As one of the top 5 startup incubators in the United States, EvoNexus, has combined capital raised and acquisition outcomes approaching $1 billion. Its founder, Rory Moore has seen thousands of deals and only selects those that are the best of the best.

I recently sat down with Rory to get insight as to what he looks for when selecting startups.

You see hundreds of applications, what is it exactly that you are looking for?

Physicians have topped this year’s list of the 25 highest-paying jobs in America.

In the latest report by jobs marketplace Glassdoor released on Wednesday, physicians are expected to bring home a median base salary of $180,000, which is highest among all occupations. Lawyers and research and development managers fill out the top three.

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How do small businesses raising money on equity crowdfunding platforms maximise their chances of getting the funds they’re seeking? New research suggests it’s all about emphasising the right part of the pitch: investors seem to care most about the management behind such businesses, they worry about the product too, but aren’t so bothered by the financials.

There are more than 200,000 angel investors in the U.S. who put more than $24 billion into startup companies last year, yet we know very little about them. Overland Park-based Angel Capital Association wants to change that, and is teaming up with Wharton Entrepreneurship to complete the first comprehensive study of angel investors. They want to learn who angel investors are, how they became angels and what factors influence their investing activity.

I write today in praise of focus.

One of the biggest enemies of any career, project, strategy, what have you, is a lack of focus. Apple AAPL 0.05% under Steve Jobs was the epitome of focus. The company did only a few things at a time, said no to more things than it said yes to (current CEO Tim Cook frequently references this dictum), and even tried mightily to restrict what individual employees focused on. It looked for specialists not generalists and often reminded its people to mind their own business.

Information technology has, of course, played a major role in reshaping business models over the past 20 years.

The basic social conventions of the preceding Industrial Era were all built around the notion that people physically moved in response to needs. For instance, if you wanted to buy something, you went to a store. If you wanted to build something, you worked in a factory.

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More than one-third of U.S. innovators are born outside the U.S.

Only 13.5 percent of all U.S. residents are immigrants. But a new report says 35 percent of residents with a doctorate degree, or Ph.D, in science and mathematics are immigrants.

This shows that highly-educated immigrants could be one of the country’s most valuable resources.

Image: Co-founder and CEO of Whatsapp Jan Koum speaks during a conference at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest mobile phone trade show in Barcelona, Spain.  - http://learningenglish.voanews.com

Neither people nor computers can really help you as a personal assistant unless you are willing to share data about what you like, what you feel, and who and what’s important to you. Even the best technology can’t read your mind, which is why a simple Google search often gives frustrating and irrelevant results, and online advertisers bombard you with opportunities of no interest.

The pace of change is accelerating, and for many people (and companies) things are changing so fast that they feel overwhelmed and retreat to the familiar instead of embracing the change. In fact we are approaching a tipping point where what is becoming interesting to the young is not the new, but the old. Vintage Michael Jordan sneakers, vinyl albums, rotary telephones, and analog amplifiers all have growing numbers of fans. In fact, vinyl album sales are increasing as CD sales decrease.

I sat down with Braden Kelley this week for an in-depth interview about his newest book. Braden is co-founder of Innovation Excellence, and this is his second book.

In 2010, Wiley published your first book, Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire: A Roadmap to a Sustainable Culture of Ingenuity and Purpose. And, just this week, your newest book published by Palgrave Macmillan, Charting Change: A Visual Toolkit for Making Change Stick is on the market for hardcover sales with an ebook version coming soon.

As the fourth industrial revolution based on artificial intelligence (AI) has begun, Samsung Group has invested in seven global startups dedicated to AI solutions. One of them is Idibon, an emerging firm in the AI sector in Silicon Valley, the U.S.

Accordingly, Samsung Venture Investment Corp., which is in charge of the investment in new technology areas in Samsung Group, ranked fourth in terms of investments in AI start-ups.

