New Hampshire’s innovative small businesses – especially in the advanced manufacturing and high-technology sectors – have become the leading drivers of our state’s economy. So it is no coincidence that a U.S. senator from the Granite State, Warren Rudman, had the vision to create two powerhouse initiatives – the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs – that have successfully harnessed the ingenuity of America’s small businesses to help federal agencies keep us safe and deliver services efficiently.

At the end of every EOFire podcast episode, John Lee Dumas asks his guests, “What was holding you back from being an entrepreneur?”

One of the most common answers is “fear”.

Fear of uncertainty, fear of failing, fear of the unknown, and fear of not knowing enough.

After hearing so many entrepreneurs, many of whom I greatly admired, say fear held them back, I started to think, “Was I afraid”?

As we continue our lessons learned series (co-authored by me and Traklight’s Mike Willee), we move from cost-cutting measures to mentoring, an area that shouldn’t skimp or skip. I recently attended an event in Vancouver, Canada, that honored mentors for women entrepreneurs. Upon chatting with the women business owners at my table, I realized that the willingness to seek help was a common theme.

Staying motivated day after day on the job can be tough, even with the kind of work that challenges and pushes us. Striking just the right balance in your workday that keeps you both focused and motivated means understanding what drives our sense of motivation in the first place.

According to Daniel Pink, author of the book Drive, motivation is made up of three key components:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Born in a bar and borrowed from nature, the Hexcup now has thousands of supporters all over the world. Two college buddies had the idea years ago in Rolla, Missouri, and turned to Kickstarter to launch their dream.

“So what if it was shaped like a honeycomb,” said Aaron Attebery, remembering the conversation he and William Heimsoth had one night.

Image: http://www.kshb.com 

Media coverage of higher education often focuses on the increased cost of college that places its graduates into an overload of debt with no decent job at the end. What’s often missing in that coverage is how higher education globally is developing technological innovations that are tremendous catalysts of change.

Two decades-old international education organizations on the forefront of technological change are the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI). Last month they published the NMC Horizon Report: 2016 Higher Education Edition that charts emerging technologies in higher education.

There’s a great irony when you consider that the “Big Three” cities for entrepreneurship — San Francisco/San Jose, Boston, and New York — are some of the most difficult places in the U.S. to live on the sort of shoestring budget that startups demand. Nonetheless, they are home to “about half the VC firms and an equal percentage of the U.S.-based companies that they finance,” according to a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. This gravitational pull has historically given these cities an upper hand, making it difficult for smaller cities to compete, but as the surge in entrepreneurial activity and migration of talent around the country continues, investors and influencers are starting to look elsewhere for great entrepreneurs.

In honor of International Women’s Day yesterday, I want to explore why gender issues make it harder for both men and women to be candid at work, and to suggest some ideas for addressing the problem. Here’s the short version:

Gender politics and fear of tears push men away from being as radically candid with women as they are with other men. This is bad for men, women and the truth. Gender bias pushes women away from being radically candid in a way that is also bad for men, women and the truth.

Are you using LinkedIn regularly to expose your personal brand and articles in order to be seen as a thought leader and trusted adviser, who people will turn to for information and assistance? If so, how much time do you spend on LinkedIn and how do you use the time? Are you being productive and getting the desired results?

An Israeli startup is making glasses with lenses that can automatically adjust their optical power in real time, which may be a boon to people with age-related trouble focusing on nearby objects and could also be helpful for making virtual reality less nauseating.

Called Deep Optics, the startup has spent the last three years building lenses with a see-through liquid-crystal layer that can change its refractive index—that is, the way light bends while passing through it—when subjected to an electrical current that depends on sensor data about where a wearer’s eyes are trying to focus. This month it announced it had brought in $4 million in venture capital to help make this happen; investors include Essilor, a French company that makes eyeglass lenses.

