JOHANNESBURG - Acceptance into an incubator is starting to hold the same prestige as acceptance into a tertiary institution. Similarly to tertiary institutions, these are differently esteemed: top universities, private universities, colleges etc. It is a new education system, one where relevant real-world entrepreneurial experience is trumping acquiring a qualification.

Image: File: The real responsibility for the success of your business is not the incubator but you, the business owner, innovator or entrepreneur. Photo: EPA/NIC BOTHMA

Longtime San Franciscans may remember the Mission Bay neighborhood, located on the southern end of the city, as the home to one of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company’s railyards. Trains ran in and out of the railyard for nearly 100 years until the 1990s.

That part of the area’s history might seem strange, though, to the influx of scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs who have migrated to the Golden Gate City in recent decades. To them, Mission Bay is an enclave of the biotechnology industry. 

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Casino resorts make up the majority of the most expensive buildings ever made, adjusted for inflation.

Hotels and resorts also feature in the top 19, while two residential towers make an appearance — one of which is used by just a single family.

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The U.S. economy is driven by innovation, but unwelcome “patent trolls” are gunking up the system. Patent reform bills sit idle in Congress as the “trolls” set up companies for the sole purpose, critics say, of shaking down inventors while never creating anything. “We just have to write 'em a check so they'll go away,” says one disgusted app maker. Economics correspondent Paul Solman reports.

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A group of 12 UMB students from various schools and disciplines were about to pitch their business plans to a panel of experts, with one group “winning” a hypothetical investment. At the beginning of the semester, as Quraishi pointed out, they began the class empty-handed. Now they presented ideas, proposals for winning approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and detailed timelines and cost estimates for their hypothetical new technologies.

Image: Students in Rana Quraishi's CIPP 980 entrepreneurship in biotechnology course listen to one another's final presentations. - http://www.umaryland.edu

Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation Association Vice President John Flavin discusses startups and venture capital funding. He speaks on "Bloomberg ‹GO›." (Source: Bloomberg)

Building a successful business, despite what some get-rich-quick schemes might tell you, doesn't happen overnight. It takes years of hard work, dedication and passion to start reaping the benefits of your labor. However, it's not just about the hours that you clock in. To find true prosperity in your craft, you must integrate meaningful habits into your daily routine.

As the world's most populated country, China's gridlocked traffic is legendary, especially in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

To help combat the problem of traffic jams and maximise limited road space, the country's top engineers have unveiled the Transit Elevated Bus (TEB) at the 19th China Beijing International High-Tech Expo on Sunday.

Back in February of this year, John Morgan, the Texas State Securities Board Commissioner, predicted that Texas would become a national leader in US crowd-funding investment. New crowd-funding regulations, explained Morgan, would allow Texas-based companies to generate up to $1 million per year.

We’re also warned to be “careful what we wish for”, but in this case it’s a good thing: Fast-forward to May 2016 and a recent article in the online journal Austininno seems to bear out that “Texas crowd funding efforts have generated $1.8 million in investments over the course of about a year and a half, and all that activity makes the state a national leader for this new type of funding businesses and projects.”

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In today’s world the online market place is saturated with many business owners that are so alike. You have to step up your game each day and prepare to WOW your audience and find new avenues to attract your ideal clients. You must be unique and draw attention to yourself in order to be noticed, known and likeable. Being popular is unfortunately the way that most business owners nowadays are becoming the go to expert for a specified passion and area that others need solutions for. Below are three ways that make you approachable as an entrepreneur and why you must incorporate all three to attract, maintain and ensure you build your audience and have clients wanting to work with you and recommending you to others.

If your organization is seeking to create a continuous change capability, it must have a strong focus on increasing its organizational agility.

As you use the Change Planning Toolkit™ to kick off your next project or your next change initiative, keep thinking about what the minimum viable progress (MVP) might be in order to maintain momentum. This is very similar to the idea of a minimum viable product, a key lean startup concept popularized by Eric Ries, author of the bestselling book, The Lean Startup.

Startups based in California, New York, and Massachusetts account for most of the VC tech funding in the United States. However, hotbeds of innovation are being spurred by VCs across the country.

With that in mind, we used CB Insights data to analyze the most active venture capital firm by the number of investments into tech startups in each US state from 2011 to 2016 year-to-date (through 5/9/16).

DJ Kleinbaum of Emerald Therapeutics explains "Eroom's Law," which says that the cost of getting a drug developed and approved will double every nine years. At that pace, pharmaceutical companies would have to spend $16 billion on drug development in the year 2043, according to Kleinbaum. Aside from driving up national spending on healthcare, the industry would be forced to develop only the most profitable drugs -– not the ones most needed.

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Bobby Lee, co-founder and CEO of leading Bitcoin financial platform BTCC, discusses how the digital currency is the first to have a set value and be transferable, like physical money. He also goes over Bitcoin's decentralized nature, how its value is derived from its finite nature, and how it will enable a global network for payments once it's widely adopted.

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Starting a new business can be an exhilarating time.

Eventually, though, you may reach a point where you will require some outside help.

Most entrepreneurs have to consider the issue of financing, whether it arises when they’re starting their company or expanding it.

According to The Kauffman Firm Survey, 50 to 75 percent of young firms use capital injections, most of which comes from owner investments or sources other than banks, while 19 percent use bank loans.

Back in Lesson #109, we compared equity to convertible debt to bank debt as finacing options for your early stage business.  There is actually another class of investment called venture debt, which is structured as a hybrid between equity and bank debt.  It has a lot of the debt features associated with a loan, although at typically higher costs, plus some equity-based incentives through the form of warrants or other royalty on revenues.

The weighted average of cost of capital for venture debt ends up around 25% per year, in the middle of bank debt at 5-10% per year and equity at 40-50% per year.  And, it is designed for companies that financially sit in between the two stages (e.g., have some revenues and traction, but not large enough to secure a typical bank loan).

Women who get a prosthetic foot after losing a leg to disease or injury have limited shoe options, but an invention by five Johns Hopkins University students may change that. The university announced Wednesday that the “Prominence” could be the first non-custom prosthetic foot to adapt to high heels up to 4 inches high.

“High heels have become an integral part of the female lifestyle in modern society, permeating through all aspects of life— professional and social,” the mechanical engineering students wrote in a report of their project. “For female veterans of the U.S. armed services with lower limb amputations, that seemingly innocuous, but so pervasive, and decidedly feminine part of their lives is gone.”

Image: (Courtesy Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering)

ANN ARBOR, Mich.--Produced by the International Association of Science Parks and Areas of Innovation (IASP), Areas of Innovation in a Global World: Concept and Practice is now available for purchase on Amazon. The book features experts from around the world who share insights, criteria for success, and practical experience for managers of areas of innovation. The book includes a chapter authored by Paul Krutko, president and CEO of Ann Arbor SPARK.

“Areas of innovation are communities like Ann Arbor, where the people and organizations that are assets to the economy are working together to create prosperity,” said Krutko. “Our regional economy offers insight on what works, and is a model for other regions to copy. Ann Arbor is leading the way in having created and maintained a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem.”

A question I often get as an adviser is whether or not to join a business incubator or accelerator as a way to move forward faster and smarter and increase the odds of business success. The simple answer is always yes, but like any other resource, finding the right one depends on your implementation stage, your own expertise, and what’s available in your geographic area.

Finding your sweet spot as an entrepreneur needs to start with a meaningful personal purpose that is also a business opportunity. Some people are so passionate about a cause that they forget to consider the lack of business potential, while others are so enamored with profit that they jeopardize their ethics. Both ends of this spectrum fail to bring long-term satisfaction or success.

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