New tax breaks are luring entrepreneurs from overseas as well as making start-ups more appealing to wealthy locals, venture capital groups say. 

Birch Finance, which demystifies hundreds of credit cards and rewards to help people pick the best for them, relocated from Florida, USA, to Sydney partly because of the juicy new tax breaks, said Ben Heap, co-founder of fintech incubator H2 Ventures.

Image: Ben Heap (left), pictured with his brother, Toby (right), says more foreign entrepreneurs will be attracted to Australia Peter Braig 

As a startup owner, you obviously want to figure out the best way to measure success. In the early stages of business ownership, financial gains are not necessarily a good measure of forward movement. Instead, look out for these positive reinforcers as a way to measure your startup’s success.

How To Measure Your Startup’s Success

1. The Industry is Taking Note

If your competition is starting to get a little uneasy, that’s definitely a good sign. You want the industry to take you seriously. You don’t want your fellow competitors writing you off as the “new kid on the block.” Make them nervous. Have them second guessing their current strategy. Heck, take it one step further and start redefining the industry. This helps boost business longevity.

Remember what it felt like to be the intern at the office? Your first step in the real world—an exciting but absolutely terrifying experience because you knew this could be the thing that makes or breaks your career. No pressure, right? Well, now you get to relive the experience from the other side of the desk. Congrats—you’re the intern supervisor!

The habits of the best leaders are well documented. They’re self-aware. They admit mistakes. They take care of, recognize, and communicate well with their teams.

But what do these inspirational people do on their own time? What goes on behind the scenes that helps them be so effective on a day-to-day basis?

"I’ve definitely noticed some things that great leaders tend to do," says Danielle Harlan, founder and CEO of The Center for Advancing Leadership and Human Potential, an organization that helps individuals and organizations maximize their impact. And the things they do behind the scenes make all the difference when it comes to their professional leadership ability, she says. Here are five such common habits.

While I was researching my book about middlemen, some people didn’t seem to understand who I was talking about. “You mean like middle managers?” they’d ask. I used to say, “No — it’s about brokers, agents, dealers, and two-sided markets like Airbnb, OpenTable, and TaskRabbit.” In other words, I was investigating the people who connect buyers and sellers in an open marketplace, not in a firm.

As a business owner, you are going to make mistakes. Some of those mistakes made may hopefully turn out to be learning experiences in which you are able to strengthen a particular area of your startup. However, not all turn out to be such. Some mistakes can actually handicap your startup permanently – these are the types of mistakes that you want to avoid at all costs. Luckily, some of the most common mistakes made by startups, which are capable of inflicting long term damage, are entirely preventable.

So you have a brilliant idea for a startup and now you need money and resources, so you’ve decided you need to join an incubator. After starting your search for an incubator, you saw your local college offers semester-long incubator sessions. Before you decide to pursue applying, you should weight the pros and cons of doing so. Here are three reasons to think twice about joining your school’s incubator.

Image: http://www.business2community.com 

India has seen a rapid rise in social entrepreneurship. Dr. Pathik Pathak, Director of Social Enterprise at University of Southampton, U.K., and the founding director of its Social Impact Lab, visited IIT Madras recently to launch the UK-India Social Enterprise Education Network (UKISEEN). The network is a collaboration of best teaching methodologies and approaches in social entrepreneurship between the U.K. and Indian universities. In this interview, he speaks about the importance of social entrepreneurship education, employment opportunities in the sector and more. Excerpts…

The increase in entrepreneurial activity in Jamaica has been chronicled in successive versions of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report, a publication which compares data on entrepreneurship from several countries. A unique data set highlighted by the report is the Total Early Stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA), which captures the number of new businesses started over a particular period of time.

Over 15 years of doing the study, the TEA of less-developed countries, such as Jamaica, has consistently exceeded that of more developed economies.

As I take part in panel discussions on the investor’s perspective on startup financing and growth, it strikes me how formulaic these events tend to be. A group of investors provides insight to a room full of rapt entrepreneur attendees. Sometimes the entrepreneurs get to ask questions, and sometimes they don’t.

