How did you find the position?

I had heard about the company myself through the MBA community, and secured the position through Wharton MBA Career Management.

The CommonBond team, summer 2015. What was your motivation for working at a start-up this summer?

I spent three years prior to Wharton providing venture financing to start-up companies and wanted to supplement that experience with some core, operating experience helping a company grow. Learning from talented entrepreneurs is the best way to get this experience.

Image: http://beacon.wharton.upenn.edu

What most people think they know about best practice in the innovation process is probably wrong.

That’s according to John Crombie, Co-Founder and CEO of UpStart Product Development and former R&D principal engineer with Johnson & Johnson’s Ethicon.

Crombie says a lot of conventional wisdom around the innovation process today—not just with regard to medical devices, but in general—is flat out backward

Business leaders face pressure to deliver above-market growth at the best of times. When the global economy is weak, that demand becomes more acute. While strategic mergers and acquisitions have the ability to generate growth, the fact remains that consistently beating the market over time requires more than that. It takes superior internal capabilities, most notably commercial capabilities in marketing and sales. Hiring new talent is a critical component, but in our experience, developing a market-beating company requires true organizational change.

The Ebola crisis underscored a problem that vexes experts in global health: Vaccines are one of the most cost-effective ways to save lives, especially in developing countries, yet traditional vaccines can take years to develop.

So when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation came across CureVac, a biopharmaceutical company working on technology that could produce vaccines faster, cheaper and more effectively, it not only took note — it took a stake in the company.

Image: A bKash agent in rural Bangladesh. The Gates foundation invested $11 million in bKash, which lets users turn a basic mobile phone into a means of storing and transferring money. - bKash

Xconomy reported last month that Leslie Smith is departing her position leading the TechTown incubator in Detroit and heading to Memphis, TN, to run the Entrepreneurship Powered Innovation Center, a public-private initiative to create and support 1,000 entrepreneurs and 500 companies by 2025.

I caught up with Smith on her last day at TechTown, and we sat down to talk about what she’s learned in Detroit, remaining challenges in the local innovation ecosystem, her plans in Memphis, and whether we’ll ever see her around town again.

I’m working on a story that’s almost due. It’s going well. I’m almost finished. But then everything falls apart. I get an angry e-mail from a researcher who’s upset about another article. My stomach knots up. My heart pounds. I reply with a defensive e-mail and afterward can’t stop mentally rehashing my response. Taking deep breaths and a short walk don’t help. I can’t focus on finishing my story, and as the deadline approaches, that makes me more uptight and it gets even harder to write.

Image: http://www.technologyreview.com

Entrepreneurial ecosystems drive local economic vibrancy and national economic growth. To inform policymakers and entrepreneurship support organizations seeking to build fertile environments for new and growing companies to thrive, the Kauffman Foundation is researching all aspects of entrepreneurial communities.

Watch for more reports on entrepreneurial ecosystems, fostering entrepreneurship dynamism and resilience, assessing entrepreneurship program outcomes, culled insights from high-growth firms, and detailed entrepreneurship profiles of metropolitan areas.

For Eric Fredrickson, what started as a simple programming lesson with his daughter has turned into a full-blown coding school — something that the entrepreneur-turned-teacher has called a “dream come true.”

Fredrickson is the founder of Creative Coding 4 Kids, a two-year-old organization that runs after-school classes and week-long summer camps that teach software development skills to children ages 8-to-12.

Image: Photos via Creative Coding 4 Kids.

While people who found companies may be willing to work without pay, a startup's suppliers only accept cash on the barrel. How can an entrepreneur pay suppliers without profits?

The answer is to convince other people to give their money in exchange for a piece of a startup's equity.

These days, you don’t have to be an expert in natural-language processing or computer vision to make an app that can automatically summarize text or recognize faces. You just have to find the right algorithm.

Seattle startup Algorithmia is making both finding and using algorithms easier with a marketplace that unites algorithm creators and the software developers who need them. The company is opening its marketplace to the general public for a preview beginning Thursday with more than 800 algorithms that can parse huge data sets; find, analyze, and recommend content; run combinatorial auctions; and much more.

Image: http://www.xconomy.com

In a bid to curb the activity of patent trolls, many have cited how these non-practicing entities harm innovation and are a scourge on a productive society. Others, in defense of them have said that patent assertion entities are middlemen facilitating innovation.

Meanwhile, there are efforts in Congress to create legislation that would make it harder for patent assertion entities to sue companies and force them to obtain licensing fees or royalties from them.

Three years ago, I founded a tech startup as a sole founder, in an unfamiliar industry, and with no tech or startup experience. Looking back, I couldn’t have been more “out of the tech scene” -- I was a corporate lawyer at Cravath, a formal firm in midtown Manhattan. Making mistakes during those early stages of Updater was par for the course.

In hopes that you will avoid some classic “first-time entrepreneur” missteps and build your company faster, here are the top three lessons I learned:

As an entrepreneur, you are a risk taker who not only sees the world differently, but who is ready, willing and inspired to change it.

Maybe you’ve always been a disrupter, an eternal optimist, or an innovative thinker. These traits may be problematic to the average person, but we’ll show you how the most effective entrepreneurs use them as a springboard to the kind of success and fulfillment most people only dream about.

Too many people succumb to the mistaken belief that being likable comes from natural, unteachable traits that belong only to a lucky few—the good looking, the fiercely social, and the incredibly talented. It’s easy to fall prey to this misconception. In reality, being likable is under your control, and it’s a matter of emotional intelligence (EQ).

Startups are companies set up to test business models developed around new ideas. Typically they have fewer than fifty employees. Startups are usually made up of developers and designers – people who write code and those who can design a consumer-friendly interface. To build their idea startups work with investors. Investors are drawn to startups because the cost is low and despite higher risk, can offer significantly higher returns if the idea becomes popular. Once funded, startups can grow quickly while maintaining low costs and limited labor.

DENVER - Eli Regalado and his Denver-based company Madhatter Agency have been waiting to launch an online investor website for Colorado start-ups and small businesses.

"We've been planning for this day," Regalado said Thursday after a bill that would give his company the legal ability to match investors with start-ups on the Internet unanimously passed its first committee.

Four startups will be competing in the Harvard Business School Association of Boston's New Venture Competition later this month. Version:1.0 The competition will take place on March 19 at the IBM Innovation Center in Cambridge. The winner will receive $10,000 cash prize, entry into the Harvard Business School Worldwide New Venture Competition, and exposure to the Harvard investor community.

Image: Courtesy JessMeetKen.com - Ken Deckinger and his wife, Jess.

With the infusion of $1 billion in private investment, a long-neglected property on the Brooklyn waterfront will become a leading center of innovation and manufacturing, spurring jobs for nearly 20,000 people.

Details of the plan for the redevelopment of Industry City – the largest privately-owned industrial complex in New York City – were made public on Monday at an event sponsored by the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce.

LANSING — State-funded perks and incentives for businesses are coming under increased scrutiny in the state Capitol these days. And venture capital firms took their turn on center stage this week.

Since 2003, when the state was trying to thwart a deepening economic downturn by enticing new companies to the state, Michigan began investing in 20 venture capital companies, which in turn, raised even more private money to invest in entrepreneurs and their start-up companies.

Image: Photo: Kathleen Gray/Detroit Free Press