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WASHINGTON, March 28, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) announced  today that it will launch a 20-state road tour led by the SBA's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs with participation from 11 other federal agencies. This will be the second year of the SBA-led Innovation Road Tour.

From the moment the Liberal government took office last fall, it left no doubt that innovation was going to be a top priority. Gone was Industry Canada, replaced by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, with Navdeep Bains, a close confidant of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, installed as the responsible minister.

Image: PAUL CHIASSON / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO Domestic tech stars such as tobi Lutke and Shopify are notable in part because they decided against moving to the U.S., unlike most technology startups.

Whether you're studying science, engineering, economics, or business, mathematics remains the core foundation of a huge number of university subjects.

As such, there's no shortage of world class institutes to study it at — assuming you're smart enough to get in.

The semiconductor market has grown by 4.6 percent annually over the past decade, with revenues rising from $213 billion in 2004 to $336 billion in 2014. This increase results from greater demand, primarily in the mobile segment, that is fueled by “shrink”—the ongoing decrease in the size of electronic components on silicon realized through continued process-node progression. Shrink enables both improved performance and reduced costs for end users.

For the last 200 years, entrepreneurial prowess enabled by financial capital has powered a long surge of economic growth. Over the major innovation cycles, the capitalist system has been resilient enough to absorb the effects of the crashes caused by pure speculation and turn them to its advantage. Production capital took the lead over financial capital and real value over paper value, as Carlota Perez has so well demonstrated in her book Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.

Image: LAURA SCHNEIDER FOR HBR

Searching for a small business to buy and run instead of taking a more traditional post-MBA job like consulting is an idea that we’re seeing catch on at top business schools. At the Harvard 

Business School, for example, the number of MBAs who decide to look for a business to acquire right after graduation has gone from less than a handful a decade ago to more than a dozen, and in an occasional year, twice that amount. Stanford’s most recent study of search funds also reports a record number of active search funds. Still, we often wonder why more students don’t follow the entrepreneurship-through-acquisition path.

After eight years, Mike Montour left New York City-based LivePerson, Inc., a 1,200-person provider of mobile and online messaging services, for a startup where he had the opportunity to launch and build a sales team. Roughly two and a half years later, that startup "wasn’t doing well," and a former colleague suggested he come back. LivePerson has rehired roughly a dozen former employees in the past year.

The path of least resistance? Chances are you're strolling up it right now. Don't blame yourself; as humans, our natural tendency is to seek security and minimize risk. We instinctually build comfort zones around ourselves and fiercely defend them, usually without even realizing it.

That might be a shrewd survival tactic, but it's a recipe for inertia. In order to succeed, we need to continuously improve our skills, using what we already know in order to figure out things we don't. But anytime you're working on that, you'll eventually hit a plateau. Here's how to get yourself over it and keep pushing ahead.

Before Apple Music, before the iPad, even before the mp3, I had a front-row seat and backstage access to the digital music revolution.

During my 12-year tenure at Apple, from the late ’80s and to the early 2000s, I helped lead the team that launched some of Apple's earliest innovations in music and entertainment. We developed the strategies, marketing initiatives, and relationships with content creators and media companies—across music, film, and TV—that laid the foundations that iTunes and subsequent innovations were later build upon.

Image: Flickr user Guillermo

Within eight months of becoming the dean of the University of Denver's computer school, entrepreneur J.B. Holston started something that could change the institution forever. Together with the deans of the law and business schools, Holston created a program infused with entrepreneurship. But this isn't just about curriculum. It's about connecting to local businesses and the community and creating an ecosystem that becomes so sustainable, it merits its own nickname.

Image: J.B. Holston, dean of the University of Denver's engineering school, right, and Shaun Senesac, project engineer, check out the roof of the engineering building under construction on campus last week in Denver. (Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post)

Throwing out a pile of old newspapers, as you do, a back-page story in the Sunday Times Business News caught my eye. In a column bemoaning the fact that "private equity's bonanza days are over," Luke Johnson claimed that "early-stage funding for technology companies ... led to the rise of countless world-beaters from Microsoft to Apple, Google and Facebook."

