Google wants to keep employees who want to start their own company, or join a high flying startup. So the company may develop an “in-house incubator” allowing Google employees to develop their startups within the company.

Codenamed “Area 120,” the effort will be led by Don Harrison, VP of corporate development, and Bradley Horowitz, who runs Photos and Streams, according to tech industry publication The Information.

SAN FRANCISCO--Propel(x), an online angel investment platform that helps investors source, evaluate, and fund pioneering science and technology startups, today released a report detailing the results of a survey that revealed the views and motivations of angel investors. The survey was conducted in collaboration with Breakout Labs, the MIT Alumni Angels of Northern California, and Innovation Node - Los Angeles, a national node of the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (“I-Corps”) Program.

The report, based on data collected from a survey of more than 200 active and aspiring angel investors in the US, found that contrary to assumptions in the angel community, angels are independent minded and do not have a ‘follower’ mentality - less than a quarter of active angel investors (21 percent) cited “who else has invested” among their top three reasons for investing in a specific opportunity. Three-quarters (75 percent) of active angels cited the “management team,” over half (52 percent) noted their “ability to understand the technology” and 42 percent claimed the “potential return on investment” as their top reasons for choosing to invest in a specific company.

AMES, IA -- U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames Laboratory senior metallurgist Iver Anderson was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) at a special ceremony in Washington, D.C. today at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

The ceremony, which was held as part of the NAI's Fifth Annual Conference, welcomed 168 new Fellows into the academy. Each Fellow was presented with a special trophy, a medal and a rosette pin.

Image: Iver Anderson is a senior metallurgist at Ames Laboratory, US Department of Energy. CREDIT Ames Laboratory, US Department of Energy 

Recently, Ray Leach, the CEO of JumpStart Inc., aroused the ire of economic development advocates for defending the move of a local startup named Phenom to entrepreneurial hotspot San Francisco to join 500 Startups, a top accelerator. As an entrepreneurship researcher, active angel investor and columnist, I am frequently confronted with the question, “What should promising high potential startups in less vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems do to raise capital?”

Australian universities are “the golden thread” that links the success of Australian startups and innovators as they bring together the best talent, research, facilities and industry partnerships, said Australia’s chief scientist Alan Finkel.

Speaking at the Business Breakfast hosted by the University of Sydney to mark the launch of its new Nanoscience Hub, Finkel noted numerous successful Australian innovators and startup firms that have gone on to service clients globally.

Thirty feet above the floor of the Pegula ice skating rink, in a lounge that usually houses hockey commentators and coaches, a more curious group of people gathered on a golden April afternoon. The well-dressed crowd included Andrew Sears, the Dean of the Penn State college of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), the CEOs of Weebly, Reddit, and other Silicon Valley stars, and dozens of students representing a multitude of colleges, majors, and ideas.

The RIT Center for Urban Entrepreneurship (CUE) is opening in Downtown Rochester. The opening of the center marks the official return of RIT to downtown since vacating offices it once occupied in the 1990s. The main campus remains in Henrietta. Located in the old Rochester Savings Bank Franklin Street, the center is an area city, state and federal leaders are calling the center of a downtown comeback. The center is a one-stop-shop to help everything from mom and pop shops to major companies open in Rochester.

I recently finished the New York Times best-seller “Mo’ Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove,” by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. 

For those who don’t know, Questlove is the bandleader for the hip-hop collective The Roots, best known as the house band for “The Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon. His memoir is enthralling, largely because of its intricate vocabulary (written by a self-proclaimed music nerd).

Image: Photo by CONTRIBUTED PHOTO Tobin Buckner is JumpStart's Akron entrepreneurial community manager and contributes a monthly blog about entrepreneurship in the region.

You have an epic idea. Now what? The real challenge for any entrepreneur isn’t getting started. It’s staying in business. Yes, you can be successful as an entrepreneur but it won't be easy. It has never been easy to start and run a successful company.

Startups are always hard. But if you don't pursue your dreams, you'll never know if it stand the chance to be successful. Dreams are all we have. Take them seriously. The bitter truth is that most entrepreneurs fail to get their businesses off the ground. Every insanely successful startup story has a flip side. If you ask any great entrepreneur about what it takes make it, he or she will most likely mention one of these signs.

