Colleges and universities have always been wellsprings of ideas and innovation. Converting those breakthroughs into success in the wider marketplace — where the public can enjoy the benefits — requires planning, strategy and more than a little promotional know-how.

To help market the new technology it develops and also protect its intellectual property, Oakland University has joined six Michigan universities in a partnership that aims to commercialize their respective technologies by sharing resources and marketing strategies.

Why do so few of us follow our passions in life? Most of us go to work, to jobs we don’t love, working tireless hours for someone else’s vision and dream. If you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ll have a great boss who motivates and inspires you to do better and friendly colleagues that support each other, as you all face daily internal and external challenges. And when your day is done, you get home feeling neither high nor low, just fortunate to be employed.

Image: Didriks | Flickr

Success is something we’re all striving for at a basic human level. We need to be safe and fed, which is ultimately a huge driving factor in our desire for money as it provides a level of both of those needs. We also need love and accomplishment or acceptance, which can also be influenced in part by money.

Has the laptop become passé?

Microsoft sure wants you to think that way with the introduction of the Surface 3. Like a lot of hybrid laptop-tablets and the companies behind them, they’re touted as a replacement, once and for all, for your conventional laptop.

Based purely on the technical specs on the new Microsoft Surface 3, this may be the closest yet to replacing a laptop altogether. That is, at least, among the choices of mid-range laptops.

With free gourmet meals, in-house massages, and dry cleaning on campus, Google is known for its extensive list of perks.

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin even brought up the myriad perks in their shareholders' letter when the company went public in 2004, promising their commitment to providing benefits that could "save employees considerable time and improve their health and productivity."

Image: Robert Johnson for Business Insider

If you are interested in submitting a NSF 15-562 Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs): Accelerating the Big Data Innovation Ecosystem proposal, send an abstract no more than three pages in length to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by the internal deadline of Monday, May 25, 2015 at noon. Follow Illinois Institute of Technology’s guidelines for internal competitions available here.

Institutional Limit: One

An individual may serve as the PI or co-PI in at most one submission. In the event that an individual exceeds this limit, proposals received within the limit will be accepted based on the earliest date and time of proposal submission. Any other submissions will be returned without review. No exceptions will be made.

Surfing the crowd has hit the mainstream…Young, agile firms have always been known for their disruptive ideas. Increasingly, enterprises are keen to foster a similar innovation culture so that great concepts can surface even in a company with thousands of employees. The challenge comes when there are many layers of management and frontline workers are struggling to navigate the corporate hierarchy so their ideas are heard by the leadership team. In a bid to transform its business, Microsoft recently announced it would cut thousands of middle management jobs to ease the flow of information and decision making, ‘no longer respecting tradition but only innovation’.

As a venture development organization (VDO) based in Northeast Ohio, we at JumpStart often get asked why entrepreneurs in fly-over regions like ours face more challenges than they do on the coasts.

In fact, we get this question so often that we sat down and made this short video, telling the story using a very simple analogy: riding a bicycle.

In the early 1990s, following the 1989 collapse of the Soviet bloc, Cuba faced its greatest crisis since the 1959 revolution. The populace was forced to endure severe shortages of basic food and consumer goods and even more intense rationing than was previously the norm.

The conventional socialist economic model that fostered trade between the USSR and friendly states according to their natural competitive advantages was shaken to its core.

When I was in elementary school, about 50 years ago, teachers used to stand in front of a class of 40 or 50 children and write on a blackboard with chalk. To make sure the material was absorbed, the teacher asked occasional questions and assigned lots of homework. If students discussed their homework or helped each other in tests, it was called cheating, and they were punished.

Image: It’s time for a makeover. (Ty Wright/AP)

by Piero Formica FOUNDER at INTERNATIONAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP ACADEMY

"The clay – said Lao Tzu, one of the most famous philosophers of ancient China – is needed to model a vase. But its use depends on the internal void that you can create." Many centuries later, in the medieval Germany, Eckhart von Hochheim (c. 1260 - c. 1328), commonly known as Meister Eckhart, traced a similarity between man and "a vase that grows larger as one fills it and which will never be full". For several decades now, policy makers have competed with each other to fill the vase with provisions of laws and economic policy measures, and, if already filled, to make it larger. An operation that has required persistent injections of public spending in turn powered by the tightening of taxation.