Image: A prototype of Deep Optics’s self-adjusting lens is shown surrounded by a printed circuit board (left), while another lens is packed in a plastic handle that has an adapter to connect it to a computer (right). - https://www.technologyreview.com

The ancient board game Go long remained a human conquest — requiring too much complex strategy and intuition to be bested by a computer. But in a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a Google computer program called AlphaGo beat the world champion, South Korea’s Lee Se-dol, on Tuesday night in the first of five matches.

Image: The world champion of Go, Lee Se-dol, lost the first of five matches to a computer on Tuesday night. Ahn Young-Joon/Associated Press

Entrepreneurship drives new business and job creation, spurs innovation that boosts living standards and creates opportunities for upward economic mobility. The question is: Does policy support entrepreneurs in this process, or make it harder?

To answer that question, we first need to understand that entrepreneurship is a varied and complex pursuit. To put it another way, starting a business presents different challenges than running a business, than growing a business. To both effectively measure entrepreneurship and target policies where they can have the greatest impact, it is important to differentiate between various aspects of entrepreneurship.

Image: http://www.kauffman.org

Emerging businesses in Africa overwhelmingly fuel the economy and provide the majority of local jobs. Globalization has presented African entrepreneurs with a unique opportunity to expand their services and offerings worldwide at a scale that has never been available before. However, though globalization provides them with countless opportunities, business owners have several challenges to overcome that are mostly exclusive to Africa.

Startups have six main obstacles to overcome: Limited access to financing, weak infrastructure, inconsistent government regulations, globalization, minimal assistance from the government, and cross-border payments.

The growth of equity crowdfunding has been spectacular. It has delivered the kind of shot in the arm for the funding of small businesses that policymakers have been seeking for decades. And what is particularly interesting is that crowdfunding has done this without two components that most investors view as vital before they invest: proper due diligence and clear signs of profits, or a route to profitability. Should we be worried about this?

In The Matrix, Neo learns kung fu in mere seconds, if learn is even the right words for it. The information is simply “uploaded” to his brain – and presto, years of study are condensed. This kind of brain manipulation is still many years off, but researchers from HRL Laboratories say they have found a way to manipulate the brain to greatly amplify learning. They believe this is the first step instant learning à la Matrix.

A recent article on Daily Mail claims artificial intelligence will allow people to find long-lasting love with humanoid robots, making them the “perfect companions” and eventually even spouses. In another piece published in February, futurist Ian Pearson predicts women will choose robots instead of men by 2025—and by 2050, most every person will prefer to be with a bot. Some will dump their significant others for a robot “as soon as they can afford one.”

Business executives from emerging markets feel more optimistic and empowered by the fourth industrial revolution than their peers in developing economies, says the fifth edition of the GE Global Innovation Barometer. Mumbai: Creativity and problem-solving abilities are important to develop tomorrow’s workforce, according to the fifth edition of the GE Global Innovation Barometer released in March.

Three news items this week illustrate how Japan continues to balance domestic reform with social stability and demographic change. The macroeconomic picture for the world’s third-largest economy remains bleak, as negative growth returned in two of the last three quarters. The Bank of Japan’s recent move to negative interest rates also has raised doubts about the underlying strength of the economy, without appreciably boosting investment or consumption. Yet the news reveals a more complex picture, in which innovation coexists with traditional patterns of behavior.

Because negative interest rates reduce the profit banks earn from lending, the labor unions at three of Japan’s largest financial institutions announced they will not press for a wage hike during this spring’s annual wage negotiations. Looked at from a cultural angle, the negative interest rate policy has resulted in a reaffirmation of a traditional mode of socioeconomic cooperation in Japan.

Angel investment funding in healthcare increased in 2015, compared with the previous years, according to a new report from the Angel Resource Institute and PitchBook. The 2015 Annual Halo Report found that healthcare deals accounted for 23 percent of angel investment.

Dealflow rose over 2014 with healthcare accounting for 14 percent of deals compared to 11.4 percent in 2014.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

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