Although Luke Skywalker makes only a cameo appearance in the latest Star Wars® film, his reappearance is also awakening interest in a prosthetic limb nicknamed for the fictional hero with a cybernetic hand. (Fans will recall that the bionic appendage replaced Luke’s right hand, which he lost in a lightsaber duel with Darth Vader in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back*.)

The DEKA Arm. Photo by DEKA Research and Development Corp. Used with permission. The DEKA Arm—which its inventor, Dean Kamen , affectionately calls “Luke”—is a real device created by the engineering minds at Kamen’s New Hampshire–based company, DEKA Research and Development. Luke, the most advanced prosthetic arm yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), translates signals from muscles in order to perform complex tasks, such as flexing fingers and grasping objects.

Resurrecting your career after a long break is not easy. But stories of those who went through the transition can teach us how to better navigate a way back to work.

No one wants to have to choose between staying on their career path and tending to urgent personal needs that may crop up. But that’s the essential situation faced by countless professionals, given how difficult it has become to return to work after even a couple of years away. In addition to degrading employees’ quality of life, this blind spot in the business world costs companies dearly due to the premature termination of far too many promising careers. 

Universities traditionally measure their impact on entrepreneurship locally. At last month’s Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC), Bill Aulet from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reminded us that in a world where national boundaries are porous to both innovation and knowledge creation, assessing our impact globally can be a strong driver of collective performance improvement.

Image: https://flic.kr/p/dwEgL9

Every year, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) provides programmers, designers and entrepreneurs with access to municipal data sets that they can use to build programmes for the NYC BigApps competition to solve issues affecting city residents. Among the winners last year were JustFix.nyc, which helps tenants build their case for getting adversarial landlords to fix things in their apartments and Treasures, which won the “zero waste” challenge for its mobile app that allows users to share unwanted household items such as furniture with someone who wants them, instead of throwing them away.

Dear Small Technology Firms, Startups, Innovators, & Investors, 

Currently live on SBIR.gov , are FY 2016 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant and contract funding opportunities from NSF, DOD, and HHS.

If you’re an innovator, entrepreneur, researcher, or small technology firm, looking to engage in high-tech growth entrepreneurship and seeking non-dilutive funding opportunities to facilitate your necessary R&D prototype development, then SBIR.gov should be one of your first reference points of interest.

Please visit www.sbir.gov to learn more.

You may have noticed a new look at Both Sides of the Table today and that’s because I’ve migrated my blog to Medium. I’ve been planning a migration for some time because I believe Medium is the best product built for writers. I don’t manage web pages, I care only about ideas and thought. Let me expand.

Roli Saxena joined Clever last year to lead customer success. But in a turn of events all too common at growing startups, her role started to expand — and expand. Today, she’s running all of sales, strategic partnerships and operations. Having come up through the ranks at LinkedIn — finally overseeing its largest North American sales division — she was used to having too much on her plate. But even the most seasoned, multitasking executives have their limits. The best ones admit it.

The innovative spirit of Detroit, embodied in the legacy of Henry Ford, never really died. Its soul lives on, especially in Midtown.

The Brookings Institute has identified areas that contain concentrations of universities, research institutions, and companies as "innovation districts," or places that "supercharge the economy." In 2014, Mayor Duggan participated in this national initiative by establishing the area extending from the Detroit River to New Center -- which contains much of the city’s academic, health, and biomedical infrastructure -- as an innovation district.

Every enterprise needs to innovate in order to survive. But as they grow larger, new ideas and agile processes tend to find less expression. In order to capitalize on innovation opportunities, enterprises need to leverage their available assets quickly and effectively. Doing so calls for senior management to take responsibility for being transformation-oriented and enabling the conditions that allow innovation leaders to thrive.

California is in the process of attempting to pass legislation, once again, to legalize intrastate investment crowdfunding. If the proposed bill becomes law, California will join dozens of other states that enacted similar regulations to help fund small and emerging companies within their boundaries by matching interested investors with promising small firms.  Since California is an enormous regional economy and home to the hottest startup scene in the world, enacting state rules may have significant impact on driving economic growth and of course more jobs.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_California.svg

Danae Ringelmann commenced a quest to redefine and redesign funding with an entrepreneurial journey that began in 2001. She has been a driving force behind the team that co-founded and launched the first of the two crowdfunding behemoths. Indiegogo, launched January 18th, 2008, eighteen months ahead of Kickstarter, has perhaps more right to an opinion than most.

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com