It's a good story. The problem is that, in Microsoft's case, it isn't true. In fact, Bill Gates' refusal to take venture capital was how he accidentally became the world's richest man.

Image: http://www.zdnet.com

Oculus is shipping its first VR headset this week. It's a big moment, but virtual reality is still loaded with usability problems that will delay its uptake to the true mainstream: You’re often tethered to a giant PC. You’re inherently asocial behind the mask. And you look pretty stupid, too. (Sorry! We’re not judging, but it’s objective truth.)

So the design firm Artefact ran a thought experiment: What could virtual reality be in another five years, right around the time Oculus considers releasing V2.0 hardware?

Image: http://www.fastcodesign.com

It’s been gratifying to see so many thoughtful Canadians weighing in on how our country can be more competitive in the global innovation economy.

I say “our country” even though I have lived and worked in California for almost 20 years. The reason for my wording is simple: I am among the many proud and patriotic Canadians in Silicon Valley working hard, through a group called the C100, to help our entrepreneurs build world-class technology companies back home.

Image: http://www.macleans.ca/

In December 2015, after intense lobbying by, e.g., the Angel Capital Association (“ACA”) and parties interested in the early stage / innovation economy in the U.S. the so-called PATH Act makes permanent the exclusion of 100 percent of the gain on the sale or exchange of qualified small business stock (QSBS) acquired after September 27, 2010 and held for more than five years. The PATH Act also permanently extends the rule that eliminates the 100 percent excluded QSBS gain as a preference item for Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) purposes. In addition, QSBS gain excluded from income is not subject to 3.8 percent Obamacare tax on “Net Investment Income” from capital gains (and other investment income) on high-income taxpayers.

Even though the color of their money is always green, all startup investors are not the same. Struggling entrepreneurs are often so happy to get a funding offer that they neglect the recommended reverse due diligence on the investors. Taking on equity investors to fund your company is much like getting married – it is a long-term relationship that has to work at all levels.

It’s been five months or so since the SEC published its long awaited investment crowdfunding rules.  Though Congress dictated that this task be completed by the end of 2012, the SEC missed the mark by nearly three years.  Now, with rules in hand, and an anticipated launch date of May 16, 2016, the time is ripe to assess where are we are headed in the brave new world of equity crowdfunding.

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com

Everyone has 24 hours in a day, but sometimes as a manager or business owner, you feel like your time is like putting socks in the washing machine. You know you started with 24, but somehow, two or three disappeared right before your eyes. Scheduling your employees, even if you only have a couple, can be a difficult task that is time-consuming and not pleasant. Optimizing your time is important, because, let’s be honest, you have better things to do than struggle with putting together the monthly schedule and figuring out who is available and who isn’t. The following tips can help you along when you’re at your wit’s end with scheduling.

Image: http://smallbiztrends.com

Back in 1961, the gradual decline of many city centers in the U.S. began to puzzle urban planners and activists alike. One of them, the urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, began a widespread and detailed investigation of the causes and published her conclusions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a controversial book that proposed four conditions that are essential for vibrant city life.

Jacobs’s conclusions have become hugely influential. Her ideas have had a significant impact on the development of many modern cities such as Toronto and New York City’s Greenwich Village. However, her ideas have also attracted criticism because of the lack of empirical evidence to back them up, a problem that is widespread in urban planning.

“I met with a Jordanian minister a few years ago and he told me that he wanted the country to have 10,000 PhDs in the next few years, and I thought, ‘that’s a great metric to have, but what are you going to do with those PhDs?”

Indeed, a great metric, but where will they go, what will they do, and more importantly, how will they generate income for the economy?

Image: Sheika Moza bint Nasser, chairperson of Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development, delivering the opening speech of the ARC'16. (Image via Qatar Foundation)