The power dynamic is fascinating: We the investors share our knowledge and the audience is there to listen, and, if they are able, to pitch investors on the panel for a brief moment. But, only if we let them.

BioNovus Innovations LLC and the University of Kansas Medical Center’s Institute for Advancing Medical Innovation (IAMI) announced a new partnership Tuesday to develop and commercialize new drugs, diagnostics and medical devices. UPCOMING EVENTS Champions of Business Awards Luncheon MAY 10, 2016 CFO of the Year Awards Luncheon 2016 JUNE 09, 2016 See More Events The agreement between the two organizations grants BioNovus — a new venture capital fund in the area comprised of Kansas City investors — with rights to license, develop and commercialize medical innovations advanced through IAMI.

Economic development officials are seeking broad-based support for a new five-year strategy being rolled out to make the Charleston region more competitive for jobs and business investment.

The plan — called One Region — has been in the works for about nine months and is expected to be finalized in a few weeks. It’s based on more than 1,000 hours of research as well as surveys, focus-group sessions and hundreds of interviews with residents, businesses and community leaders.

Image: Aerospace employers such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner plant in North Charleston (above) remain a high priority under the region’s new five-year economic development strategy. File/Brad Nettles/Staff 

Ethan Weiss, a cardiologist at UC San Francisco, spends long hours at the hospital treating patients. But between shifts, he takes calls with health-technology entrepreneurs to offer them advice and feedback.

As Weiss explains, it's not about the money. He does the majority of this advisory work for free or in exchange for a tiny chunk of equity. It's also not about prestige: He doesn't speak publicly about the startups he's consulting with. So why does he bother?

Engaged employees are more productive, have higher job satisfaction, and are more focused on customers, according to a Gallup study. But what exactly does "engaged" mean?

Boston University professor William Kahn coined the term 25 years ago, but there still isn’t a widely accepted definition. What does exist, however, is a lot of frustration and myths surrounding the idea, says Rodd Wagner, vice president of employee engagement strategy for the consulting firm BI Worldwide and author of Widgets: The 12 New Rules for Managing Your Employees As If They're Real People.

When Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, first observed that “the number of components that could be etched onto the surface of a silicon wafer was doubling at regular intervals and would do so for the foreseeable future,” as John Markoff reports, it is entirely possible that no one quite understood the implications of what he was saying.

Image: Gordon Mooreat Intel in 1970 Gordon Moore Wikipedia the free encyclopedia 

Around the world, tablet shipments are down 15% for the first quarter of 2016 and school districts in the U.S. are increasingly favoring more affordable Chromebooks. Source: Education Dive

Imagine a Canada teeming with vibrant entrepreneurs, creating meaningful work, new innovations and building the economy of the future. Imagine leveraging our rich connections through our diaspora and sharing the very essence of what it is to be Canadian – caring – to the rest of the world. Imagine moving past a resource-based economy to one based on knowledge, creativity, sustainability and social responsibility. Imagine a policy environment that actually incentivizes the Canada that we want – the Canada of the 21st century, not the 19th.

A bill designed to make it easier for startups to obtain capital from wealthy investors is awaiting Senate action after passing the House last week by a large margin.

The measure has support in both parties and from business groups, but passage in the Senate is no sure thing, as some Democrats and financial-reform advocates have concerns that the legislation would remove protections for investors.

It’s been over three and a half years since we started our company but more than five years since the entrepreneurial bug bit us all. We were still in the seventh semester of B.tech at IIT-Roorkee, and dreaming of building a company.

Being an entrepreneur might be the coolest fad in town, but by no means is it an easy one. It takes way too much out of a person — physically, mentally and emotionally. It’s like taking a vow that from that day onwards, you are going to put one thing (your startup) before every other thing in your life — your comfort, your joy, your family, your friends and, at times, even your peace of mind!