Potential investors without any startup exposure need to filter out the noise to find the best deals.

Here are the five things I always look for in a good Aussie startup.

1. A HIGH-QUALITY TEAM WITH COMPLEMENTARY SKILLS

People make things happen; great people make magic happen.

When evaluating a team, think about what Niki Scevak always says: “Can this team get shit done? Why do they give a shit?”

It’s harder to do it solo – statistically speaking, founding teams of two are better than one and four is too much.

I ran a marathon, once upon a time. (If you could call what I did “running.” It took me nearly five hours—you do the math.) Still, I did it: laced up my New Balances, pounded the pavement through five months of training, and then went ahead and finished the whole 26.2. Some folks, including my podiatrist (bunions), didn't think I could do it. But as sports psychologists I talked to told me, physical feats are often more about mind than matter. Just in time for those New Year's resolutions, here are five evidence-based tips for upping your running game—or any physical activity you choose.

The practices of participative management and employee empowerment can best be described as the sharing of information and power with employees at all levels, including frontline employees.  This practice is crucial to the success of business today because it ultimately allows employees to make on-the-spot decisions that help the organization deliver higher quality service, at a faster pace, to the customer.  This empowerment also creates tremendous growth opportunities for employees. 

With state governments trying to manage their budgets, there has been significant activity seen around the country dealing specifically with incentives and economic development policies. Many states are creating new programs, adjusting current programs, or removing certain programs that are deemed unprofitable. Several states such as Illinois, Florida, Kansas, Alabama, and others have cut their budgets tremendously and are suspending certain programs. Understanding the details of these changes will help businesses capture increased incentive values and avoid potential hurdles and challenges in the future. Let’s look at some of these changes:

Image: http://www.areadevelopment.com

The playing field for economic development incentives has been muddied recently due to evolving philosophies on incentives and cash-strapped states not only modifying their approach toward incentives, but using the fine print to reconsider promises made to companies looking to move or grow.

As the U.S. economy has recovered, some politicians think incentives aren’t as necessary to attract business and grow jobs. And as state administrations change, new philosophies on how incentives should be used are inevitably adopted.

Innovation is still gold in the booming technology sector — but California’s Silicon Valley is no longer the only place to mine it. Many of today’s tech firms and startups need to expand outside primary tech hubs like Silicon Valley and San Francisco to find affordable labor and locations for operations that don’t necessarily require the high-cost locations at “ground zero.” The good news: today, they don’t have to. The tech industry is expanding outside its pricy hometown in the quest for lower costs, modern facilities, and access to talent.

Image: http://www.areadevelopment.com

I recently got to work an hour early. I had one goal in mind: world-domination, early-morning productivity. I made coffee, opened my email inbox, and the next thing I knew . . . it was noon. Where did the day go? And, more importantly, why didn’t I get anything substantive done? Sure, I cleared out my inbox, but I didn’t tackle a thing on my to-do list.

The last 10 years of Joel Grossman’s life started with a seemingly casual introduction through a business school friend to Location Labs CEO Tasso Roumeliotis. “I was getting my MBA and looking for a Bay Area tech internship, but I wanted to work for a company with a business model I really believed in,” he says. After a phone screen and a quick interview — and offering to work for free that summer — Grossman landed the role. “I showed up and found an empty desk, and that was the beginning.”

The U.S. is going to elect a new president which will shape the future direction of the nation and influence the future of the world for generations. But I have not heard the one game-changing vision I know that will prepare the U.S. for the future from any of those that would be president. Will the U.S. continue to be a leading Innovation Nation? Will the U.S. continue to invest in innovation as it has in the past? Will the U.S. continue to inspire entrepreneurs and leaders by leading investments in innovation?

Almost every week brings news of another campus opening an innovation center. Community colleges, liberal arts schools and research universities are all carving out intentional spaces for creativity and collaboration. Driven in part by the rapidly changing needs of employers, higher education is seeking to make its spaces more reflective of a work environment that places a premium on entrepreneurship. Most of these centers feature modern furniture, whiteboards and prototyping equipment like 3D printers. But architects and designers suggest university leaders ask themselves several key questions before getting too far into the process.