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I’ve long complained that U.S. cities are not getting the attention they deserve from the federal government, even though they are the nation’s fundamental engines of innovation and economic progress. But that may be starting to change, thanks to a new report from President Obama’s high-level Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

Angel investors are an essential component of the global economy, supporting ideas and innovators at their very earliest stages. In 2014, more than 200,000 American angels invested about $24 billion in 73,000 startups, according to the Angel Capital Association (ACA). Little data, however, exists on who these investors are and how they make their decisions. ACA, Wharton Entrepreneurship and the John Huston Fund for Angel Professionalism at Rev1 Ventures are launching a nationwide survey of angel investors to learn more. Angels who take the survey will be eligible to receive complimentary tickets for angel education events, including the 2016 ACA Summit, May 9-11, 2016, in Philadelphia. The survey is available at: http://www.theamericanangel.org/

The search for reliable and replicable strategies to stimulate regional economic prosperity is as old as the field of economic development itself. These strategies have included the encouragement of direct investment, business attraction and retention, and sector-based cluster strategies. More recently, the role of entrepreneurship has been explicitly recognized, descriptively and prescriptively. Glaeser et al. and others have shown that one essential element in sustained regional growth is the presence of significant concentrations of indigenous small and growing businesses. On the surface, these empirical findings are consistent with the popularization of the entrepreneurship ecosystem metaphor and the subsequent launching by governments and civic organizations of a plethora of startup encouragement programs (e.g., the Startup America Partnership; Startup Chile) as a lead economic development strategy.

There’s been a healthy amount of chatter lately from analysts and tech writers that we are approaching a meltdown in startup financing. Unicorns, those startups valued at $1 billion or higher, are being downgraded at a rapid clip. The most recent victim is Flipkart, an Indian e-commerce firm devalued last month from $15.2 billion to $11 billion. Another unicorn, UK-based Powa Technologies, was once valued at $2.7 billion but went bankrupt in February. Several other well-known unicorns that have experienced valuation cuts in recent months include Palantir, Dropbox, Snapchat, Jawbone, and Zenefits. This is disastrous not only for the companies but also for the limited partners of the VC firms who are seeing their investments devalued by 30% or more overnight.

It could change the face of housing.

It’s no secret among young adults that the price of housing in cities such as San Francisco and New York is likely to ravage a fresh college grad’s paycheck.

And to venture capitalists, those rising prices could signal the rise of a completely different kind of housing: adult dorms.

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Sarasota County is on the verge of an agreement with a large state school that officials say will lure tech companies to the area and bolster the local economy.

IF YOU GO   What: County Commission meeting When: 9 a.m. Friday, March 18 Where: Administration Building, 1660 Ringling Blvd.   On Friday, county commissioners will meet for a special session to consider funding an educational engineering center run by the University of Florida with a $1 million grant to be paid over the next half-decade. The school’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering will use the so-called “Innovation Station” to partner with local companies, K-12 schools and the start-up community.

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At its "Innovation for Everyone" event today in New York, Nike unveiled high-performance footwear and apparel for athletes, a fleet of items for consumers, and more features on its Nike+ app. But the one thing that had everyone—okay, mostly sneakerheads—salivating was the rumored public launch of the self-lacing high tops inspired by what Marty McFly wore in Back to the Future II. Good news first: self-tightening laces are here with the launch of the Nike Hyperadapt sneakers. Bad news: they're not quite what Back to the Future die-hards want to see. Rather than releasing faithful replicas of Marty McFly's bad-ass self-lacing high tops, Nike debuted performance sneakers that speak to the coming wave of adaptive apparel and take aim squarely at athletes.

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What do Sonicare toothbrushes, Roomba iRobots and 70 percent of the computer chips in today’s iPhones have in common?

As a few of our witnesses told the House Small Business Committee earlier this month, they all began with small companies using the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) or Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA).

"Traditionally, entrepreneurs have raised money in old-boy networks, typically in San Francisco or New York," says CircleUp CEO Ryan Caldbeck. From CircleUp's start in 2012, it has aimed to help entrepreneurs bypass this network—instead providing an online marketplace that connects consumer-product startups with accredited investors who can make investments through its platform. "On CircleUp, [who you know] is not what’s important," Caldbeck says. "We have the network. We give the network to everyone."