The continuing rise of mobile technology and greater collaboration between banks and innovators will be among the key trends in fintech this year, according to the industry executives gathered in Milan last week for the inaugural FinTech Stage conference.

Over the course of the two day event, participants shared their views on what themes will be most important for the fintech sector in the coming months.

Image: http://thetally.efinancialnews.com

For the past few weeks I have been exploring some themes around innovation (in this post for why failure is a competitive advantage and in this post that talks about how to turn failure into a competitive advantage) and I wanted to continue on that track by highlighting a few examples of companies that have internal incubator or “lab” programs. The goal of all of these programs is to: encourage employees to come up with ideas, give employees the opportunity to pitch their ideas, provide experimental capital to employees, test ideas, and then replicate the successful ones. Many companies are now starting to focus on developing various types of cross-organizational innovation programs and in some cases these programs have been going on for years. Here are just a few that I wanted to highlight.

Eric Feng made a lot happen at Hulu in just three years. As the first senior executive the company hired, he played a pivotal role in the development of Hulu.com, the desktop app, distribution and advertising. He served as spokesperson and even coded large part of the site's front-end himself. And it paid off — Hulu rose to become the No. 2 video site on the internet, drawing 43 million unique viewers a month. But one accomplishment made all of this possible: He hired extremely well.

Have you noticed how so many business people are lemmings? They rush from one best selling re-hash of something everyone knows to the next. They pay ridiculous sums to listen to a short talk by the author telling them what they just read, sometimes in exactly the same words.They pay even more to bring in the latest expert on saving your business as a motivational speaker at their annual meeting.

Over the years I’ve attended some of these talks. I’ll admit that occasionally there is a fantastic performer who is a joy to watch. Notice I use performer and not speaker as usually the fantastic part is due to their platform skills and not the words they spout. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t know that if you run your organization better you’ll get better results?

New lessons are emerging for executives striving to harness the power of social media in the cause of wider employee participation. Clearly, there’s more to success than just investing heavily in the latest Enterprise 2.0 technology platforms. Large-scale engagement of the workforce requires, first and foremost, a firm grasp of organizational culture and its social dynamics, a psychological understanding of what triggers new behavior, a determination by management to loosen if not relinquish its traditional top-down approach, and an ability to demonstrate how digital activities complement offline or other real-world events.

We have a few critical updates for you as well as news on many other issues.  How about breaking the DoD SBIR program out from the others and making it permanent?  How about breaking the DoD services (Army, Navy Air Force) out from under the OSD?  We've got this and much more for you.  

Techies in Silicon Valley often tell me that if they do their job right, it should cease to exist. The goal of a lot of technology is to reduce the amount of human labor necessary to get something done. A new study finds that this Silicon Valley maxim holds also true for the government—in a big way.

Min-Soek Pang of Temple University found that for every dollar governments invested in technology, spending decreased by $3.50. “I was surprised with the magnitude of the impact,” said Pang. No joke. 3x is a huge number for any carefully controlled study.

Recent college graduates have been setting their sights on nonprofits more than private companies for several years.

According to The New York Times's analysis of data from the American Community Survey of the United States Census Bureau, 11% more young college graduates worked for nonprofit groups in 2009 than in 2008. A 2012 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that the U.S. nonprofit sector grew an average of 2.1% between 2000 and 2010, while for-profit sector jobs declined by an average of 0.6% a year during the same period.

KANSAS CITY, Mo., April 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Which of the thousands of startups funded by the 12,000+ members of the Angel Capital Association (ACA), the world's leading professional association for angel investors, will win the coveted Luis Villalobos Award? It will be one of these three just announced finalists: ActX (Seattle), GroundMetrics (San Diego), and RetroSense Therapeutics (Ann Arbor, MI).  These companies will be honored and the winner will be announced in a special awards ceremony on April 15th at the world's largest gathering of angel investors, the 2015 ACA Summit taking place in San Diego. The award is named in memory of Luis Villalobos, who angel investors nationwide admired for actively investing in and mentoring ingenious, creative and innovative startups.