Image: The City College of New York's Zahn Innovation Center functions as a startup incubator, offering mentorship and pro-bono services, networking opportunities and rapid prototyping facilities. (photo by Wildbloom Photography)

Campbell Soup Co. helped create and bankroll a venture capital fund to invest in startup food companies, President/CEO Denise Morrison revealed at a meeting of financial analysts today (Feb. 17). Campbell will be the lone limited partner in Acre Venture Partners LP, although it will be managed independently of the big food company. Campbell allocated $125 million to the fund, which will invest in small start-up food companies – an emerging trend among big food & beverage companies – especially ones that are developing truly novel products.

The tech boom that has ignited Silicon Valley’s economy added 64,000 new jobs to sectors across the region in 2015–but a few sectors are losing jobs, according to a new survey.

Three sectors lost more than 5% of their overall number of workers: Information-technology repair, nonprofits, and telecom manufacturing and services, according to a regional study by Joint Venture Silicon Valley. They lost more than 4,000 jobs last year, despite the region adding more jobs in 2015 than in any year since 2000, the regional think tank said.

Entrepreneurship isn’t usually worth the risk, some research says, at least strictly in financial terms. Thankfully, plenty of people take the plunge anyway, because they’re drawn to it for other reasons, such as wanting to be their own boss, or wanting to pursue a personal passion.

But that conventional view is misleading, argues a recent paper by Gustavo Manso at the University of California, Berkeley. Instead, he finds that self-employment does pay off financially, but not in the way entrepreneurs might expect. The financial benefit doesn’t usually come from the entrepreneurship itself, but in the form of higher wages when the entrepreneur returns to the workforce.

The rash of headline-grabbing cyber attacks on major companies over the past few years has made one thing abundantly clear: it’s not enough to rely only on traditional security tools. To venture capitalists, that means there’s money to be made by betting on startups developing new ones.

VCs are hoping to get a piece of companies’ increased spending on cybersecurity. In 2014 Gregg Steinhafel, the CEO of Target, became the first head of a major company to lose his job over a data breach. Now, worried company leaders are giving their security units a “blank check,” says Scott Weiss, a general partner who specializes in security at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz: “The CEO has said, ‘Look, whatever you need, you’ve got.’”

For all the remarkable progress being made in artificial intelligence, and warnings about the upheaval this might bring, the smartest computer would still struggle to make it through the eighth grade.

A contest organized by researchers at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), invited programmers to create a program capable of taking a modified version of a conventional eighth-grade science test. The results of the competition were announced Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Google CEO Sundar Pichai just weighed in on Apple's battle with the FBI, which has ordered Apple to help it unlock the phone of one of the shooters who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, last year in an apparent terrorist act.

In a series of tweets, Pichai wrote that although Google gives "law enforcement access to data based on valid legal orders," that is "wholly different than requiring companies to enable hacking of customer devices and data," which could set a "troubling precedent."

The historic city of Cambridge will go one step closer to getting a new £20 million innovation centre this week.

Architects Aukett Swanke will announce on Friday that building work on a new incubator space in Cambridge Science Park has commenced. They will add that it will be finished by 2017.

The architects say the facility will "function as a vibrant centre for research and development, offering incubator space for high-growth businesses."

Image: Aukett Swanke - The John Bradfield Centre in Cambridge.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, a Florida biological sciences professor conducting an aerial survey near Palm Beach spotted tens of thousands of migrating sharks just "a stone's throw" from the beach.

Dr. Stephen Kajiura, an associate professor at Florida Atlantic University's Department of Biological Sciences, posted the footage on Facebook, showing large clumps of the black tip sharks along the coastline.

Every year, the World Economic Forum releases its Global Competitiveness Report on the state of the world's economies.

The WEF looks at data on areas as varied as the quality of the teaching of math in schools to the rate of inflation in each country. It then uses the data to compile a picture of virtually every country.

MINNEAPOLIS—John Cleese says his teachers never recognized the creativity that would one day make him among history's greatest comedic writers and actors.

Decades after founding Monty Python's Flying Circus, Cleese told a sold-out Minneapolis audience Friday that he's given a lot of thought to the creative process and now knows why his gift went unseen as a student.

Image: "New ideas are like babies. It's easy to strangle them at birth," John Cleese said. - Mike Ekern | University of St. Thomas