Ramon Vullings

TIPTON -- According to Tipton County Economic Development interim executive director Nathan Kring, economic development has changed from developing jobs to developing communities.

“If you ask 100 people what economic development is, you’ll get 100 different answers,” said Kring. “But the bottom line is, economic development has become more than what it used to be.”

According to Kring, who became director on April 1, several Ball State University studies have shown that people do not move to where jobs are – jobs move to people.

Image: http://www.kokomotribune.com

Two years ago, our team at First Round, led by Partner Bill Trenchard and VP Platform Brett Berson, began to quietly build out a program to help our founders navigate the choppy waters of follow-on fundraising. Long had we observed founders caught off guard by what was needed to raise their Series A after having a relatively easy time at the seed stage (only further exacerbated by an influx of seed funding in the market). All together, we have immense knowledge in fundraising that we've accrued witnessing our companies raise over 1,000 rounds and $18 billion in follow-on funding. It’s possible for startup founders to know more about almost every facet of company-building, but fundraising is one area where we'll always be able to offer more experience.

In January this year, India’s central government announced the first list of 20 cities that have been identified for development as smart cities, part of government plans to develop 100 Smart Cities by the end of 2022.

The plans came about in part, via the Smart Cities Challenge funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies. The Government of India launched this challenge as a selection process to distribute central government funding to 100 cities over three years.

Image: http://readwrite.com

Taipei Computer Association chairman Tung Tzu-hsien (童子賢) yesterday called for a better investment environment and a more open-minded attitude in response to the government’s plan to build an “Asian Silicon Valley” for start-ups and firms producing innovative products.

“It might not work if the government simply wants to copy the success of Silicon Valley,” Tung told a forum focusing on start-ups at Computex Taipei.

Tung’s remarks came after President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) told the opening ceremony of Computex that the government is to carry out an “Asian Silicon Valley” initiative in Taoyuan, connecting domestic and international resources in manufacturing and research and development in a bid to develop Internet of Things (IOT) supply chains.

Image: http://www.taipeitimes.com

The U.S. health care system has a tremendous need for novel high- (and low-) tech solutions to increase its quality, agility and affordability.

To meet this need, the National Science Foundation (NSF) supports research and early-stage development of novel biomedical products, processes and services.

Fifty NSF-funded startups and small businesses with innovative biotech, based on fundamental research, will be on display in San Francisco June 6-9 at the 2016 BIO International Convention, the world's largest gathering of the biotechnology industry.

Companies will be part of BIO Innovation Zone, an exhibit space dedicated to early-stage companies with frontier biomedical technologies.

Online business-to-business marketplace Expert Market has put together a ranking of the global cities where people have the best balance between their work and leisure time — the so-called "work-life balance."

Using data from Swiss banking group UBS, the site compiled information on the biggest, most important cities globally, taking into account how many hours per week and per year people work as well as how many days holiday they take, before creating the ranking.

Aspiring entrepreneurs who rely only on traditional learning vehicles (teachers, classrooms, and risk-free practice) are doomed to failure in anticipating change today. Either they are never really ready to commit, study an opportunity until it has passed, or fail with tools and techniques from a bygone business era. The Internet and the current information wave have changed everything.

A two-year government study has found a small increase in two types of cancer in male rats exposed to the kind of radiation that cell phones emit. Given the ubiquity of cell-phone usage, the implications of the findings are substantial, if they are replicated in humans.

Scientists have investigated a possible link between cell phones and cancer for decades, and come up with mixed results. A huge study in Australia that was released this month tracked the incidence of brain cancer from 1982 to 2012 and compared it to cell-phone usage, which went from nonexistent to 90 percent of the country’s population during that time.

Image: https://www.technologyreview.com

Lithuania might be a small country, but it definitely has ambitious people who are building great products.Here is the list of startups that you should keep an eye on and they might be worth investing in.

Vilnius city (Credit: Martynas Slapsys)

SearchNode

Created by a 16 year old Anthony Baksys and other co-founders, SearchNode helps to engage eCommerce sites visitors and boost retention with smart Plug & Play Search. The company was 100% bootstrapped from the beginning and 4 years later it calculates 6-digit number annual revenue. At the moment, SearchNode has more than 100 clients from 13 countries including Secretescapes.com and GetGeared.co.uk. 

Please submit nominees by Friday, July 15, 2016.

Outstanding Research Park Award

Recognizes the parks that excel in bringing technology from the laboratory to economically viable business activities, thus promoting the growth of businesses, jobs and public revenue. These parks actively participate in the university community, creating an important positive effect on university research funding and on recruitment of superior students and faculty.

Emerging Research Park Award

This Award is presented to an emerging park that has been in operation less than ten (10) years. Applicants will have excelled in bringing technology from the laboratory to economically viable business activities, thus promoting the growth of businesses, jobs and public revenue. These parks actively participate in the university and federal lab community, creating an important positive effect on university research funding and on recruitment of superior students, faculty and researchers. It was given for the first time in 2007.