Everyone who's ever started something knows what it's like to never finish something. Many of us are pretty good at completing most of our tasks and undertakings, but few of us finish all of them all the time. In an assessment my team and I recently conducted about what it takes to succeed, 70% of people said that in the past year, they’ve left a number of projects unfinished.

So you are ready to start your own business! It’s a time that is both exciting and possibly nerve-racking. But there are so many reasons to do it, right? To be your own boss. To set your own hours. To realise your dream. And most of all, to provide the kind of financial reward and security that working for someone else can rarely offer. And you are re right, of course, in principle. Successfully starting, running and ultimately exiting a business can deliver on all of these promises.

Breakthrough tech entrepreneur Chinedu Echerou is urging budding businesses to observe what he calls the 'Five Cs of Entrepreneurship' - credibility, clarity, conviction, capital and concentration in execution.

He says these elements have proved invaluable for him over time up to the point where he recently sold two of the technology companies he created - Hopspot.com to Apple; and Tripology.com to Rand McNally and eventually, USA Today.

Life has a way of changing all of us over time, but often the change is subtle and imperceptible. There are, however, certain accelerators that can bring about rapid and meaningful change in an individual’s life. The decision to become an entrepreneur is one of those accelerators. The act of creation, of building something from nothing, fundamentally changes those involved for better or worse.

South Korean venture capital companies turn their eyes to promising biotech firms overseas, looking for a vehicle to accelerate their investment goals.

KTB Network recently joined hands with three Chinese venture capital companies to invest a total of 36 billion won ($30.1 million) in the country’s biopharma company CARsgen Therapeutics. The biotech company is highly praised for its immune cell therapy platform. It is working on a new method to treat patients with glioblastoma and hepatocellular carcinoma with a goal to conduct a clinical trial next year.

Image: http://pulsenews.co.kr

Rapid innovation, why?

Paul Sloane, innovation consultant and author, recently pointed out a study by Capgemini Consulting, entitled The Innovation Game, charting the rise of corporate innovation centers: actually, 38% of the world’s top 200 companies have set up innovation centers.

Image: http://www.innovationexcellence.com

"I see you have your computer linked to the telephone line, can you tell us how you did that?"

Those are the words of a Thames TV host back in 1984 explaining the first steps needed to send an email before most people even knew what email was. Even for long-time Internet users, the imagery in the video is pretty amazing.

Image: http://mashable.com

True confession: I have not always been good about mentally getting away from my business. Vacation is not a word that enters easily into many entrepreneurs’ vocabularies.

According to a study by American Express Small Business Monitor, about two-thirds of small business owners find it stressful trying to balance their personal and business lives.  Yet, true rest and real vacations are essential not only for an entrepreneur’s personal health, but for the health of the business, as well.

DRAWING comparisons to Edward Snowden, a graduate student from Kazakhstan named Alexandra Elbakyan is believed to be hiding out in Russia after illegally leaking millions of documents. While she didn’t reveal state secrets, she took a stand for the public’s right to know by providing free online access to just about every scientific paper ever published, on topics ranging from acoustics to zymology.

Every startup founder rightfully starts out as the single leader of the startup, but as the business grows, many entrepreneurs struggle with relinquishing any control, or fail to recognize and allow other leaders to emerge. The result is that the business becomes dysfunctional as growth stagnates, and entrepreneur health and happiness decline.

The right alternative is to focus on finding and delegating some control to the hidden leaders in your startup. These leaders are those exceptional team members who have proven themselves or developed the strength of character, behavior, and learning to be the drivers of the next phase of your business growth.

The UK government has published a report on innovation after culling data from over 30,000 employers between 2012 and 2014. According to their research, 53% of UK businesses are actively pursuing new products and services – an increase of 8% versus two years prior.

Business Secretary Sajid Javid released a statement on the report;

Image: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com

Millendo Therapeutics, Inc., a clinical-stage life sciences company founded in Ann Arbor in 2012, is developing novel treatments for endocrine disorders caused by hormone dysregulation. The company recently entered into an exclusive license agreement with AstraZeneca for the worldwide development and commercialization rights to MLE4901, a product candidate for the treatment of polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), the most common endocrine disease in women. This product has the potential to make a difference in the lives of millions of women.

In addition, Millendo secured a $62 million Series B investment led by New Enterprise Associates, Inc. The funding will be used to develop the company’s therapeutics and continue to hire great talent.

Some days you feel on top of the world. Others, not so much. For the latter, here’s a cheap and easy solution: a quick, motivational read. For less than $20 on an e-reader and an hour or two of your time, you get the shot in the arm you need. These books may not change your life, but they might change tomorrow morning, and sometimes that’s good enough.

THE WAR OF ART

Anyone trying to create something encounters what novelist Steven Pressfield calls Resistance—that insidious force within the human mind that keeps people from taking action. This book teaches you how to battle the dark side and get stuff done.

A landmark study led by University of Sydney has found that people become more active, sleep better and reduce their sitting time when they retire.

Published in the Journal of Preventative Medicine, the study followed the lifestyle behaviours of 25,000 older Australians including physical activity, diet, sedentary behaviour, alcohol use and sleep patterns.

Image: http://scienceblog.com

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.

Memes are everywhere. Easily sharable on any social media platform, and instantly remixable with little technical effort, they've become visual vehicles to share our thoughts with the outside world. But where do they come from?

Image: http://www.businessinsider.com

Take one: Too many startups don’t make it past five years, and neither will your investment

New rules for equity crowdfunding in Canada permit ordinary people to diversify their portfolios and buy a stake in fledgling startups. But spotting the next Shopify Inc. or Kik Interactive Inc. early in their life cycles — way before they’re worth billions of dollars — is like finding a tiny needle in a tall, messy haystack.

I was recently asked to pull together some top tips for crowdfunding campaigns under Title III of the JOBS Act. Here are some of the top tips:

Find a way to tell your story – Crowdfunding investors are really looking for financial statements and revenue numbers; they can go to public companies for that. Crowdfunding investors are looking for a story that inspires them to believe that the company might be the ‘next big thing.’

Stand aside Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs because those innovators who are really going about changing the world are likely to be government-related jobs in locations like Grenoble, Munich or Tokyo. And top of the pile is France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), for its research into areas such as renewable power, public health, and information security, according to the latest Reuters Top 25 Global Innovators – Government ranking.

Image: http://www.brand-e.biz

More than one-third of U.S. innovators are foreign born which suggests highly educated immigrants just might be one of America’s most valuable resources.

Despite only making up 13.5 percent of all U.S. residents, 35 percent of those responsible for some of the most important innovations in America are foreign-born people who usually have a PhD in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathmatics) field, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Information Tecnology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF).