For all the decades of clever country rhetoric, Australia’s innovation system has long been like a high-performance car stuck in first gear.

The revelation in The Australian today that Australia’s significant investor visas will be linked, for the first time, to meaningful investments in start-ups and emerging businesses is a very important push on the accelerator.

It’s widely accepted globally that innovation will drive growth and prosperity into the 21st century and Australia has long had most of the key prerequisites of a healthy innovation ecosystem in place.

Canadian universities have been charged with the responsibility of contributing directly to economic growth, and criticized for their failure to do so. However, they are already required to perform competently in teaching and research – which they do very well, it’s worth noting. Although Canada does not have powerhouses on the level of Harvard, Stanford or MIT, our average university is far better than the average university in the United States or most other countries.

In 2011, billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel made waves when he set up a fellowship to pay promising college students $100,000 to drop out of school and start companies instead.

Four years later, how's the program going?

Pretty good, according to a new California Sunday story on the teens of Silicon Valley.

In 2015, your successful business needs to translate — preferably, across borders and languages too, especially if you run an e-commerce based startup. Short of translating all your existing materials — a potentially costly and time-consuming process — how and where do you even start?

To find out, I asked eight entrepreneurs from Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC)" what first steps they recommend you take and why.

Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Larry Page. Sergey Brin. They share more than a few enviable accomplishments. They’re billionaires, they made their fortunes in tech and they started their businesses while they were still students. It also doesn’t hurt that they’re seriously smart cookies.

However you slice it, they’re all living proof that you don’t have to wait until after graduation to launch your own business. And, as is the case for Gates and Zuckerberg, you might not have to graduate at all (though, to be clear, we’re not advocating for dropping out).  

In an ideal world, you have at least a year’s salary saved up and you can quit your day job in order to focus 100 percent on your entrepreneurial venture. Unfortunately, that’s just not feasible for many entrepreneurs who end up being successful.

Maybe you have a family to take care of, massive student loans, debt or a mortgage you can’t negotiate lower, or perhaps the medical benefits of your current employer are just too good to let go. Many entrepreneurial mentors will tell you to quit your job, but if you do, who’s going to be putting dinner on the table?

Entrepreneurship is, in many ways, about achieving independence. You won’t have a boss anymore. You won’t have a network of supervisors and coworkers to set your schedule or monitor your success. Instead, you’ll become a master of your own destiny, and you’ll become accountable only to yourself for your ongoing actions.

That independence can also be a curse, however. The fact of the matter is that even though entrepreneurship is an independent act, the most successful entrepreneurs in the world only got to where they are because of the help they received from the people around them. You’ll be making your own decisions and carving your own path, but if you want to be as effective and as impactful as possible, you’ll have to rely on a few types of people to help get you there.

Organizers at the athenahealth More Disruption Please accelerator say they are in the midst of updating its term sheet. This is a good thing, because not everyone’s a fan.

I’ve been fielding complaints since HIMSS last month that the athenahealth term sheet is too harsh. It’s not easy to compare. Other accelerators I spoke to who reviewed the terms were split on its merits.

Plus, athenahealth is relatively unique to most accelerators since it’s run directly by a healthcare technology company.

Image: http://medcitynews.com

After another transformer fire at the Indian Point nuclear facility on May 9, New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo would like to see the power plant shut down for good. The aging nuclear power plant is in the midst of its application to the federal government for a license renewal, which would allow the two reactors on site to continue to harness fission to boil water for electricity generation for another 20 years. But with local, well-connected opposition like the governor, Indian Point's days as a nuclear facility may be numbered no matter what federal regulators decide.

Image: http://www.scientificamerican.com

I’m going to say it before you even think it. Yes, with both a PhD and MBA, I’m overeducated. People marvel (or snark, depending): “You have both a PhD and an MBA? You must really like school.” The fact of the matter is, I like learning and sometimes that involves school, but mostly it involves learning by doing.

For those of you unfamiliar with what it really takes to get a PhD, a PhD in the life sciences is basically a long, poorly paid apprenticeship. After you are done with your one and a half years of classes, you work in unpaid practicums, or for minimum wage as a research assistant, for four years. As a graduate research assistant, the annual stipend from the National Institutes of Health is currently $22,920 — and you are not working a cushy 40 hours a week. Try more like 60 to 70. So, it’s a factual statement to say a PhD is essentially a glorified way to work for minimum wage for years. The notion that you are chillaxing reading books and pontificating in an ivory tower should be put to rest.

When you have kids, you want to give them everything, and more important than things, that often means teaching them the skills they’ll need for a happy, confident and adventurous life. Entrepreneurship provides the skills that people of every age will need to be successful in our ever-changing world.

While kids may not be able to grasp the in-depth details of every aspect of business that we as adult entrepreneurs are responsible for, they’re a lot smarter and intuitive than we often given them credit for. The skills and character traits kids can learn as little entrepreneurs will help them thrive their entire lives.

Unicorns.

The most overused word in the technology industry today. And they aren’t even fucking real. That is how absurd things have gotten. No, I take that back. THIS is how absurd things have gotten:

“I have to raise at a billion-dollar valuation” “Why? You don’t have the revenue or profit to support that valuation.” “But if I don’t I won’t be able to recruit the best people in the market. And every great company is raising at north of a billion dollars now so I need to in order to compete.” “Ok. Well, if you choose the price, I choose the terms.” “Deal.”

LSN Research often hears from investors that when choosing a company to invest in, a sound management team is just as important a factor as the quality of that company’s technology. Developing an innovative biotech or medtech product is a lengthy process fraught with risks, and it takes a strong management team to successfully guide a scientific discovery through all the challenging steps. So what are the qualities of the ideal management team, and how will investors judge whether yours has what it takes? Investors have reported the following important attributes:

If you have 15 minutes to kill, try Kolor, a quick online game that asks you to identify a specific color as fast as you can from a palette that becomes increasingly similar. The objective is straightforward and simple, but trust us, you won't want to stop until you've gotten a perfect score.

The just released County Business Patterns indicates a general trend of continued employment dispersion to the newer suburbs (principally the outer suburbs) and exurbs but also greater concentration in the central business districts of the 52 major metropolitan areas in the United States (over 1 million population in 2013). County Business Patterns is a Census Bureau program that provides largely private-sector employment data by geography throughout the nation.

Conventional wisdom in the startup world dictates that two founders are ideal for a startup. There are lots of famous pairs of duo co-founders: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Jerry Yang and David Filo, Hewlett and Packard, Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Three co-founders is acceptable, but anything beyond that the chances of success of the company may actually decrease.

When you set out to build a great company, it’s hard to know how you are doing along the way. There does come a time when you know you’ve done it. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Salesforce, Tesla, etc got there. We know that. And the founders of those companies know that too.

But two years in, three years in, four years in, it’s hard to know how you are doing. The market moves quickly. Customers are fickle. Competition emerges. Trusted team members leave. Your investors flake out on you. And so on and so forth.

Densely populated Bangkok has around 7 million registered cars, but only 400,000 parking spaces, a reality that former IBM consultant Paruey Anadirekkul found frustrating whenever he visited clients. As it turns out, many of these lots are owned by homeowners at their condominiums, apartments, and homes, giving him the idea to find information on the nearby estates to find a parking space that he could rent.

Earlier this year the Conference Board released the results of a survey of CEOs to identify their most critical challenges. The hands-down winner was the challenge of human capital, especially leadership. Second was the challenge of innovation. For every region of the world, innovation was among the top five issues identified. Asia placed it first.